Have you ever tried to hum your alarm tone in the middle of the day? Despite it being one of my most listened-to songs, the daze in which I usually find myself listening to it means I can never quite recall what it actually sounds like. Anyway—whatever it sounds like—it went off at 6:15am, it being a weekday.
I’m a teaching assistant who is regularly assigned to various schools around the city to cover for others who are sick or on holiday. Sometimes I’ll be at a school for a week or two, though often just a couple of days. My assignments are mediated by a ‘recruitment agency’ (read ‘middle-man’) and when a school needs a supply teacher, they contact the agency, who links them up with me. Sometimes this means waking up and getting ready for work before knowing whether I will actually be working or not. On this particular day, the call didn’t come. These middle-men often charge schools up to twice the amount they pay the teachers, amassing huge profits from state budgets for doing very little.
I could continue writing this as a piece about another example of how private companies drain public money and fill the pockets of shareholders with profits skimmed off the top. But I would like to talk about how the above scene of a fruitless wakeup call—the uncertainty, the middle-men, the isolation—is a small piece reflecting a larger social revolution that was launched in the 1970s, and became dominant the world over in the decades that followed.
In the UK, supply teachers like me used to belong to a pool managed by the local council. A school in need of a supply would be linked up with one by the council and the school would pay a standard fee. No room for profits—simple.
In 1979, the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that these systems were inefficient and should be subject to ‘marketisation’ along with the rest of the economy. This meant opening up previously unexploited areas for the private companies to insert their tendrils. The public pools of supply teachers were almost completely replaced by commercial agencies in England and Wales, a few of which now dominate the market, and supply teachers the rare access to secure work and pension schemes. A typical story of the neoliberal revolution.
And yet, it would be a mistake to view neoliberalism as an amoral project. Thatcher was a social engineer who viewed economic policies as the tools with which to change society. “Economics are the method,” she told a Sunday Times reporter in 1981, “the object is to change the heart and soul.” So, 45 years later, are our hearts and souls changed?
The neoliberal view of the human condition is one where the threat of destitution hanging over our heads is what disciplines us into waking up to our alarms; where the possibility of poverty motivates our sense of personal responsibility; and where the distant chance of amassing a fortune encourages us to strive. The outcome of a collectivist society, they say, is one of lazy individuals; the outcome of the individualist society is a wealthier collective. Thatcher even claimed, “There is no such thing as society. There is only the individual and his family.”
So this was the vision, and for us to view ourselves as individuals in competition with each other, social bonds had to be broken and reorganised. Trade unions—an organising focal point outside of the state—were systematically weakened, markets were deregulated to allow the accumulation of huge private fortunes, and people were encouraged to become shareholders and homeowners. Each family was to become an island. Whether the family next door was struggling was none of our business. It almost feels too obvious to state that we aren’t better off because of it.
And yet the project has never been discredited. That is because the transformation was so total that it now passes for common sense. Think of the black-pilled crypto-investor who sees an investment portfolio as his path to wealth and comfort; the young couple living with a parent and working extra hours to get on the housing ladder and start their very own family unit; and the newly-qualified professional, endlessly refining their CV to be noticed among a sea of applicants for a single opening. Each is absorbed in an inward struggle, yet together they could demand luxury, housing, and employment for all. This is the neoliberal social revolution.
The revolution was complete when other visions of society became utopian and unserious. By the 1990s, the basic questions of how we structure our economies and social worlds were considered settled, and economics underwent a makeover. No longer was it ‘the method’ of achieving a particular moral vision of society, but rather it was a neutral science of experts arguing over the right formula that would send us soaring towards prosperity. Economists began to model themselves on natural scientists, as if they were meteorologists tracking wind-patterns and predicting hurricanes. Economics stopped being a means to an end, and became the end in and of itself. This is perhaps the neoliberal revolution’s greatest achievement.
To see this is to demystify economics and understand how it shapes our social worlds—from the uncertainty of daily life, to the routines of work, and the ways we relate to others. Seeing the systems behind our daily routine confirms what we already feel: that the atomised conditions we live in aren’t natural. Unlike the weather, economies are shaped by human hands, and so can be remoulded.
If economics is the method, then building associations on the ground alters the balance of power, whether it be through tenants’ unions, community projects, or mutual support in our workplaces and neighbourhoods. Each is work towards a movement capable of taking the reins of our economies and commanding a different society into being. It means trying to live, as far as we can, as though the society we wish to see already exists.
In the words of Howard Zinn, “the future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory… small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
