Farrar, Straus and Giroux

They’d faced massive resistance from organized labour and they’d had enough. In response, these pioneers of neoliberalism drew a conclusion that has shaped our age: that a modern economy cannot coexist with an organized working class. Consequently, they resolved to smash labour’s collective bargaining power, traditions and social cohesion completely.
Unions had come under attack before – but always from paternalist politicians who had proffered the lesser of two evils: in place of militancy, they’d encouraged a ‘good’ workforce, defined by moderate socialism, unions run by agents of the state. And they helped build stable, socially conservative communities that could be the breeding ground for soldiers and servants. The general programme of conservatism, and even fascism, had been to promote a different kind of solidarity that served to reinforce the interests of capital. But it was still solidarity.
The neoliberals sought something different: atomization. Because today’s generation sees only the outcome of neoliberalism, it is easy to miss the fact that this goal – the destruction of labour’s bargaining power – was the essence of the entire project: it was a means to all the other ends. Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring – not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation.

The attack on organized labour was punctuated by signal moments. In 1981, the US air traffic control union leaders were arrested, paraded in chains, and the entire workforce sacked for taking strike action. Thatcher used paramilitary policing to destroy the miners’ strike in 1984–5.

Those of us who lived through the defeat of organized labour in the 1980s experienced it as traumatic, but told ourselves that our grandfathers had lived through just the same. But if we step back and look at it through the kaleidoscope of long-wave theory, it is in fact unique.
The 1980s saw the first ‘adaptation phase’ in the history of long waves where worker resistance collapsed. In the normal pattern, outlined in chapter 3, resistance forces the capitalists to adapt more radically, creating a new model based on higher productivity and higher real wages. After 1979, the workers’ failure to resist allows key capitalist countries to find a solution to the crisis through lower wages and low-value models of production. This is the fundamental fact, the key to understanding everything that happens next.
The defeat of organized labour did not enable – as the neoliberals thought – a ‘new kind of capitalism’ but rather the extension of the fourth long wave on the basis of stagnant wage growth and atomization. Instead of being forced to innovate their way out of the crisis using technology, as during the late stage of all three previous cycles, the 1 per cent simply imposed penury and atomization on the working class.

During the post-war boom, capitalism suppressed the development of the global south. The means by which it did so are clear and well documented.44 Unequal trade relationships forced much of Latin America, all of Africa and most of Asia to adopt development models that led to super-profits for Western companies and poverty at home. Countries that tried to reject these models, such as Chile or Guyana, had their governments overthrown by CIA coups or, as with Grenada, by invasion. Many found their economies destroyed by debt and by the ‘structural adjustment programmes’ the IMF dictated in return for debt write-offs. With little domestic industry, their growth models relied on the export of raw materials, and the incomes of the poor stagnated.
Globalization changed all that. Between 1988 and 2008 – as the chart shows – the real incomes of two-thirds of the world’s people grew significantly. That’s what the hump on the left-hand side of the graph proves.
Now move to the right-hand side of the graph: the top 1 per cent also see their incomes rise, by 60 per cent. But for everybody in between the super-rich and the developing world – that is for the workers and lower-middle classes of the West – there is a U-shaped hole indicating little or no real increase. That hole tells the story of the majority of people in America, Japan and Europe – they gained almost nothing from capitalism in the past twenty years. In fact, some of them lost out. That dip below zero is likely to include black America, poor white Britain and much of the workforce of southern Europe.

We have listed the factors that allowed neoliberalism to happen: fiat money, financialization, the doubling of the workforce, the global imbalances, including the deflationary effect of cheap labour, plus the cheapening of everything else as a result of information technology. Each seemed like a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, allowing the ordinary karma of economics to be suspended. But as we have seen – and as most of us have experienced in some way – there has been a huge price to pay.

The interplay between supply and demand does not come into the price of an iTunes track: the supply of the Beatles ‘Love Me Do’ on iTunes is infinite.

Firefox, an Open Source browser, has currently around 24 per cent of the global browser market.19 A staggering 70 per cent of all smartphones run on Android, which is also technically Open Source.20 This is in part due to an overt strategy by Samsung and Google to use Open Source software to undermine Apple’s monopoly and maintain their own market position, but it does not alter the fact that the dominant smartphone on the planet runs on software nobody can own.

Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’

The small number of companies that dominate each sector is striking. In traditional sectors you have usually four to six big players in every market: the big four accountancy firms; four or five big supermarket groups; four big turbofan makers. But the signature brands of info-tech need total dominance: Google needs to be the only search company; Facebook has to be the only place you construct your online identity; Twitter where you post your thoughts; iTunes the go-to online music store. In two key markets – online search and mobile operating systems – there is a two-firm death match, with Google currently winning both of them.

Wikipedia is the best example. Founded in 2001, the collaboratively written encyclopaedia has, at the time of writing, 26 million pages and 24 million people registered to contribute and edit – with about 12,000 people regularly editing and 140,000 people vaguely taking part.32
Wikipedia has 208 employees.33 The thousands who edit it do so for free. A user survey found 71 per cent of them do it because they like the idea of working for nothing, and 63 per cent because they believe information should be free.34 With 8.5 billion page views per month the Wikipedia site is the sixth most popular in the world – just above Amazon, the most successful e-commerce company on earth.35 By one estimate, if it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be $2.8 billion a year.36
Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space. Furthermore, it is one of the most valuable learning resources ever invented and has (so far) defied all attempts to censor, subvert, troll or sabotage it, because the power of tens of millions of human eyeballs is greater than any government, stalker, interest group or saboteur can match.