Most people have encountered Rubin’s vase at some point in their life. Initially you see one clear image, but then another image is perceived at the expense of the first. Once both images are apparent, their imprint on the memory is such that the image will never be observed as it first was, the brain constantly able to switch between the two from then on.
The effect this illusionary picture has on the viewer’s perception is analogous to what in psychology is known as gestalt switch, or in science more generally as a Kuhnian paradigm shift, named after Thomas Kuhn whose seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions identified the uneven development of science over time. Both relate to a radical and critical shift in the perception of a previously accepted systemic framework through which we interpret and make sense of the world.
Such a concept could be helpful in the coming months as the impact from the coronavirus has the capacity to lead us to fundamentally reassess the prevailing individualistic value structure that neoliberalism has constructed. From completely upending economic orthodoxy with the greatest level of state intervention in the economy since the Second World War, to a renewed understanding of the importance of public services and respect for the value that precarious low-paid workers bring to society, the coronavirus pandemic has the capacity to radically transform our society.
There Is No Alternative. So goes the conditioning mantra which always underpins the arguments of the neoliberal naysayers who tell us the dysfunctional status quo is the only game in town. Yet in the space of a couple of weeks we have witnessed both how dysfunctional the system is, but also how much power the government has to intervene to rectify economic and social dysfunctions. In an instant, this crisis revealed the fallacious concept of the magic money tree to be nothing but a farce, a deceitful rhetorical tool used to debase the arguments of those trying to rectify the systemic problems of the status quo. Just as during the 2008 financial crisis, when banks and business are under pressure the government is always on hand to provide the necessary funding; for them, There Is Always An Alternative. Yet when nurses and other public sector workers are desperate for a pay rise, neoliberal Tory governments always claim they are demanding unicorns.
It is increasingly clear that economic shocks which affect the establishment always justify massive state bailouts, yet the general persistent economic and social dysfunctions which characterise neoliberal capitalism must be left to fester, neglected from state intervention. We are told this is necessary in order to not distort the naturality of the free market, however incidents like these crises when the state intervenes on an epic level, display in sharp relief that the market is neither autonomous nor inherently spontaneous or natural, and is in fact a social construct, bounded by a legal framework designed by legislators, and underwritten with tax payers’ money by the state. Those with more influence on those legislators and the state are able to use their power to mould the market to their needs. This influence is brought to bear through their economic power within society and is contrasted with the political power the masses have over the state. Of course, the key component of neoliberalism is the insulation of the economic from the political, legitimised under the illusion of a free market that must be protected from the influence of that democratic political power which is portrayed as a hindrance to the efficient functioning of the market. Yet these crises clearly reveal that far from the state being a burden on the market, it is in reality both the bedrock and designer of the market. In so doing they reveal the neoliberal discourse which promotes a narrative that the (political) state is a burden on individuals and should be limited – whilst all the while mining its resources for their own ends – is a deception through which to disarm the public of the immense democratic power they hold to model the market on the needs of society, rather than global capital.
Paralleling the crisis’ capacity to reveal the vacuity of neoliberal assertions in respect of the relationship between the state and the market, it also has the capacity to redefine the prevailing social value structure. Whilst bankers and their ilk used to be keen on calling themselves ‘masters of the universe’, the 2008 crisis exposed this to be another conceited neoliberal discursive trick which helped frame a narrative that their actions were somehow sublime, rather than the parasitic Ponzi scheme which the crisis revealed much of it to be. The coronavirus has taken this devaluation of the neoliberal value structure a significant step further, with the elevation of the social value inherent to much low paid work. When society as whole is in critical danger, we can see it is not the super remunerated finance sector which keeps us alive, but rather the low paid, providing essential services to the life support systems of society; the food chain, public services etc.
The crisis has revealed the government has always been cogniscent the welfare system is not fit for purpose. As soon as a majority of the electorate needed to use it and therefore experience what many long term sick and disabled have to try to live on day to day, the government admitted that payments are both not enough to live on, and accessing them takes too long. Demonstrating the strength of political power, as this is an electoral threat, the government, have not only made the system (temporarily) more generous, but have undertaken an unprecedented programme of employee wage subsidisation. In turn this revealed the precarity of the self-employed, especially those atomised workers in the gig economy who so many of us are reliant upon. Whilst eventually the government even had to intervene to provide funding for them, it yet again laid bare both the inequities in the system and the capacity of the state to intervene.
One of the clearest actions pushing on a gestalt switch that the crisis has compelled has been the virtually overnight ability of the government to take action on homelessness. Almost at the stroke of a pen, government has ordered an end to the homelessness crisis, thereby exposing the callousness of their previous inaction.
But the most fundamental change, and one which will be very difficult for future governments to unpick will be the reassessment of the value of our public services such as the NHS. Having already endured ten years of neoliberal austerity which demanded endless cutting of public services in order to keep the tax bills low for global capital, this crisis has exposed how antithetical this logic is to society, leaving it extremely vulnerable in the face of crises. And whilst we don’t yet know what further disruption to the status quo the response to coronavirus may bring, what seems clear already is that it has enriched the value of the collective and impoverished those of excessive individualism.
These various aspects of the response to coronavirus hold the capacity to fundamentally reorient society away from the excessive individualism which has been promoted by the neoliberal project. In a similar way as Thomas Kuhn identified that the development of science is not a stable piecemeal process, but rather is punctuated by periodic revolutions in which the status quo paradigm becomes increasingly unable to provide a resilient coherence in the face of competing ideas, such that it increasingly loses its legitimacy, so the response to coronavirus represents a fundamental challenge to the existing neoliberal paradigm. For not only does the coronavirus crime scene have neoliberalism’s fingerprints all over it, in respect of underfunded public services struggling to respond, virus hotspots linked to areas of deprivation, and outsourced manufacturing resulting in a lack of quick access to essential equipment needed to fight the virus, to name but a few, the necessary responses which have had to be put in place are premised on socialist principles of collectivity; the antithesis of neoliberalism. And whilst these aspects of the crisis already represent a challenge to neoliberalism, these are likely to become a lot sharper if the death toll in Western societies is considerably higher than those in the East. The legitimacy of neoliberalism was already on life support following the financial crises and the ten years of austerity it dictated society must suffer as a consequence, but this crisis should delegitimise the paradigm once and for all.
Over the last ten years especially, but stretching right back forty years to the beginning of neoliberalism, it has dictated that the state must be shrunk in order to protect individual (economic) freedom, that the private sector, via a competitive market is the most efficient way to organise society, that workers must be individualised, and that our ability to fund public services and invest in the nation should be hostage to the sentiments of global capital markets, for these we are told are more rational than the actions of politicians responding to democratic demands.
Yet once the dust begins to settle after this crisis, how can any of those tenets still be held legitimate? Even during periods of perceived stability when the neoliberal system delivers for the wealthy, it produces multiple crises for wider society and the environment, but when it engenders wholesale system failure as in 2008 and now during the coronavirus, not only is it unable to offer any resolution on its own terms, it is its antithesis, socialism and the principles of collectivity which are the most efficient way to respond. Surely a paradigm which fails on its own terms and which needs to be rescued by the ideas of its smeared opposite is unsustainable?
Without doubt once a vaccine has been developed those who benefit from the neoliberal system will push back to try preserve the status quo and reorient the narrative back to the virtues of individualism. Through their elite funded think tank mouth pieces at Tufton St and the like, they will try to smear the collective principles which are self-evidently pulling society through this crisis. Yet I imagine this will not be as easy a task as it once was. A gestalt switch may well have been perceived in the public’s consciousness. They can see that far from collective values being a threat to their individual freedom, they enable them. The neoliberal weaponizing of individualism was always a strategy to atomise us from each other and thereby disempower our collective control over society. This crisis has revealed yet again it is a fraudulent philosophy and the tenets on which it is premised are false and antithetical to society. When the crisis is over it will be very difficult for any government to engage in another period of prolonged austerity, especially in light of the reoriented social value hierarchy mentioned above which has elevated the standing of public services. Therefore there will have to be a reckoning; either we endure another era of austerity politics and global markets dictating emasculated public services, or we scuttle neoliberalism on the rocks it has washed us onto once again.
From the Outside Looking In 