If liberalism has one guiding thread it’s that nothing should happen to a person without their consent. John Locke, probably the most famous philosopher in the history of liberalism, argued that “no-one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”
Good intentions were rather undermined by the fact that in Locke’s Britain, a bastion of liberalism since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the number of offences for which the death penalty applied rose to around 250 by the early 19th century. A person could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief or taking an unauthorised clipping from an ornamental bush. A slight impediment to health, one might think.
Locke himself invested in the slave trade and thought children as young as three ought to be sent out to work.
But, nonetheless, the principle was laid down.
The liberal dictatorship
In addition to a penchant for hanging peasants, early liberalism was implacably hostile to democracy. Faced with the huge Chartist petition of 1842, the liberal historian and politician Thomas Macaulay declared universal suffrage “incompatible with civilisation”. Chartist leaders in Britain were jailed and the mere demand for the vote often treated as a criminal act by the ‘liberal’ authorities.
However, in the intervening years the opposition of most liberals to democracy dissipated to such an extent that ‘liberal-democracy’ is now seen as an eternally natural state of affairs, rather than the coupling of once sworn enemies. And in the reconciliation the liberal principle of consent has survived. Governments, it is proclaimed, are dependent on the will of people. They are compelled to seek a popular mandate. Nothing should be done without the people’s consent.
However, I want to argue that both economically and politically, the liberal – now liberal-democratic – principle of consent is a sham. In the words of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman we manufacture consent, we don’t seek it out. A society founded on genuine consent would look incalculably different to the one we now inhabit.
I will illustrate this hollowness by looking at two seemingly disconnected topics – UK Labour party leader Keir Starmer and “modern slavery”.
By any means necessary
Keir Starmer was overwhelmingly elected as leader of the Labour party in 2020. In his election campaign, he presented himself as a crusader for striking miners and printers. If elected, he promised to make “the moral case for socialism” based on ten pledges – including support for common ownership of utilities, abolishing the House of Lords, an end to ‘illegal wars’, and reversing cuts to corporation tax. He also set himself up as the unity candidate, promising “an end to factionalism”.
In retrospect – after a year and a half of Starmer’s leadership – all this seems utterly farcical. He has shunted the party inexorably to the Right, urging activists to embrace the legacy of Tony Blair, a man venerated as “the master” by George Osborne. Starmerism has involved courting the support of billionaires, seeking Parliamentary candidates from outside the party and trade unions, defenestrating the left-wing leader of Scottish Labour, forcing shadow ministers to apologise for being ‘anti-business’, refusing to make any spending commitments and being outflanked from the left by the Conservatives, for example on nurses’ pay. In the words of an aide, rather than making a moral case for socialism, “all that nonsense” – meaning Corbynite policies – had to be ditched.
And far from seeking unity, Starmer has waged an unrelenting war on opponents in the party, removing the whip from his predecessor for telling the truth, sacking left-wingers from the shadow cabinet on spurious grounds and expelling and suspending members who disagree with him, including swathes of left-wing Jews.
It is sometimes argued that Labour party members – all half a million of them – are unfortunate, but necessary, collateral damage in Starmer’s quest to make Labour “electable”. But this is belied by Starmer’s plummeting approval ratings and the fact his predecessor’s policies – if not the man himself – were popular with voters.
However, in assessing Starmer’s performance, mainstream commentators don’t condemn the duplicity he exhibited in order to get elected as Labour leader. In fact they laud him for shrewdness or political nous. Because Starmer encapsulates – in telescoped form – what ‘democracy’ under neoliberalism, or ‘new liberalism’, is. It is not about seeking to define and represent the popular will, but to obtain – by any means necessary including lying – consent for a pre-ordained set of policies.
Without doubt pre-neoliberal Parliamentary democracy has often manifested exactly the same tendency. But it has been distilled into an art form in the last four decades, with real power usurped by pan-governmental organisations like the IMF. Governments are now placed in a straitjacket, compelled to support balanced budgets and accompanying austerity, liberalized financial markets, low corporate taxes, and personal tax rates that don’t prompt an exodus to the Bahamas on the part of the very wealthy. Given the resentments that this state of affairs inevitably generates, ‘democracy’ is largely about ensuring they are directed at powerless targets, usually immigrants and benefit claimants.
Curiously, however, even though the spirit of democracy can be unashamedly trampled on, the formalities can’t. Free and fair elections must be periodically held and consent, by hook or by crook, extracted. It is an irony of history that just as a wave of democracy rolled across the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, toppling dictatorships and one-party states in its wake, the actual content of democracy was hollowed out. Governments, whatever their theoretical commitments, were invariably compelled to accept the strictures of IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes and the dictates of the Washington Consensus. Post-apartheid South Africa is a textbook example of “democracy without democracy”. Elitist fears expressed at the dawn of universal suffrage a century and a half ago, that democracy would swamp liberalism, have proved groundless. Precisely the opposite has happened.
Liberalism and slavery
The same liberal neuroses about consent can be observed in the furore over “modern slavery”. Governments bend over backwards to condemn it in the strongest possible terms, charities pledge to eradicate it, and the media join the chorus.
This is not to deny that modern slavery is a serious problem, and a separate category from the conventional employer/employee relationship. But the wall erected between “compelled labour” and the normal workings of capitalism is supremely ideological. In the urge to locate “exploitation” as happening solely when a worker is coerced – the UK’s Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority defines its aims as “preventing worker exploitation” – another claim is implicitly made: that when the labour exchange is free and consensual exploitation doesn’t occur.
But this is nonsense. In the words of academic Neil Howard, this fictional binary “protects the system from the moral outrage that might otherwise challenge its hegemony”.
Capitalism – i.e. an economic system based on ‘free’ labour exchange – cannot do without reams of people without property who are compelled to rent themselves out in order to procure the means to physically survive.
Even if one is to ignore the millions of people on the margins of the global economy who choose to submit to servitude or trafficking because in conditions of dire poverty they represent their least worst options, a comparatively wealthy country like Britain shows the depth of the well from which exploitable people are drawn.
There are, it is estimated, 16 million people in the UK who have less than £100 in savings. And nearly 80% have some form of personal debt in the shape of credit cards, personal loans, bank overdrafts and payday loans. In such circumstances – and in those of a benefit system that will sanction claimants who can’t prove they are looking for work – saying no to a job offer is not, practically, possible. In previous, more honest, eras, this was called wage slavery.
Exploitation through the ages
Marxism is frequently presented as nightmare ideology that wants to make everyone the subject of an all-powerful state and was responsible, in the last century, for killing millions in gulags and famines. But the hysteria partly comes from Marxism’s insistence, uniquely in economic thought, that exploitation doesn’t just occur under patently coercive arrangements like slavery and feudalism but also when people, on the surface, voluntarily choose to work for an employer.
“There’s only one basis that any capitalist ever hired a worker,” says author Richard Wolff, “and that condition is ‘you gotta produce more for me than I pay you for coming here to do it’”. In this sense, capitalism is no different from prior economic systems, or the vestiges of such systems that remain. In all cases, a small minority exploits the vast majority in order to extract a surplus from them. “Capitalism, even though the workers are not slaves or serfs, does replicate those two systems in this particular way,” says Wolff. “One group of people – the employees – go to work on condition that they produce a surplus that the employer gets.”
You may baulk at the notion that someone like Lionel Messi (salary €71 million at Paris Saint-Germain F.C.) is exploited. However, what cannot be honestly denied that is corporations and other businesses, practically and legally required to maximise profit, view the world’s population as either a resource ripe for exploitation or a human mass to be left to rot (“the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all,” said 20th century economist Joan Robinson). In the latter case, the human material is created for trafficking and forced labour in the West.
And in most Western countries, exploitation – exploitation that is of workers who ‘freely’ consent to do their jobs – is intensifying. In Britain, in the wake of the financial crisis, zero hour contracts have mushroomed and many workers – for example builders or delivery drivers – are falsely reclassified as ‘independent contractors’ in order to save the employer from having to fork out for holiday or sick pay. They can also earn below the minimum wage because they aren’t officially paid a wage and don’t have set hours.
In addition, as pandemic conditions slowly lift, many employees are finding they are being sacked and told to reapply for their jobs based on inferior conditions. Despite the rhetoric about the inestimable value of key workers in the worst stages of the pandemic, Tesco, British Gas, British Airways and local councils and have all tried to engage in this “industrial thuggery”.
In such circumstances what better way to shield capitalism from justifiable anger, than to focus all attention on the plight of slaves and coerced workers who, it is claimed, exist entirely outside of its legitimate confines?
The cooperation of the exploited
But there is a deeper reason, in my opinion, for this blindness of liberalism. In the 1970s, psychologist Stanley Milgram, author of the famous obedience to authority experiments, noted that for obedience to work seamlessly, those subject to it had to believe that their submission was a voluntary choice. “The psychological consequence of voluntary entry is that it creates a sense of commitment and obligation,” he said, “which will subsequently play a part in binding the subject to his role.”
Any endeavour – and that includes the ubiquitous labour contract – is so much easier to perform if the victims of it can be convinced to cooperate. Enforcing coercion is hard. It requires perpetual surveillance and overcoming an ingrained human resistance – some have called it counterwill – to bowing to another’s desire.
That is why liberalism insists that consent exists in political and economic arenas when patently it has to be fabricated. But if consent can be given, it can also be withdrawn, if only spiritually at first.
