Symptoms of Decline

The decline of liberalism is about much more than international relations. The neoliberal model of capitalism hit the rocks in 2008 and has stagnated ever since. Multibillionaire tech oligarchs dominate Western society. Meanwhile, China, a state-directed economy, has continued to grow while transforming itself into the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech goods and infrastructure, dispelling the notion that the Western liberal model of development is the only one that can succeed.

And then there is the decline of liberal politics. Far-right parties are quickly moving from the role of insurgents to that of chieftains in many Western countries. Even where centrists cling to power, they are increasingly shedding their own association with liberal political values. From Britain to Germany and Romania, ostensibly center-left governments and liberal-democratic states have put into question fundamental liberal tenets, including equality before the law, freedom of speech and assembly, and respect for the outcome of free and fair elections.

The fact that authoritarian responses to dissent are increasingly the consensus view among elites does suggest that this is not merely just another political cycle, one that will exhaust itself before quickly swinging back the other way. There is strong reason to believe we are at the start of a much deeper shift, where the foundations of liberal democracy and liberal capitalism are crumbling, and may indeed have collapsed, as Philip Pilkington argues in The Collapse of Global Liberalism.

Pilkington identifies the Ukraine war as the key accelerant of global liberalism’s final collapse. The failure of the West to bring Russia to heel brought an end to a time when one could “simply assume that Western liberal countries can impose their will on others through economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, or even military intervention.”

Indeed, every tactic with which the West has tried to stop Russia has only served to weaken its own position. By freezing Russian foreign exchange reserves, the West undermined the hegemony of the US dollar. By sanctioning the Russian economy, the West accelerated its own deindustrialization and strengthened Russia’s links to China.

The West has even been outgunned by Russia, because modern military technology has led warfare back to the trenches, where cheap, mass-produced ammunition and drones are key. Russia can produce such weapons en masse while the West cannot, because it has lost its industrial capacity.

As well as losing military supremacy, Western societies are losing the ability to reproduce their populations. According to Pilkington, liberal individualism has relegated marriage, family life, and raising children to the margins of social life for young adults. The West’s rapidly aging population and historically low birth rates are leading to a situation where anemic growth, intergenerational conflict, and mass immigration all serve to tear at the sinews of Western society.

The failures of neoliberal globalization underpin Western decline. Western manufacturing capacity was transferred to the Global South, especially China, so that corporations could benefit from lower labor costs. The hollowing out of industry and the rise of financialization have destroyed good working-class jobs in the West while creating deep global trade imbalances. The imposition of tariffs and other punitive measures to constrain China amount to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

What Is Liberalism?

For Pilkington, Western decline has one cause: liberalism. But defining this ideology can be like nailing jelly to the wall. What parameters does Pilkington set? The first chapters of the book seek to position liberalism as a doctrine which seeks to destroy “hierarchical structures in politics and society at large.”

Although he locates liberalism’s rise in the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries — the same period in which capitalism became the dominant mode of production — Pilkington refuses to identify liberalism with capitalism as such. That explains his somewhat broad definition of liberalism as being about overcoming hierarchies in general, rather than feudal hierarchies in particular, which is what the bourgeois revolutions were clearly designed to do.

Indeed, the concepts that are most closely tied to classical liberalism — private property rights, free-market competition, and equality of the individual before the law — were all developed to protect the emergent capitalist order from the arbitrary power of feudal elites. The idea that we can think about liberalism as something that is not fundamentally embedded within capitalism is clearly erroneous.

Pilkington’s more ambiguous definition serves two clear political purposes. First, he is keen to stress what he sees as the commonalities between liberalism and Marxism, which he considers to be the logical outgrowth of liberalism because it takes the idea of eliminating hierarchies to its ultimate conclusion. Bizarrely, this even leads him to the notion that Marxism and neoliberalism are ultimately “aiming at the same end goal,” because they are both forms of “hard liberalism” which demand that “all aspects of moral and social life conform to [liberal] precepts.”

Second, by detaching capitalism from liberalism, Pilkington seeks to position post-liberalism as a revival of a traditional capitalist form that has never actually existed. He advocates a return to a “more ‘natural’ hierarchical form” based on each country’s “own unique history.” This theme of natural and unnatural ideas is a constant in the book, with his own ideas — some of which are clearly drawn from liberal thought, such as the “Bancor” international currency system proposed by John Maynard Keynes — being natural, while those of his ideological opponents are unnatural.

The notion of society having lost its “natural state,” to which it now must return, is very obviously ahistorical. When did this “natural state” end? What are the roots of “unnatural” ideas, if they are not to be found within the societies from which they emerged? How could liberalism have been so hegemonic, if it is a set of ideas “imposed on a society from the outside”?

Pilkington has no explanation to offer, but he does think that the lord–serf relationship in the feudal epoch was “natural,” which gives us an indication of the sort of hierarchies he may find appropriate in a post-liberal world. After all, if Pilkington is right, and all human beings are not born equal and should not be treated as such, then there has to be some way of sorting out the superiors from the inferiors: why not through the categories of lords and serfs?

Chinese Contradictions

One of the interesting things about Pilkington’s conservative traditionalism is that much of it is rooted in Marxist analysis. One chapter, “Deindustrialization and the Rise of Funny Money,” clearly draws on Marxist critiques of neoliberalism in identifying the causes of deindustrialization and financialization. Another, “Demographics and Destiny,” identifies “a tendency for the rate of people to fall” within “liberalism.” In the original article where Pilkington developed this useful concept, he drew inspiration from Marx and did not root the tendency within liberalism as such, rather presenting it as something “inherent in capitalism itself.”

This matters, because substituting the concept of liberalism for capitalism leads us to identify root causes in the ideological superstructure, rather than the material base, of the modern world. Take China, the country which Pilkington identifies as the shining example of a non-liberal development path. China has followed the international pattern, with a collapse in birth rates as the country develops: in this, it is no different from liberal countries. Clearly, there is something more deeply rooted than liberal ideology at play if we want to explain why women have fewer children as capitalist societies become wealthier.

The obvious explanation for the fact that China’s fertility rate has followed that of the West is that the country is deeply integrated into global capitalism and shares many of the common features of late capitalist societies — most relevantly commodification, which pushes young adults to prioritize work and consumption over childbearing. But accepting this point would create a problem for Pilkington, because he would have to accept that there is a place for socialist approaches to demographic pressures. This is something which he dismisses outright, taking aim at “state childcare” policies as a way of trying to manage away the problem of children (as he characterizes the attitude of the Left).

Without socialized childcare, how does Pilkington expect parents to carry the double burden of paid work and care? Or, given his traditionalism, would he like to see the mother permanently at home with the child, and thus massively reduce the size of the labor force at a time when demographic trends are already reducing the working-age population? Pilkington is silent on these questions, presumably because he knows there are no serious answers to them that fit comfortably into a traditional conservative outlook on the world.

Indeed, Pilkington’s whole attitude to China is riddled with contradictions. On the one hand, he begins the book by stating that “much like communist regimes, liberal regimes are unnatural and will lead a country into severe dysfunction.” On the other hand, much of the book consists of praise for communist-ruled China as an exemplar of well-functioning post-liberalism.

He squares this circle by arguing that communist regimes always fall back on prerevolutionary hierarchies — in China’s case, the Confucian imperial system — because Marxism is too extreme to act as an ideology that can sustainably govern societies. But if that is the case, then why are communist regimes “unnatural,” in Pilkington’s words? Presumably communism would in fact offer the exact remedy for which Pilkington is searching, in view of its track record of hammering liberalism while reverting back to pre-liberal forms of governance when in power.

Furthermore, Pilkington’s praise for China sits awkwardly with his rabid anti-green rhetoric. China is becoming increasingly prosperous while leading the world in its development of green infrastructure and technologies, something that should not be possible from Pilkington’s perspective, since he argues that green policies result in “falling living standards and general misery.” The evidence does not back up this claim: even in Europe, in the few places where green energy has displaced gas as a determinant of wholesale energy prices, the cost of electricity for households and businesses has fallen.

If Western countries had built a green industrial base of their own, even on a far more limited scale than what China has managed to construct over the past twenty years, it would certainly have created high-quality jobs while reducing energy costs for businesses and households. Instead, Trump is actively blocking the development of green infrastructure because he doesn’t like the way wind farms look. Yet Pilkington wants us to believe it is green activists which have “irrational” attitudes towards energy?

What these inconsistencies in Pilkington’s worldview reveal is someone trying to ride two horses that are moving in different directions. He wants to appeal to the tastes of the insurgent right-wing forces in Western societies, who constitute the target audience of this book, while at the same time identifying with the major success story of our time: non-Western, non-liberal China. But the truth is that the Right intensely dislikes China just as much as the centrist liberals do. Neither tendency would like to admit the reason for this: they have more in common with each other than what divides them.

Rights for People, Not Capital

If we are moving into a post-liberal order, it will display significant continuities with the liberal one. For example, the Right and the liberal centrists agree on the sanctity of private property rights, up to and including control over the commanding heights of the economy. In a post-liberal United States, the big tech firms would remain firmly under corporate domination. These issues are not up for debate anywhere among establishment thinkers.

There is also an emerging consensus around the construction of police states that strip away fundamental rights. Here, there is more contention, as both the Right and the centrists accuse one another of attacking freedom of speech and assembly. The reality is that both are implementing increasingly draconian policies in power, working hand in glove with Big Tech to do so. Tech-driven authoritarianism is likely to be the defining feature of a post-liberal order.

This is where the Left should be defending certain values that have historically been associated with the liberal Enlightenment-era tradition. In other words, there is such a thing as universal rights. Rights which are relativized, so that they are applicable to natives not immigrants, Christians not Muslims, Israelis not Palestinians, are not rights at all — they are privileges.

Liberals have frequently spoken the language of universal rights while relativizing them in practice. This is most obvious when we look at the liberal history of colonialism and imperialism. But post-liberal authoritarianism seeks to take pride in supremacy, arguing that it is justified because of “natural” hierarchies between people and peoples. Approached consistently, this supremacism is the basis for the arbitrary exercise of executive power by the strong over the weak — despotism.

The Left should be more consistent than the liberals in our defense of universal rights. Here, we should avoid indulging postmodern conceptions that establish exceptions to universal rights when it is deemed to be politically advantageous. We should be ardent defenders of the universal right to freedom of speech and assembly even when our opponents are exercising it, because we understand that the undermining of these rights will, in the long run, only favor the powerful.

But we should also be clear about where we differ from the liberals in principle. Universal rights, which are fundamentally political in nature, do not apply to property. Private property (as opposed to personal property) is contractual — it designates that someone has ownership rights over an asset of some kind.

When property rights are extended to the major resources of the world, as they are under global capitalism, it establishes a class of owners and a class of people that have to work for the owners to survive. Private property “rights” can by definition never be universal. Indeed, due to the destructiveness inherent in capital’s perpetual drive for accumulation, property rights inevitably crash up against, and ultimately undermine, our political rights.

Completing the Enlightenment

We can see the tension over how to approach the question of universal liberal rights in Marx’s 1843 text On The Jewish Question. “Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward,” Marx wrote. “True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order.”

However, he went on to criticize the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” proclaimed in France after the 1789 revolution, for not going beyond “egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society — that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.” In the framework of the Declaration, man was

far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

We can conclude then that liberal rights are inherently in tension with an anti-capitalist perspective, since they seek to offer protections to individuals within the confines of capitalist social relations. They preclude the overcoming of capitalism, which can only happen through collective action, including specifically action against the property “rights” of capital. Nonetheless, liberal rights can still be, as Marx insisted, a “big step forward” within the constraints of “the hitherto existing world order.”

The late Marxist intellectual Neil Davidson put it in another way, arguing that the task of socialism would involve “completing” Enlightenment thought. For Davidson, socialists had to distinguish between aspects of the Enlightenment project rooted in “the capitalist economic and social conditions from which it initially emerged” and aspects that are “genuinely universal and consequently capable of being turned to different purposes.”

As liberalism goes through a potentially fatal crisis, the last thing the Left should be doing is trying to resuscitate its corpse for fear of what the post-liberal alternative may entail. Instead, we need to be clear-eyed in identifying those Enlightenment-era ideas that provide protection from the arbitrary exercise of ruling-class power and should be defended, and those that act as a block to overcoming capitalism and should be rejected.