Capitalism would need to invent a Guardian, if it did not already exist, writes Jonathan Cook. And in turn, The Guardian would need to invent a George Monbiot if he was not already one of its columnists.
The Guardian building in London. (Nigel Mykura, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
An audio version of this article – read by Matthew Alford – is available here.
Chris Hedges hosts a very interesting discussion with Guardian columnist George Monbiot on his new book about capitalism and its modern incarnation, neoliberalism. Monbiot rightly sees capitalism as a supremely “coercive, destructive and exploitative mode of economic organisation.”
Neoliberalism, observes Monbiot, emerged as capitalism’s response to its biggest challenge: democracy.
After centuries of struggle, Western publics managed to win the vote. The capitalist ruling class faced a major problem. The public sought to use its newfound political power to secure other rights, such as labour protections. Workers organised into trade unions to demand a bigger share of the value of the commodities they created. These new voters also wanted a better quality of life, including weekends off and proper housing, and an environment free of industrial pollutants that were (and still are) contaminating the air they breathed, the food they ate, and the water they drank.
Those rights inherently threatened the maximisation of profit — the goal of capitalism.
Neoliberalism offered a solution. It sought to make capitalism invisible to the public by reframing it as the “natural order.” Like gravity, it came to be treated as “just something that was there, not something that was invented by people,” as Monbiot aptly puts it.
“Wealth creators” — the billionaires leeching off the common good — were recast as secular gods. Any interference in the so-called “free market” — in fact, a market not free at all, but carefully rigged to benefit a tiny, monopolistic wealth elite — was considered sacrilegious.
A network of think-tanks, secretly funded by the billionaires, was established to manufacture a consensus about capitalism’s immutability and benevolence — a message that was enthusiastically amplified by the billionaire-owned media.
Central to the confidence trick at the heart of neoliberalism was the suggestion that any dissent, any limit placed on the rapacious greed of the capitalist class, would inexorably lead to totalitarianism, to Stalinism.
Capitalism became synonymous with freedom, innovation and self-expression. To question capitalism was an attack on freedom itself. This idea lay at the heart of the relentless assault on the labour movement that shifted up several gears during the Thatcher-Reagan years of the 1980s. Trade unions were presented as a threat to the smooth working of the economy, to growth and to “freedom.”
The Trilateral Commission was set up in the 1970s to deal with the supposed problem of 'an excess of democracy': voters were becoming less passive (over Vietnam then, the Gaza genocide now) and had to be returned to passivity.
Starmer is a member of the Trilateral Commission. pic.twitter.com/gT3ZJGkSEV
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 18, 2024
This was also around the time the Trilateral Commission was founded by a group of senior Washington policy officials, keen to address a problem they defined as an “excess of democracy.” It is worth noting that the current British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, secretly joined the Trilateral Commission around 2017, while he was serving in the Labour shadow cabinet. He was one of only two MPs — out of 650 — to be invited to become a member in that period.
Starmer personifies the way neoliberalism has made parliamentary politics irrelevant. British voters, like U.S. ones, now have a choice between two hardcore wings of capitalism. Margaret Thatcher’s TINA slogan — “There Is No Alternative” — has finally borne fruit.
In practice, we are all neoliberals today. Any other way of organising society than the one we have — which depends on runaway consumption, requiring unsustainable, slash-and-burn economic growth — has become impossible for most people to imagine.
Starmer in his London office, October 2023. (Keir Starmer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
On all of this, Monbiot’s argument is strong and clear.
But I have an urgent question for this critic of capitalism: Is the Guardian Media Group Monbiot works for a capitalist news organisation or not?
Monbiot has always defended his paper as exceptional: the one supposedly “nice” corporate outlet. He has decried all other media as unequivocally as he does capitalism. But he insists The Guardian is different. How?
If he’s right about capitalism, and I think he is, then it is difficult to understand how he has not reached the conclusion that The Guardian too is a product of capitalism’s coercive, destructive, exploitative mode of economic organisation.
The Guardian depends on corporate advertising. In other words, it has to keep its advertisers happy — that is, advertisers embedded in, and enriched by, the capitalist system.
The Guardian is owned and run by a corporation, the Guardian Media Group, that is tied into a complex of other corporations with economic interests entirely dependent on the success of a capitalist system driven by consumption and profit. (Some gullible people still mistakenly believe the paper is owned by some charity-like trust rather than a limited company.)
That The Guardian is deeply rooted in the West’s capitalist system makes sense of why it took such a central role in trashing and smearing Jeremy Corbyn, the only leader of a major British party in living memory to seek to challenge the neoliberal status quo.
Corbyn expressing support for Julian Assange outside the London court where the U.S. appeal hearing was taking place, Oct. 28, 2021. (Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign)
It makes sense of why the paper so visibly helped to destroy Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who exposed the West’s war and resource-grabbing industries like no one before him. He did so by bringing into the light of day classified official documents that proved the ruling class’s crimes.
It makes sense of why The Guardian has been so unconscionably feeble in giving any kind of voice to the millions of Britons, many on the left it supposedly represents, who are shocked and appalled by Israel’s genocide of the people of Gaza, and the utter complicity of the British and U.S. governments.
It makes sense of why The Guardian has been a cheerleader for an entirely avoidable war in Ukraine triggered by NATO’s decades-long expansion ever closer to Russia’s border with Ukraine over Moscow’s protests. It was a move that Western experts long ago warned would signal to Russia that the West was seeking confrontation, would erode the Kremlin’s confidence that the principle of nuclear deterrence could be maintained, and was bound ultimately to provoke an equally violent reaction.
It makes sense of why The Guardian has been paying lip service to concerns about a looming climate catastrophe while actively stoking the very consumer habits and expectations that make reducing CO2 levels impossible.
And finally it makes sense of why The Guardian works so very hard to fashion itself as a uniquely leftwing and progressive publication. In doing so, The Guardian has become capitalism’s handmaiden-in-chief.
When a genuinely leftwing party leader emerges, as Corbyn did, The Guardian can maul him or her from the left much more effectively than papers such as The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail can from the right. The bipartisan assault on Corbyn proved far more convincing and credible than if it had been carried out solely by the rightwing press.
Similarly with wars. If The Guardian backs the latest war — as it invariably does – then these wars must be a good thing because the left and right agree. The rightwing press can sell war to its readers on the basis of “terror threats” and a “clash of civilisations,” while The Guardian can sell it to readers on the basis of “humanitarianism” or the need to topple the latest “new Hitler.”
The capitalist system needs a media corporation like The Guardian if only to stop a genuinely independent, genuinely anti-capitalist, genuinely anti-war outlet from ever gaining a foothold in the public space.
This is also why The Guardian has been so central in the effort to inflame fears about “populism” — of both the right and left varieties — and “fake news” on social media. It smears the progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-war left as dictator-appeasers, genocide-belitters and anti-Semites as enthusiastically as it denounces the white supremacy of the Trumpian right. It excels in this, its own specialised form of disinformation.
Which brings us back to Monbiot.
I have written many articles over the years criticising Monbiot. And every time I do so, I am inundated with comments that this is another example of the left eating the left, of sour grapes, of cheap point-scoring.
Which is to entirely miss the point.
This isn’t chiefly about Monbiot. It’s about his function in a capitalist economy — and how he contributes to The Guardian’s role of undermining an anti-capitalist, anti-war left. Monbiot doesn’t have to understand the function he plays to still play it. In fact, all the evidence is that he is entirely blind to his function.
Monbiot has never written a column on the worst assault on press freedom in a generation: the political persecution of Julian Assange. Soil erosion, he said, took precedence. Now he's prioritised a witchhunt of left heretics on Ukraine over Assange's freedom. He's an utter fraud pic.twitter.com/OtJ7pTE6gx
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 2, 2022
It also highlights how we, the progressive left, are caught in a trap that the capitalist class has engineered for us. Monbiot’s book on neoliberalism, if his interview with Hedges is anything to go by, is doubtless excellent. And because it is excellent, it will win Monbiot more devotees, and more kudos on the left. Which will make him even more useful to The Guardian in proving its leftwing credentials.
Monbiot isn’t chiefly to blame for that. Our gullibility as readers, as critical thinkers, is.
Speaking the quiet part out loud, Joe Biden admitted many years ago that the United States would have had to invent Israel if it did not already exist.
What he meant was that Israel serves a function that benefits Washington elites: as a disguised U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East; as the lightning rod for protest as the West projects its violent power into the oil-rich region; as the catalyst for stoking ethnic and sectarian divisions that have prevented the consolidation of a secular Arab nationalism; as the Bible-citing colonial hegemon that has fomented an Islamic fundamentalism to mirror Israel’s Jewish-Zionist fundamentalism; and as an insurance policy, allowing U.S. politicians to smear domestic critics of its Middle East policy as anti-Semites.
Similarly, capitalism would need to invent a Guardian, if it did not already exist. And in turn, the Guardian would need to invent a Monbiot if he was not already one of its columnists.
The Guardian is critically important to neoliberalism’s efforts at maintaining the legitimacy of capitalism by making it invisible. It does so by suggesting capitalism’s righteousness is so uncontested that it enjoys universal political support. Meanwhile, The Guardian needs George Monbiot so that it can demonstrate to the left that all sides are being given a platform, that the free press really is free, that there is no need for any greater pluralism.
The fact that Monbiot has written a book critiquing capitalism and neoliberalism is another of the great paradoxes of the system. But sadly, it is one that The Guardian, and capitalism, can not only accommodate but weaponise against the left.
If this is difficult to accept, consider the climate catastrophe. The Guardian is probably the most outspoken corporate media outlet on this topic — though, admittedly, that is a very low bar indeed. Many readers are absolutely committed to supporting The Guardian financially each month because of its coverage of a climate crisis already upon us. And yet the Guardian Media Group is embedded in a system of consumption promotion — of flights to paradisal destinations, and of luxury cars — that is fuelling the very climate disaster The Guardian is supposedly sounding the alarm against.
In other words, it is propagandising for the very consumption model that it is also warning us is destroying our planet. It works because human beings have a very large capacity for cognitive dissonance, for accommodating two contradictory thoughts at the same time. It is precisely why propaganda is so successful, and why we make such poor critical thinkers unless we exercise this faculty like an additional muscle.
Monbiot is as much a victim of this human tendency towards cognitive dissonance as anyone else. In fact, he appears supremely vulnerable to it.
As I have noted in a previous article, Monbiot has been a consistently outspoken champion of the West’s endless wars, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are integral to capitalism’s efforts to rationalise vacuuming up huge sums of money to enrich the wealth elite through the war industries rather than looking after the public, and that these wars come at an incalculable cost to the environment, as the destruction of Gaza and now Lebanon should underscore.
As I wrote two years ago:
“Monbiot holds as a cherished piety what should be two entirely inconsistent positions: that British and Western elites are pillaging the planet for corporate gain, immune to the catastrophe they are wreaking on the environment and oblivious to the lives they are destroying at home and abroad; and that these same elites are fighting good, humanitarian wars to protect the interests of poor and oppressed peoples overseas, from Syria and Libya to Ukraine, peoples who coincidentally just happen to live in areas of geostrategic significance.
Because of the vice-like corporate hold on Britain’s political priorities, Monbiot avers, nothing the corporate media tells us should be believed – except when those priorities relate to protecting peoples facing down ruthless foreign dictators, from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Then the media should be believed absolutely.”
But worse, Monbiot isn’t just gullible. He has been the corporate media’s most effective attack dog on the anti-war left.
He has expended a great deal of his time and energies on policing the left’s discourse and smearing its most long-standing figureheads, from Noam Chomsky to the late John Pilger.
He has tarred both as “genocide belittlers” in at least two columns for questioning what the West’s “humanitarian wars” are really about. And he did so while he was also claiming to be too busy to make the time to write a column about Assange’s years-long torture and show trial for doing journalism about the West’s war crimes.
The West’s latest “humanitarian war”— Israel supposedly “defending itself” through genocide against the Palestinian people it has been belligerently occupying for decades and whose lands it has stolen — has been an especially hard sell for the corporate media. But it is precisely where we were bound to end up by ignoring – or worse invalidating – the voices of figures like Chomsky and Pilger who were trying to show us the bigger picture of what these wars were really about.
And Monbiot served precisely that role at The Guardian of invalidating them.
Read his new book on capitalism if you need to. Absorb its lessons. But remember, the biggest one is this: Monbiot can be right about the wickedness of capitalism while himself being thoroughly complicit in its wickedness.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I first discovered the “Guardian” in the lead up to and during the Iraq War. Unlike the complicit “New York Times,” the Guardian was squarely against the war. In subsequent years, it became clear to me that the publication had been co-opted by the British government, including its intelligence services. In other words, it began walking down the same path as the Times, and that’s when I stopped reading it.
All of this is prelude to my saying that I have never read anything by George Monbiot, which is why I was able to listen with an unprejudiced mind to his interview with Chris Hedges. I found it magnificent. If Monbiot is, indeed, a hypocrite, that won’t stop me from sharing the interview with friends.
Vice vise
All media outlets and the contributing writers/analysts must be read with skepticism; there is no single media source or individual to whom one can give full intellectual, non-critical allegiance…and there never has been. When the immediate environmental realities were replaced by human interpretations of them this need began and is now fully the messy fact. Monbiot must be read critically; that’s about as far as an honest analysis can go. Some widely read ‘proposers of ideas’ are more craven, foolish, ridiculous or alternatively more prescient and wise than others: it is the reader’s responsibility to sort it. Demanding that the writer be different than they are is of no use.
When, to my surprise, I saw the title of Hedges’ Monbiot interview, I immediately thought of Jonathan Cook. He would have been the perfect person to respond to the interview, as Mr. Cook has written extensively and exposed The Guardian’s double talk (especially Mr. Monbiot).
Jonathan Cook says Capitalism would need to invent a Guardian, if it did not already exist. And I think the Guardian would need to invent a Monbiot, if he did not exist. Undoubtedly, his “success” has been invaluable to the success of The Guardian in conveying the complex messages of neoliberalism.
I think Monbiot and the daily insult that is the Guardian go very well together. I used to think both were more than OK. Let’s not forget that environmental coverage in the Graun is sponsored by the Gates organisation. A typically smug Graun reader wouldn’t have a problem with that. Does Monbiot?
The Guardian is a controlled opposition, and George it’s star player.
When Dave Bell left, we should have all done the same, although he hung around a bit too long. Nevertheless DB left with dignity and his efforts to vindicate Corbyn throughout the witchhunt times was greatly appreciated.
I gave up reading Monbiot’s columns years ago, for the exact same reasons that Jonathan Cook enumerates here. Late-stage Capitalism spits out people like Monbiot like cheerleaders for an invisible sports team which everyone else is rooting for without question. It is a matter of logic being linked inextricably to monetary success: if you are successful, you must be somehow telling the truth about something, just never the truth about anything still worth hearing. 35% of the columns in The Guardian are simply product advertisements, or else desperate attempts to make people give sordid information about what conditions they have orgasms with people they don’t know, or no longer want to be married to. The other 65% is simply propaganda on a scale which makes Tokyo Rose nothing more than a nightclub singer. Meanwhile, I am glad to ask the question: is there any journalist consistently better than Jonathan Cook? I don’t think so. Not to say that there aren’t some great journalists equal to him.
You are too kind and forgiving to Monbiot. He is a hypocrite writ large. Let’s not forget his support for a fake meat food industry that only consolidates corporate control of our food system ultimately further diminishing our already fragile health from a national diet composed of 75% processed foods.
One word – disingenuous.
That’s how I see Monbiot. Which makes him very dangerous.
I watched the interview and i thought it very good – very clear and understandable – he and Hedges seemed to be on the same page.
“But remember, the biggest one is this: Monbiot can be right about the wickedness of capitalism while himself being thoroughly complicit in its wickedness.”
Not being a follower of Monbiot’s writing – I would be curious as to how he is “complicit in the wickedness of capitalism” – is it because he still works at the Guardian, a MSM publication, like the NYT or the WP, instead of quitting like Hedges and mounting his own Substack? Or because he “ignored” or “invalidated” voices of people like Chomsky or Pilger? But weren’t they saying those wars were/are basically about the very thing he has exposed here?
Which of our “humanitarian wars” does he defend?
I have seen this sort of thing rather often, unfortunately, most often on the Left – a person being condemned because he is not sufficiently outspoken an all the lefty issues of the day – or may disagree with some of them – otherwise known as a “circular firing squad” – No doubt I would disagree with some of his positions as well, were I familiar with more of them – but isn’t it better to attack the positions than the person who advances them – especially puzzling when it appears Cook agrees with Monbiot on the issue discussed in the interview … Frankly this sounds more like a hit piece of the sort Cook accuses Monbiot of …
Thia is kind of sad, IMO …
Perhaps you could try actually reading some of Monbiot’s articles or even try reading Cook’s article again and absorbing it.
Which of our “humanitarian” wars does he defend? Practically all of them. He is one of the best examples of the “compatible left” – a supposed progressive who provides cover for the West’s imperial expansion and the chaos and destruction it has unleashed. The formula is simple: feign “humanitarian” concern for the victims of whatever “brutal authoritarian dictator thug” the US and its various lackeys are targeting for regime change. Focus on demonizing said “thug” while ignoring inconvenient facts about the West’s own interests and actions in fomenting war and destabilization or the legitimate concerns of its targets. It’s an old tactic; it’s the reason the CIA covertly funded and supported the “anti-communist left” in the postwar years. If you have not followed Monbiot’s writing then you are not familiar with what Cook is talking about. His “humanitarian” cover for the West’s destruction of Syria. His “humanitarian” cover for the long-term neocon/NATO project for the “containment” and dismantling of post-Soviet Russia. His cover for the silencing of critics like Assange. If he actually does believe what he writes on such subjects as Cook suggests, then he is just another in a long line of “progressive” useful idiots helping to manufacture consent for the system they pretend to be critiquing.
One can’t overemphasize the importance of this element of ideological hegemony. It is not at all the type of internal spat between two people on “the Left” that you describe. Rather, it is the case of a pseudo-leftist appealing to the legitimate concerns of his progressive readers in a way that obfuscates their understanding and actually serves the powers that be.
Perhaps the same could be said of those who supposedly warn about encroaching on Russia knowing that is exactly how we are preparing for war.
It is like hostile corporate takeovers on the stock market but of countries that are “in play” for development after the refugees flee and the corporate renovators step in to invest in scrapping off the rubble and rebuilding. WWII proves that it can be quite lucrative with all our new weapons systems used on Europe and Japan.
Humanitarian wars as the rich wait it out elsewhere..
I abandoned The Guardian when it betrayed Julian Assange.
Thank you Jonathan Cook.
I saw the Hedges interview. Ordered the book and read it this week. Even quoted some of the descriptions of neoliberalism under a recent Patrick Lawrence article.
It started “strong and clear” against neoliberalism, but trailed off into an “..effort to inflame fears about ‘populism'”
Didn’t understand that. Until I read this.
if The Guardian can talk about the climate, let’s join the discussion and mention the culling of the bees and its far-reaching consequences – hxxps://chemtrails.substack.com/p/no-bees-2024-worst-harvest-ever-thanks
I think that studying the language is important. Every time they say these wars are protecting US interests, what they mean is corporate and elite interests and not US citizens. It’s quite clear to me looking at US infrastructure and failure of FEMA for the carolinas and florida during the recent hurricanes.
THANK YOU so very much, yet again,
for making us think things THROUGH
in order to draw proper conclusions!
Well said Jonathan. I stopped reading George Monboit’s articles years ago, but he seemed to make sense in his chat with Chris Hedges recently.
From what you are saying, that leopard hasn’t changed his spots, he’s just trying to please the people who might buy his book and his employer, the Guardian, which is entirely beholden to billionaires and big business, not to mention MI6.
The Guardian’s been a god damn Russophobic rag that could indirectly put us on the path to World War 3!
The Guardian’s been a god damn soft (and not so soft) Zionist apologist for some of the most grotesque ethnic cleansing the Western world his witnessed in many decades.
All completely true. Monbiot is a fraud and I was disappointed to see his name crop up here.