Western liberalism: a politics of death

A short history of the origins of climate change.

Our social media feeds are flooded with images of death and destruction—whether from the live-streamed genocide in Gaza, or the urgent warnings from scientists about ecological collapse and the crossing of planetary tipping points—it is becoming more apparent for those who have long been shielded from the true costs of Western ‘civilisation,’ that all is not well with Western liberalism. This harsh reality has never been hidden from the global majority; for those whose ancestors were colonised, enslaved and subjected to genocide by the brutal march of modernity, liberalism and global capitalism.

However, with a cult-like leader in the Oval Office, who openly embraces fascism, the facade of Western exceptionalism is beginning to crumble. Now that the capitalist class has over-exploited the lands and people of countries in the periphery (poorer, often formerly colonised nations), the driving force of exploitation is coming from the core (those in wealthy, industrialised nations). Capitalism has historically relied on the unequal economic relations with formally colonised nations on the periphery — international laws and economic systems designed by powerful colonial states entrench poverty, in order to maintain a supply of cheap labour, and raw materials to sustain the prosperity of those in the core (Hickel, 2017). However, as ecological collapse cannot be contained within national borders and natural resources in the periphery are being exhausted, these dynamics are beginning to be felt in the core. With increasing austerity measures, labour precarity, the privatisation of public services, and the destruction of our planetary home, the exploitation on which capitalism was built is rebounding on ordinary people living in wealthy nations, who can no longer see an endless curve of prosperity in their futures (Hickel, 2017).

Western liberalism emerged to provide political and philosophical justifications for the newly emerging social order that capitalism was creating in Europe. Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham helped shape the ideological framework within which capitalism could expand, unrestrained in colonising new lands and individuals in its search for cheap labour, and endless expanses of land from which to extract wealth. Through a narrative of individual freedom, private property ownership, reason and a drive for endless progress and economic productivity, Enlightenment thinkers heralded in the age of Western liberalism, which was then spread throughout the world through a brutal regime of colonisation. When Spanish colonisers stole vast quantities of Andean and Mesoamerican gold and silver from the Americas, this enormous wealth circulated throughout European financial centres, funding banking and credit systems that enabled the rapid expansion of a global market system, giving rise to early financial capitalism (Wallerstein, 1974).

Enlightenment thinkers seeking to escape the dark ages of religious dogmatism determined that rationality was the highest form of human evolution. They conveniently saw in themselves—the wealthy, educated Western European man—the pinnacle of this process, the modern man. This implies that everyone else fell behind them on the scale of human evolution, not just women (who were too emotional to be rational), but all other races, who were, unfortunately, falling behind in evolutionary terms. Thus, the burden fell upon the white man to go forth and civilise them, such that they could be brought into the modern age of reason. Known as the white man’s burden, this civilising mission spread white terror and genocide across the globe, with historians estimating that at its peak, Western European powers (and their settler colonies) dominated around 85% of the world’s territory, representing the consolidation of the Western, global, capitalist order (Ferguson, 2003). The fact that large numbers of these evolutionary-backwards people would die out was seen as natural. If they were hastened to extinction by the well-oiled machinery of genocidal colonial practices, that was just helping nature along in a process of ensuring the survival of the fittest (which also meant the whitest).

Thus, Western colonisation spread liberalism worldwide, ushering in a new era of globalised capitalism that developed along racialised lines (Robinson, 2000). New global structures were developed by powerful colonial states, to entrench their advantage through economic and international legal systems, often at the expense of formerly colonised nations, which were left reeling from the trauma and destruction of their societies, peoples and lands. Of course, these legal frameworks were always applied unevenly, with powerful nations largely ignoring their own rules when they conflicted with their economic or political interests. As Henry Reynolds (2021) points out, the British colonisation of Australia was illegal under international law as it existed in the late 18th century. It was clear that the lands were inhabited; thus, they could not lawfully be claimed as terra nullius (a land without people), and sovereignty could be acquired only through treaty or declaration of war, neither of which the British chose to pursue (Reynolds, 2021).

Paradoxically, during this time of colonial terrorism throughout the globe, there was a flourishing of a human rights-based discourse in Western Europe, which proudly proclaimed that all men were equal and born with inalienable rights. In reality, only a minority of the population (Western European men) could be recognised as men and thus as having rights worthy of protection. This transparent hypocrisy within the Western canon was apparent to all those existing at the margins, unable to be recognised as part of mankind; however, the powerful and articulate critiques of the colonised were rendered unintelligible to many in the West, because they could not see them as equally human. Thus, these critiques were sidelined, allowing the hubris of Western liberalism to march on.

Now that actually-existing-capitalism (as opposed to the economic theory), with its unrestrained access to political influence, indigenous lands, and slave labour has passed its zenith, it is starting to cannibalise the very things it requires to exist; a stable planetary system, the unpaid social labour of care giving, and a politically stable market of consumers (Fraser, 2022). A frightening new era of techno-fascists is heralding in the dusk of a dying empire, long past its peak of economic prosperity and dominance, left clinging desperately to military might as its last remaining source of power.

Corporate power, having long been embedded in our public institutions, has discarded any facade of separation and is brazenly stepping forward to reveal itself as the true ruler of liberal democracies. The techno-fascists in the White House have little regard for those they deem superfluous to capitalism; they believe that through digital mass-surveillance, their control over the flows of information (through platform monopolisation), and their control over state security apparatuses to suppress dissent, they will be able to usher in a new dawn of AI-powered efficiency and progress. Of course, there is nothing new about these worldviews; they are the product of Western liberalism and its foundational disregard for certain lives in the brutal quest for progress and profit.

Gaza is where the mask of Western liberalism has fallen away to reveal its true face—one which has never been hidden to the global majority. Western liberalism was built upon the genocides of many of the world’s truly democratic, anti-authoritarian civilisations (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021), showing one face to those it deems human, and another to those whose lives it deems ungrievable (Butler, 2009). The true face of Western liberalism, if we’re forced to contend with its material history, is one of racialised and gendered domination, which saw the lands and bodies of Indigenous peoples as merely a resource from which to extract endless wealth, and rendered the unpaid labour of women invisible. It believed in rational modern man’s ability to understand the natural world, in order to dominate it; a hubris that the natural world is on track to deliver a crushing blow to. The West has long seen itself as above the laws it has helped create, but there are older laws, those of the land, well understood by Indigenous peoples, which care not for the demands of Western exceptionalism; for there are some laws which powerful men cannot circumvent, and the consequences of those laws are coming for us all.

References

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.

Ferguson, N. (2003). Empire: How Britain made the modern world. London, England: Allen Lane.

Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet—and what we can do about it. Verso. 

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hickel, J. (2017). The divide: A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions. London: William Heinemann.

Reynolds, H. (2021). Truth-telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement. Sydney, NSW: NewSouth Publishing.

Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press. 

Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York, NY: Academic Press.