Neoliberalism Has No Mark Antony

Davos, Mark Carney, and the Authoritarian Future of Neoliberal Capitalism

There should be a sign at the entrance to Davos that reads, “Wealth is wisdom and virtue,” because that’s what the 1% believe. They think they are our leaders by merit, rather than coercion or corruption. That is why they come to Davos every January. It’s a necessary ritual to keep society’s faith in their hold over us strong. Naturally, the corporate news media assist by normalising their political and economic oppression of the world.

Photo by Damian Markutt on Unsplash

It is an oligarchs’ coven, or old home week for billionaire tax avoiders. A time to back-slap and chin-wag about the ways and means of strengthening their grip on the levers of power everywhere.

The American Empire is dying, and it rages against the dying of the light. Trump is less mad king and more professional actor, reading out the script of an empire’s swan song. Yet I also believe he and much of America’s ruling class are deluded enough to think that aggression at home and abroad can save America, if only for their lifetime.

Now is the time of monsters. For the world to face them, defeat them, and build something new that has a chance of being fair, forward, and democratic. Technocratic incrementalism is not the solution. It’s a recipe for destruction.

No one at Davos will speak about the genocide in Gaza. But then again, extreme wealth has an ideology, not a morality. So the lives and deaths of others become mere computations in a ledger book.

Mark Carney’s speech in Davos yesterday is being heralded as a great speech for the ages. Much of this is because the people who distil and curate our reactions to events are paid well above the average wage to maintain the powers that be.

Yet the speech does have a unique quality: it is more honest than most pronouncements. Carney recognises that the West is at a fork in the road. Canada’s prime minister, in the speech, offered his directions to a safe haven. But as I listened to the speech, it sounded like a more articulate Lee Iacocca telling the public and his shareholders that GM in 1990 was a bag of shit—one he could fix by being innovative and not relying on the same old, same old.

Carney’s speech was delivered as Canada’s CEO rather than its prime minister, offering ways to preserve not society so much as the assets of the 1%.

His speech was probably the greatest defence of pragmatic amorality in commerce and trade ever delivered in front of cameras beaming live around the world.

“We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world as we wish it to be.”

The line could have appeared in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, just before “the world will go out with a whimper, not a bang.”

Carney’s quote has been capitalism’s raison d’être since the 19th century. That mantra has justified genocides, ethnic cleansing, the industrial poisoning of our waterways, wars of conquest, and the suppression of workers’ rights for centuries.

In his speech, Carney said, “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” However, Carney sold a “third way,” which essentially perpetuates neoliberal capitalism. This is deeply sentimental in its desire to preserve the core of the old world order. In a nutshell, the Carney Doctrine urges Canada to embrace powerful oligarchic corporations to protect its sovereignty. To Carney and his CEO comrades, wealth is both stability and a fortress.

Nowhere in his speech did he say that wealth and the taxation of it must be used to eradicate poverty, end homelessness, strengthen public healthcare, or serve as a sword to defend human rights.

Like a song from Sleaford Mods, there is little honesty or desire for substantive change in Carney’s speech. It’s why top income earners are making it their, “I have A Dream,” oration.

At best, Carney’s speech is an acknowledgement that the US will assert, with impunity its imperial rights over its vassal states. Carney’s advice to lesser nations was very corporate: accept the limitations of your influence with the boss and look for ways to survive.

In years past, Davos attempted to gild the lily of neoliberalism. They conned a plebeian world into believing that the rich were committed to sustaining economies beneficial to everyone. However, now that Donald Trump is president of the USA for the second time, they no longer need to pretend extreme wealth is benevolent wisdom. Greed is good again, and fascism isn’t so bad either.

In 2026, we arrived at our destination of strong-man politics, which is murdering what little remains of democratic institutions, because neoliberalism was democracy’s Uber ride to this anti-democratic hell.

The 1% of Davos have suffocated democracy across the planet. 2026 will inevitably be a horrendous year of repression, death, and wars without end. Carney’s speech is less a road map to survival and more a prayer, like Cardinal Wolsey’s, that if you show the same canny cynicism as Henry VIII, you may just keep your head from the executioner’s axe. Wolsey found out that no one is ever one step ahead of a tyrant, and I fear Carney and Canada will discover the same.

But in the meantime, Carney’s pursuit of trade and the strengthening of corporate Canada will not improve ordinary lives—because it was never intended to. Carney is trying to build a lifeboat for the nation’s asset class, and we aren’t on the call sheet.

Trump is too old to be a dictator for long. But even when his national nightmare ends, another will begin, because there is a Hitler in the shadows waiting their turn. It is up to every one of us to decide what must be done to combat growing authoritarianism. Despotism can’t be wished away, and dictators, once in power, never allow free and fair elections to remove them from office. They die in office, are forced into exile through violent insurrection, or are put to the gallows after rebellion by the people or their generals.

We are now in the era of the Long Winter. Society is not in slumber, like nature waiting to be reborn in spring; it is frozen in an existential darkness imposed by billionaires, the political class, and the news media that serve them. Someone like Mark Carney, so entrenched in the benefits, power, and decadence of the old world order, is not going to lead Canada—or Western society—to any safe harbour. He is part of the problem, not the solution to the crisis humanity now faces. Society will only be led safely to the other side by movements uncorrupted by wealth. Change has never come from the top, and it never will.

Outro

Thank you for reading and for supporting Harry’s Last Stand. I use this Substack to promote and preserve the legacy of my dad, Harry Leslie Smith, who spent the final decade of his life warning that we must not allow his past to become our future. I believe we have already crossed that territory. Still, his life, his memories, his essays and speeches — and his determination to build a fairer society — remain worthy of emulation and remembrance.

If you’re able, please consider a paid subscription — £3.50 a month or £30 a year (converted to your currency). I’ve reduced the annual price by 20% to make it more accessible, and because January is a harsh month and my rent is due. I need 12 new subscriptions. A yearly subscription covers much of my essential living costs, including prescription medicines. There is also a tip jar for anyone who feels inclined.

On brighter news: The Green & Pleasant Land, after eighteen months of work, is now complete in beta format and with publishers. It will be published this year, and everyone who helped make it possible will be acknowledged in the book.

My father’s story — and that of his working-class generation — must be remembered if we are to resist today’s fascists. If you’d like a beta e-copy, let me know.

Take care,
John