Environmentalist George Monbiot and documentarian Peter Hutchinson, co-authors of the 2024 book The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (Penguin Books), have created a companion film of the same name, but with this added subtitle: “(& how it came to control your life).” This documentary is also co-written by Monbiot and Hutchinson, while the latter shares directing and producing credits with Lucas Sabean. The screen version chronicles a detailed history of Neoliberalism in a series of numbered chapters, delivered onscreen in a thoughtful, punchy way by Monbiot, intercut with animation, vintage film clips such as from Lon Chaney’s 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, news footage and more.
According to Invisible, the capitalist system’s origins are intricately, inexorably interwoven with the development of colonialism, and Madeira is “where capitalism began” back in the 15th century, when Portuguese settled in this Atlantic archipelago located 250 miles north of the Canary Islands and 320 miles west of Morocco. The European settlers introduced sugar production, which involved slave labor, and until the mid-16th century, Madeira was one of the Atlantic’s top sugar markets. But by the 17th century this shifted to Brazil and other sugar producing places, resulting in an extractive, capitalist cycle that continues to this day, which Monbiot describes as “seizure, exhaustion, abandonment.” For instance, the film charges that in 2025 dollars, “$45 trillion was extracted from India by England,” the subcontinent’s former colonial overlord.
Invisible traces what could be called “the Invisible Men” who are the philosophical and ideological founders and foundations of Neoliberalism, going back to English Enlightenment era thinker John Locke, and on into the 20th century, with the rise of the Austrian School of Economics, notably Hayek (Friedrich, not Salma) and Ludwig Von Mises; the Mont Pelerin Society based at Texas Tech University; Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists. A variety of think tanks – the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, the UK-based Adam Smith Institute – formed an integral part of this web lavishly funded by financiers such as the Koch Brothers, which promotes what the film describes as: “The greatest propaganda coup in human history – that you get rich by your hard work.” Invisible maintains that this ideology propagates “fake history,” “mythology” and a “justifying fairy tale” for what is in reality the accumulation of capital via the exploitation of others’ hard work and labor and extraction from nature.
This capitalist cauldron brewed the 1980s’ Thatcherite/Reaganomics counterrevolution. As chapter five, entitled “The Distribution of Wealth,” shows, the Neoliberal project then emerged out of the shadows, pushing “Inequality grows, unions crushed, tax cuts for the rich,” and more. Chapter four is entitled “What’s Liberal About Neoliberalism?”, especially considering when brutal strongman General Pinochet unleashed Neoliberal economic policies on Chile after the overthrow of Pres. Salvador Allende’s democratically elected, socialist leaning government.
Despite its historical grasp of the evolution of Neoliberialism, I felt Invisible doesn’t fully, clearly define and explain what this somewhat confusing term actually means. Afterall, what is “liberal” about dictatorial police states such as Pinochet’s Chile, where thousands were exiled, disappeared, tortured, imprisoned, executed? Derived from the word “liberty,” liberalism, as advanced by 18th and 19th century philosophers, emphasizes political freedoms. For instance, Englishman John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859’s On Liberty: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
Liberalism has traditionally stressed principles such as individual rights and limited government, guaranteeing free speech – as opposed to the autocratic rule of dynastic monarchies and theocracies, the unchecked power of church and state. “Neo” is derived from the Greek and means “new,” “revived,” modified.” For Neoliberals, liberalism’s sense of deregulating expression, the rights to assembly, to petition the government for redress and so on, is applied to the economy, “liberalizing” regulations for an unfettered economy, unencumbered by government restraint, for capitalists to pursue laissez faire business practices without regulators breathing down their necks and holding the horse’s reins.
The much-vaunted “invisible hand of the market” – from which the documentary’s title is in part derived – guides and “deconstructs” society, minus encumbrances such as the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and the rest of the administrative state’s “alphabet soup” that restrains industry and trade so free marketeers can “drill, baby drill!” without any interference or oversight from “Big Brother” in Washington or other capitals. As Invisible puts it in chapter one, entitled “The Free Market”, Neoliberalism “redefines us as consumers, instead of as citizens,” who exist in a “natural hierarchy of winners and losers.”
This results in what chapter seven calls “The Crisis of Democracy,” wherein, among other things, the state takes risks to bailout corporate profits. In chapter eight, this leads to “The Attack of the Killer Clowns,” increasingly bizarre political players, whose specialty is “distraction by mesmerizing,” leading to “chaos is a profit multiplier.” These “buffoons” include Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding president Javier Milei, idealogue Steve Bannon, and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who is to journalism what Pinocchio is to honesty.
Invisible’s ninth chapter, “Citizens of Nowhere,” makes pithy points, noting that so-called “nationalists” are often in reality “tax exiles… always the first to sell their nations down the river,” squirreling away their ill-gotten gains in overseas havens, out of reach of tax collectors and auditors. The film humorously notes that the extreme of this capital flight trend sees billionaires such as Elon Musk (the idiot savant who later inherited Milei’s chainsaw), Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson trying to escape Earth’s regulations by literally aiming at the stars, while “seasteader” Peter Thiel is building “artificial islands”.
And so on, Monbiot and Hutchinson meticulously lay out their argument against Neoliberalism and its acolytes in their 75-minute nonfiction film. To resist these free racketeers, the co-authors advocate “Building a New Narrative” in chapter twelve, insisting that “those who tell the stories run the world.” To make their case, the filmmakers enlist clips from two of the greatest, most influential political movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1939’s Frank Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (co-written, BTW, by a card-carrying, dues-paying Communist Party member, Sidney Buchman, who was subsequently fined and blacklisted during the 1950s), which received 10 Oscar nominations and won in one category, plus Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 antifascist masterpiece, The Great Dictator, which was likewise nommed for Best Picture, as well as in four other categories.
Strangely, Invisible conflates, equates and rejects Nazism, Stalinism and social democracy (damn those war-mongering, imperialistic Norwegians!). Asserting that “the only thing that can replace a story is a story,” the filmmakers maintain that contrary to the Neoliberal dog-eat-dog worldview, humans “are the supreme altruists of all species, the supreme collaborators.” They advocate “mutual aid – we survived by working together. That’s when we thrive. Greed is when we’re weak,” and the Neoliberals are “apostles of greed, selfishness and loneliness.”
Monbiot and Hutchinson may not be acolytes of the Anarchist Prince, Peter Kropotkin, but they do champion what they call “The Commons.” These are “local community assets” that “can’t be alienated, taken away” from collective groups that have access to them “for perpetuity,” such as “forests, coral reefs.” Invisible also espouses “participatory, deliberative democracy” and includes a clip from Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci fi extravaganza Metropolis (which, incidentally, was reputedly Hitler’s favorite film). The filmmakers cite places where they claim, borrowing a phrase for ecological restoration from Monbiot’s 2013 book Feral, this “rewilding politics” have, at least to some extent, already successfully transpired, including Porto Alegre, Brazil; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Vallejo, California. The documentary’s final chapter sums up the anti-Neoliberal ethos: “The Politics of Belonging.”
George Monbiot, who has worked for the BBC, has been a longtime campaigner raising awareness against global warming, writing the 2006 book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. Since at least 2008 Peter Hutchinson has been producing/directing social problem documentaries, including co-making 2015’s Requiem for the American Dream featuring the U.S. Left’s foremost intellectual, Noam Chomsky, which was co-helmed by Lucas Sabean, who is also Invisible’s co-director. Their documentary also includes music by Peter Gabriel, with creative graphic design & animation by John Baumann.
Invisible provides a much needed and long overdue debunking of the Neoliberal misadventure, and is at it’s most compelling when it’s critiquing this misbegotten philosophy of economics that has bedeviled the world since General Pinochet jackbooted his way into power, followed by the ongoing Thatcher/Reagan reign of terror and errors. Because this is a new production made before Trump’s return to power, the documentary doesn’t deal with Trump-onics per se. On May 7, Kevin D. Williamson, former National Review editor and writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote in The Dispatch that “Donald Trump is a socialist.” With his insertion of statist power into the economic sphere – from the imposition of tariffs to telling Walmart to “eat” the higher costs caused by tariffs to dictating who law firms can and cannot represent – Trump is no free market Neoliberal. (Trump is the personification of all of capitalism’s evils, and is no socialist.)
While Invisible is engagingly told and strong in its chronicling and condemnation of Neoliberalism, it is namby-pamby in offering a solution. Its alternative vision is, at best, a sort of “socialism lite,” similar to what attendees get at a Bernie Sanders/AOC “Fight the Oligarchy” rally. But nowadays we need stronger medicine to fight Neoliberalism and Trump’s statism.
The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& how it came to control your life) will be released on VOD and digital platforms on June 3.
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