Complete in itself (I hope) but continuing on from Casual Remarks on Liberty
In the English speaking world, since the late 1970s, both sides of politics seem to have increasingly developed the determination to protect and increase the power of large corporations, establish plutocracy and impinge on the liberty of people in general. The political elite of the Right seems more thorough and overt about this, so I shall primarily discuss Right wing style politics in this and a few subsequent posts. It may need to be said that there are many well intentioned people on both the Right and Left who oppose this move, or who do not appear to have noticed what is happening.
Market Liberty and Hierarchy
The first step taken in the contemporary promotion of plutocracy is the reduction of liberty to action in a market. Liberty of action in a market may indeed be important, but it is not the only factor in making liberty or in guarranteeing the continuance of liberty. Over-emphasis on this factor may be destructive of liberty.
A free market does not mean a free society, it more likely means a “fee society”, in which those with wealth can buy more services, buy more influence, and have much more impact on the market and other people than those who are poor or merely comfortable. These wealthy people also have much more freedom and power to tell others what to do. They become more important, and the market gears itself to serving them and where the greatest profit arises with the least effort. This set up, also means those with wealth can buy privilege as a matter of course; they can purchase access to politicians, lawyers, PR agents, or criminal threat and promote the kind of information, organisation, and distribution of risk, that suits them and not others, and so on.
Where wealth differentials become high enough then the wealthy can buy all forms of power to protect the retention of their wealth, and remove freedom for others from the market and the State. Capitalists suppress unions of workers, but not unions of businesses, (through buying politicians, laws and regulations).
I have previously mentioned the common excuse that the media these people own, can lie to benefit them with impunity, because they own it and have the right to control what it says. Such a position implies they have no resposibility towards truth, only towards ‘selfish’ support of faction and maintaining their power. They are demanding liberty without responsibility.
With, or without, direct control over media, they can support those who work in their favour, and ignore or trouble those who don’t. Society can become snowed by false information, which boosts their power.
While it can sometimes be argued that people have earned this wealth and should be rewarded, it is also common for people to inherit the wealth with little sign of any particular ability. Inherited or not, the wealth was almost always made with the help of others, who did not share in the wealth they produced because of the laws of capitalist privilege. Wealth also gives the ability to network with other wealthy people and team-up for the benefit of that group as opposed to everyone else. This is especially important if the ideology encourages and enforces the idea that less powerful people should act primarily as individuals outside of their place of employment.
The interaction between people with wealth increases their power and impact on others and, in general, power based in wealth appears to deny responsibility towards others (human or otherwise). There are studies which seem to show that wealth encourages behaviour most people would consider immoral, partly because the wealthy can get away with it, and partly because wealth can encourage indifference to, or contempt towards, less wealthy people. This encouraged ‘selfishness’, impacts on the liberty of others.
If it is more profitable to destroy an environment than to preserve it, then it will be destroyed legally. If it is more profitable to poison people than not, then people will be poisoned legally – and enabling free pollution seems to be one of President Trump’s major economic policies (the other being interfering in the free market through tariffs – some say that he gave massive tax concessions to large scale property owners as well). The only thing that is to be protected is the property and liberty of those wealthy enough to defend it in the courts.
For me, the direction of this kind of market liberty was most clearly revealed in conversations with self-proclaimed libertarians who argued that everyone should have the right to sell themselves into slavery. The billionaire with access to all kind of privilege and defense has the same right as the person with no capital, income or shelter and a hungry family to sacrifice their liberty forever in return for a small sum of money and survival. To be concise, in this case, market liberty encourages slavery of the non-privileged.
Reducing liberty to the market, biases liberty towards wealth, and may even remove wealth from those not so fortunate through the conditions of employment and survival.
In actually existing capitalism, it is doubtful that a free market can exist for long. No capitalist wants to keep a market which may unhorse them, when they have the opportunity to team-up to try and use the power of wealth to prevent this from happening.
Liberty vs. Employment
Given that most people can no longer support themselves, by producing their own food, shelter, clothing and so on, then the primary social relationship in the market, is between boss and employee. Employees are expected to be subservient. And although a few employees may be fortunate enough to have the ability to leave what they consider to be oppressive conditions and immediately move into another job without suffering penalty, employees will generally find that employers, as a group, expect obedience. Employers also expect ownership of the results of their employees’ labour and even their employees’ ideas, sometimes even those ideas not generated at work. Some types of work require the employee not to work in the same industry if they leave their job, which further weakens employee power and liberty. In many cases employers attempt to deskill jobs to make employees interchangeable and cheap; this also makes work is largely boring and with little requirement for skill development, and this may well impact on the kind of self-development and understanding needed for real liberty.
Fear of lack of employment in general, and of the consequences arising from standing up to an employer, is likely to be constant, also impinging on employee’s ideas and practices of liberty; their lives become servitude, learning to placate and please their boss. Growing lack of support from the State for periods of unemployment (even hostility to those attempting to find work, as in Australia), and State sponsored hostility to unions (employees organising for group resilience) further weakens the ability of people to freely change employment, or risk challenging their employer. This routine demand for obedience is almost certainly not conducive to a sense of liberty.
One reason for working at a university originally was the amount of freedom you had from this kind of submission. Provided you did your contracted lectures you were free to do whatever you liked, within the criminal law. You could keep your ideas and share and develop them as you chose. With increasing corporatisation (the extension of capitalist modes of organisation to other forms of life) this freedom is completely undermined, by endless paperwork, performance evaluations, demands for results, customer satisfaction surveys, and even university ownership of ideas in scientific disciplines. This extension of corporatisation is all about spreading the demand for worker submission to bosses. In the older days the universities were far less profit oriented, far freer and did not require proportionately much more money from the public.
One of the endless complaints of capitalist colonialists was that the conquered people would not work for wages – they were, in the would-be bosses terms, ‘lazy’. At best people would work until they had earned enough for whatever they wanted, and then they would return to self-sufficiency. This liberty had to be prevented, as you cannot run a capitalist business with that kind of freedom and uncertainty. Hence, land would be taken from conquered people, taxes and punishments applied, to get people to engage in wage labour. In the West the formation processes of capitalism had involved people being thrust of the land, self-sufficiency destroyed, and labour forced into low wages. At least according to some sources, wages were often not enough to survive on, but no matter, there were always more laborers. Wage labour could be cheaper than slavery – as the boss did not have to keep their workers alive.
This is the point of the anarchist demand “No State, No Church, No Boss”. ‘Boss’ is usually translated as ‘Master’, which is what bosses where called in nineteenth century Europe. With most people having to submit to bosses to survive there can be little learning of the paths of liberty.
Free market theory on the other hand demands more power for bosses, with less independence for workers. This is likely to be one reason why neoliberals are so hostile to unions, unemployment benefits and social wages, and completely indifferent to the effects of organisations of employers.
Liberty becomes Consumption
While liberty is reduced to freedom to be bossed, the market further transmutes desires and ambitions into the purchase of commodities, rather than self expression through independent creation. ‘Artists’ are judged solely by their ability to sell their art. Companies promote those artists they think will be successful and make the most profit for them and simply sign and ignore the others, and this is not unreasonable given the logic and compulsion of the market. The history of the recording industry is full of accounts of successful artists getting further into debt slavery because of the perfectly legal machinations, and exploitation, of managers and record companies.
Freedom in the market, for most people, comes down to freedom to buy what they can afford (or to go into debt); often having to choose between different brands of product owned by the same company. While freedom to choose what you can purchase is probably good, it is not the complete basis of liberty.
Profit and Liberty
In a neoliberal State, profit is everything, especially the profit of established and powerful business. This is the case, irrespective of whether every activity is best run with profit as the aim. Profit supposedly marks virtue, talent, hard-work, quality and success.
Eliminating costs is the easiest way of increasing profit, as nothing innovative, new or useful has to be thought up or invented. Employees are a cost and a potential trouble, so they need to be eliminated or further controlled, as much as possible (again liberty of employees is unimportant in market liberty, especially low level employees). Lying and misdirection can quickly boost profit and save costs, so it’s buyer beware and making markets and profit primary, corrupts truth. Cleaning pollution is a cost and so polluting is not a problem, and neoliberals work to increase their ability to freely pollute and freely destroy ecologies (with any burden going to other people). The likely reason the Right cannot even talk about dealing with climate change, is that dealing with it might threaten the profits of some established and powerful corporations. Profit is not only inherently good, but more important than survival. Pollution poisons, or potentially poisons, people, that is simply an unimportant side effect of the free market, to be challenged in courts if at all – after all, to neoliberals, the market solves all problems and being hurt by their activity, is your own fault.
In court, the corporation is usually safe without a strong participatory State responding to people, because ordinary people find it hard to overcome the financial and legal imbalance between them and the offending corporation. The class action has developed in an attempt around this corporate dominance. Mostly this makes profit for the lawyers if successful. However neoliberal politicians try and make class actions harder, so individuals are more vulnerable to corporate abuse. Where I live, if the people have a victory, the neoliberals change the law to make sure it can’t happen again – it is clearly the law that is at fault not the corporation – profit and corporate liberty must be protected, whatever the effects on the liberties of others.
The structure of the corporation with its diffusion of resonsibility, means that it is hard to hold its members responsible for corporate crimes, especially if the crmes were profitable. If the shareholders don’t care, or have benefitted enough, then that is the end of it, or some high level executive might get dismissed with a huge bonus. Of course if the crime diminished corporate profitability and was committed by a low level person, the consequences might be different. The corporation gives liberty without resonsibility to its executives and shareholders, and a massive kick to ordinary people; it is inherently a tool of hierarchy and dominance.
The more power and liberty given to the corporation, the less for everyone else.
Neoliberal markets and the Corruption of Truth
Liberty demands an attention to truth, and accuracy of beliefs. You cannot be completely free, or completely able to adapt to reality, if you are routinely misled. In capitalism misleading advertising, PR, obfuscation, fantasy and product hype are normal and intrinsic parts of the system. The general idea is to gain attention in the profitable way, and to provoke excitement and stability of power, rather than the contemplation of truth.
This disinformation stretches into political behaviour and supposed news which become attempts to persuade people to acquiesce to their subordination, or to be distracted from real problems. We are all told capitalists gain their wealth through their superior talents, or the favour of God, rather than because of their crimes, power or connections, and that leaving everything to the market, (that is, big business) will solve all major problems. We do not have to participate, other than by choosing products out of the range we are presented with, and with the dubious information we are given as part of sales practice.
Through these misinformation actions, capitalists create a fantasy world, which eventually clashes so strongly with reality, that crashes of all kinds happen (economic, political, ecological to name a few). Elections simply become spending and disinformation wars between corporations – it is doubtful they are free in any meaningful sense – successful candidates are more likely to be of some pro-corporate party simply because they will not be continually slurred in the corporately owned media and will receive better financing. In this system, elections change more or less nothing. Trump is just another slightly more erratic neoliberal, which is why he has such solid Republican backing, despite his more morally dubious actions.
Neoliberalism and Fiscal Restraint
Neoliberals constantly call for fiscal restraint from the State. However, after forty years of such demands, I know of no State which is cheaper to run than it was previously. However, nearly all neoliberal States are less helpful to the populace, and more hostile and persecutory to those they are supposed to help. It possibly could be argued that neoliberalism functions by persecuting people it considers weak outsiders, like the unemployed, refugees, despised ethnic groups or disabled people. This helps ordinary people to feel less suppressed by comparison.
The Reagan Revolution made this clear. There were massive cutbacks in social spending accompanied my massive increases in military spending. Neoliberals did not object to this, probably because military spending goes largely to arms manufacturers, and contractors, rather than to ordinary people. In other words it increased private profit, which is their ultimate goal. Reagan also reduced tax intake from the wealthy, on the grounds that they would now generate more income and pay more tax. Not surprisingly while tax cuts for the wealthy are always popular with the wealthy, they rarely to never increase tax revenue. Revenue fell at the same time as expenditure increased, which lead to more calls for cuts on social spending.
If one really wanted to reduce State debt, then clearly it might be possible to consider a process to make certain that corporations paid at least the same levels of tax on their profits that ordinary people do on incomes, rather than much less, zero, or even negative tax. You also would not put masses of effort into chasing small abuses of public funding when you could put the same effort into pursuing large abuses. Lowering tax evasion and avoidance by the wealthy, could then lower everyone’s tax burden, which is supposed to be the aim of the exercise. However, in neoliberalism, it is considered great if the burden of the State is shifted onto the middle class, and that wealthy people get to pay less and less tax so they increase their wealth and power.
During this period, regulations for the populace and the power of the security state have increased, causing impingements on liberty for normal people. Life has been overtaken by neoliberal form filling, as government departments try to make sure they have not helped non-wealthy people by accident, and that everything has been done as cheaply as possible, with the least encouragement of liberty.
Privatisation (especially of profitable services) increased, but it has rarely cost the government less, although they lose power and income, while it boosts the power and influence of business over people.
Neoliberals also tend to support charitable organisations rather than people’s rights to services, probably because charitable organisations, especially religious ones, have a great tendency to interfere in the lives and liberties of those they are charitable towards, while not impinging on the lives of the wealthy. This history of interference was one of the reasons for the workers’ interest in State provided services as a mode of liberty.
Fiscal responsibility for neoliberals comes down to less money spent by the State helping, or enabling, ordinary people, and more money spent on corporate subsidies, time wasting, and defence of corporate power.
Conclusion
To equate market liberty to full liberty is almost comic. It is reductive, deceptive and only enabling of the power of wealth and corporate organisation – which is why market friendly States tend to give subsidies to the already successful and strip them away from the less fortunate. In practice market liberty proposes that the non-wealthy are inferior and only deserve constraint.
The market, left to itself, enables hierarchy, plutocracy, consumption and obedience rather than liberty. This is why the idea is useful for the promotion, and sacralisation, of corporate power.
These comments continue in: Neoliberal Liberty and the Small State
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