There are significant problems with modern formulations of ‘free markets’ by libertarians and neo-liberals. This is another attempt to express my discontent with these positions
There is no evidence that capitalism can exist without government. It has not done so, so far.
- Libertarians are not real anarchists, as they ignore the power differentials in capitalism or assert that with real free markets the State will collapse – a bit like communists insist that after the dictatorship of the proletariat the State will collapse, sometime in the future, and that imagined collapse justifies whatever is happening now.
- Capitalist markets have never existed without a State.
- Some libertarians and neoliberals try to avoid this problem essentially by asserting trade is capitalism, and that therefore lots of Stateless capitalist societies have existed.
- But there are many modes of exchange and not all of them are capitalistic.
- If we accept that capitalism is trade, then communism is capitalism. Both systems engage in trade. Capitalism does not encourage free trade, but trade according to the rules of the rich elites.
- Capitalism is a particular set of political organisations of production and restrictions on trade and property, that stops most people from being self-supporting and demands they engage in wage labour, favors hoarding by the rich elites, and suppresses opposition to those elites.
Capitalism promotes wealth inequality
- Most libertarians and neoliberals celebrate inequality of riches.
- They argue that massive inequality of riches is reward for talent alone. Power has nothing to do with the inequality.
- But one possible part-definition of capitalism is that it is a system of exchange organised to benefit the rich elites and increase their power over everyone else who has to depend on them for survival because everyone else has to engage in a market controlled by those rich elites.
- The fundamental social relationship in capitalism is not liberty but obedience to a boss who is wealthier than you are. Capitalism is about submission to wealth.
Riches buy power
- Riches can buy all forms of power, especially if riches are considered good in themselves. they can buy control over: Violence, Communication, Information, Energy, Religions, organisational power and so on.
- Riches can also buy liberty for those who have riches.
- Therefore the more unequal the riches the more unequal access there is to power and liberty.
- Libertarians and neoliberals support liberty for rich people, and the rights of rich people to not be hindered in any of their activities, including those which impinge upon poorer people.
- At the extreme point, the legal system (courts, judges, lawyers, police etc) is up for sale to the highest bidder, so there can be no challenge to the rich at all.
- In neoliberal or libertarian capitalism your rights are what you can pay for.
Capitalism tends towards plutocracy
- Humans tend to collaborate with each other. You could not have corporate capitalism if this was not the case.
- Therefore it is likely the hyper-rich will collaborate to either set up government in the unlikely event that there was no government previously, or take over the government if there is a government.
- Once they take over the government, they will promote government for their collective interests, and collective liberties, and suppress other needs or other liberties which conflict with theirs, or their riches. This is what people often do.
- They can stack government with their supporters, and make legislation which supports them and makes it harder for others. They can repeal legislation which impinges on their liberty, but keep legislation which impinges on the liberty of others.
- As they control information and support generation of information which supports them, they will attack the best truth we have, if it conflicts with their dominance or wealth generation for themselves.
- They suppress other modes of power which are not capitalistic. Which means there is little in the way of division of power – capitalist States tend to become mono-powers, and encourage capitalistic organization for everything.
- Capitalists will set up plutocracy, and curtail the liberty of other ‘classes’. It is very hard to find a capitalist system in which this does not happen.
- Indeed, we have had forty years of talk about free markets and we now have a straightforward plutocracy. The plutocracy is unstable, because it has ignored and suppressed inconvenient people and the working classes, and has suppressed the needs and dynamics of the ecology we live within. But corporations and their interests come first (although they may pretend not).
- Libertarians seem far more comfortable with authoritarian capitalists, authoritarian religions, and State removal of the rights of workers than they seem comfortable with democratic socialists, or communal anarchists, who want to overcome the suppression of people in general. Given capitalists, in practice, use the State all the time, this comfort has nothing to do with getting rid of the State or increasing liberty.
The origins of capitalism do not reside in hard work but theft and violence
- The libertarian, neoliberal and capitalist origin myth asserts that inequalities of riches (and the other inequalities these buy) arise from hard work and talent.
- But capitalism arose in theft and oppression.
- It started in aristocracy which depended on the taking of land, usually through violence or conquest.
- Capital developed by stealing. People’s lives were stolen through slavery, indentured labour, truly terrible and often cheap but lethal working conditions, and so on. Land was stolen by ‘colonial’ violence from people who already used the land as in India, the US, Australia, and in the UK by theft of commons. It originated in the theft of treasure from India, and South America, or more accurately in the South American case, from British pirates stealing from Spanish treasure ships. It originated in massive cheap pollution, poisoning and environmental destruction which stole people’s lives and health.
- Wherever it was arrived, capitalism stole property and self-sufficiency from people and turned them into wage laborers, depriving them of basic liberty.
- Capitalist colonialists would often impose monetary taxes on people to force them to engage in otherwise meaningless wage labor, and submit to the colonial forces.
- There is no reason to think that this is no longer the case, and that capitalism is now not structured by riches inherited from that violence, or that if violence and ecological destruction can be got away with profitably it will not be engaged in.
- Libertarians and neoliberals are really good at seeing that ordinary people can co-operate to inhibit the market and they seem to want to suppress such movements. However, they are pretty useless at seeing the normal violence of capitalism or the ways that capitalists can cooperate to interfere with the market, both with the State and outside the State, for their benefit and power.
- Libertarians often seem to define their “non-aggression principle” to exclude normal capitalist violence and suppress real rebelliousness, or demands for recompense for capitalist theft as aggression, probably because they support the establishment more than then people.
People are not just driven by profit or power
- While in actual life libertarianism and neoliberalism reduces everything to profit and the liberty of the wealthy humans have many other drives
- Libertarianism and neoliberals essentially dismiss these drives. If it does not make money, its of no value or use . If it does make money it is of value of use.
- We may example: not very good art, non-capitalist religion, co-operation, care, love etc are all downplayed by libertarians and neoliberals in favor of the market.
- It might be that everything worthwhile in life comes from outside the capitalist market and is destroyed by that market, as everything is reduced to money and profit.
Capitalism damages people
- Historical theft and violence continues to damage people today, as colonialism and its racism, class distinctions and so on continue to affect peoples lives and allocate life chances. This does not mean people cannot triumph against huge obstacles, but they face those obstacles and structural inhibitions, because of previous and continuing capitalist theft and violence.
- It has already been stated that capitalism damages and poisons ecology. People need functional ecology to live well, so damage to ecology damages people.
- Capitalism encourages obedience and submission with the threat of being dumped into poverty.
- Capitalism requires most people to have no relationship to what they produce, or to take no reward in what they produce, and have no control over what happens to what they produce. This is what Marx called alienation. It harms people’s involvement in their own lives.
- Capitalism encourages machine production, and therefore, for most people, discourages craft production or the development of holistic skills and the use of their body and mind and feelings etc. This damages them. Adam Smith while encouraging division of tasks and labour, recognised that it inculcated mental and ‘spiritual’ stultification.
- Capitalism encourages exhaustion, not just of land, but of people through overwork, media saturation and so on. This lessens their ability to respond to life and problems, or to reject capitalism.
- People can nearly always be replaced, as they have no intrinsic value. This also damages people and shows they are of no real worth, as bosses cannot be bothered to treat them like ‘human beings’.
- Possibly all the major problems in the West have been generated by capitalism and its markets.
Tags: free markets, neoliberalism
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