Sunday, July 24, 2022
[CrashList] The Capitalist Market
Charles Brown Thu, 08 Mar 2001 14:30:26 -0800
http://www.coastalpost.com/01/3/15.htm
Coastal Post
March 2001 (Vol. 26, No. 3)
The Capitalist Market
By Frank Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Our supposedly free market is really a fundamentalist
religion, with the strengths and weaknesses of any faith-
based system. Its foundation is equal parts mythology,
creativity, greed and stupidity. Only the last two can
explain the belief that private energy, private health
care, private education and countless other fixations on
our private part are, despite increasing signs of failure,
superior to social control of such life supporting
institutions.
The main argument against social power claims the
suppression of individuality inherent in big government,
and it has some element of truth. But what has passed
for governmental control has never been an expression of
democracy, whether in capitalist social democratic states
or in nations that have attempted to create socialism.
The first always perform for the benefit and under the
direction of private capital, and the second always under
the heel of a global system whose opposition would not allow
them to achieve the ideals they professed. Socialist states
have been forced into compromises that often made them
little better, and sometimes worse than what they
wanted to replace.
Neither social democracy nor socialist attempts at
humanizing reality have been able to rise above the
capitalist market, but merely to exercise some local
controls that briefly fine tune its murderous
contradictions.
The collapse of attempted socialism in the Soviet Union and
the abandonment of social democratic capitalism in the west
have seen a return to the fundamentalist faith in market
forces as the arbiter of all human affairs. Of course, with
private, corporate capital exercising the controls formerly
the responsibility of government. It has been a disaster,
and it gets worse every day.
In their pre-capitalist form, markets involved social
relations that played a major role in advancing communication
and trade among people. Markets were building blocks in the
structure of human organization into larger social entities,
but they depended on person to person encounters. Barter,
trade and deal making involved interpersonal relations
between producers and consumers that increased a notion of
community, while bringing goods and services to more people.
When that system became dominated by ever larger commercial
forces, the market was transformed into something less
communal and more mercantile. As wider varieties of goods
became available, smaller groups became more dominant in
markets, leading to exploitation of actual producers and
consumers, with financial control exercised by absentee
forces.
What is presently called globalization is nothing new, but
merely the age old process of market control by private
capital becoming greater, faster, and more damaging to
the social and natural environment than ever before.
Under the domination of ruling elite minorities, life has
always been dangerous for the majority. But the danger has
never been so great, and, conversely, the possibility for
overcoming it and achieving success for most of humanity
never greater.
The anti-social nature of private capitalist command of
markets makes the threat so deadly. It creates a world in
which humans starve while pets overeat, in which militaries
are housed while civilians are homeless, in which drug firms
make billions of dollars while sick people can't afford
medicines. It is a world in which the natural, social and
political environments are under the control of forces with
no purpose other than the creation of profits for investors
that guarantee losses for everyone else.
And it is the hopeful signs of growing social consciousness
and democratic demands in the world at large that make the
possibilities of success so much greater. But the global
crisis is such that there really isn't much time for those
social forces to get their act together. If the world is, as
Shakespeare said, a stage on which we perform, the majority
cast members need to take over the production, before the
minority stockholders bring about a disastrous flop that
won't just be financial.
Before we create a global gas chamber that threatens
to asphyxiate us all, we need to change this system that
controls the creation and distribution of resources, all
on the basis of first creating private profit. The present
romance with markets, individuality and privatization of
public forces is a renewal of age old fundamentalist beliefs.
With the use of mass media techniques of modern mind control,
relative paupers have been convinced that success means
simply buying some stock in one or another "new"
company and waiting for the money to pour in.
The reality is that for all the minority paper wealth being
generated by alleged `new economy' high-tech stocks, the
country's entire structure rests - precariously - on an
`old economy' foundation of oil, gas and other
non-renewable fossil fuels.
Americans upset by increased energy prices need to
understand that domestic and foreign sources are finite
and drying up. But under the dictates of wasteful profit
marketeering and planned inefficiency, demand everywhere
continues to rise. What is to be done?
The social democratic urge to slowly reform by presenting
a more human face to capitalism, has been replaced by old
market values, revived as neo-liberalism. First promoted
by the Reagan-Thatcher regimes and more recently by their
stepsons, Clinton-Blair, this revival has seen the market
become god, individuality the son of god, and government,
social responsibility and democracy become satanic demons,
interfering with divine profit accumulation.
The profit dreams of minorities have become the nightmare
loss of majorities, with social, political and environmental
systems simultaneously threatened by an organizing domain
gone berserk.
Markets may someday become human places again, as flea
markets, farmers markets and even garage sales give example.
But Capitalism cannot be reformed, anymore than a carnivore
can become a herbivore. It is a cannibalistic system that
will ultimately devour humanity and the planet if it isn't
stopped by a democratic movement aimed at more than reform.
If humanity is to survive, capitalism must be abolished.
Copyright (c) 2001 Frank Scott. All Rights Reserved.
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