In the introduction to Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman complained of the perversion of the word “liberalism,” which early in the 20th century underwent a shift in meaning from a philosophy favoring free markets and individual liberty to a philsophy favoring government intervention to guarantee individual security. He quoted Joseph Schumpeter’s statement that the enemies of the system of free enterprise had appropriated its label.
This is true in a sense which Friedman perhaps did not intend. Most people who call themselves “liberal” these days are, indeed, hardly friends of free enterprise. But if Friedman meant to imply that liberal Democrats are uniquely hostile to free markets, among political movements in the American mainstream, he was mistaken.
In fact, any time you hear a politician on C-SPAN or a wonk on one of the talking head shows praise “our free enterprise system” or “our free market system,” you can be morally certain the words are being spoken by an enemy of free enterprise and free markets.
The people who talk most about “free enterprise” and “free markets” in American political discourse, far from actually favoring those things, have appropriated the label “free enterprise” for their system of corporate welfare, corporate protectionism, and crony capitalism.
Quite frankly, I’m thoroughly sick of seeing right-wing Republicans referred to as “free market fundamentalists” by people like Thomas Frank. I’m sick of seeing “free market” treated, on the Left, as synonymous with a modernized version of Robber Baron capitalism. But it’s hard to blame them for this, considering that about the only people you see praising “the free market” in the mainstream media are, well, Robber Barons.
It’s a shame they’ve managed to get away with it. I have a more respect for those who, no matter how morally odious, at least are honest enough to admit where the interests of the corporate piggies at the trough really lie when it comes to free markets.
The private sentiments of the so-called friends of “free enterprise” — people like Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, and Dick Armey — are probably more honestly represented by former Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas: “The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy.” “The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.”
Tom Friedman, the foremost defender of corporate globalization, knows exactly what the system really requires:
“For globalism to work, American can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
But then, I like the cheerfully sociopathic Blago unknowingly recorded on the phone (“effing golden”) a lot better than the guy on the talking head shows who lifts his eyes heavenward and compares himself to Gandhi and Mother Theresa. At least with people like Andreas and Friedman, you know what you’re dealing with. No hokum about “free enterprise.” Just flaming death from the skies for anybody who fails to ratify the Uruguay Round TRIPS accord or stops using the dollar as a reserve currency.
If you want a living illustration of the moral cancer at the heart of what passes for “free market” advocacy, just look at Dick Cheney saying “the government never made anyone rich” — while Halliburton/KBR gobbles down slop by the bucketfull.
It’s no wonder “free enterprise” and “free markets” have fallen into such ill repute among broad sections of the American public. You can thank their most vocal defenders. If “free markets” meant what the folks at FreedomWorks and AEI meant by them, I’d hate them too.
Fortunately, though, they don’t. Free markets — genuine free markets, without subsidies or protections for big business — are the enemies of corporate power. But you’ll never see anyone saying that on CNBC or the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, With ‘friends’ like these …, Columbus, Georgia Ledger-Enquirer, 5 Sep 2010
“The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.” –Bastiat
The conservative establishment should take a lesson from their “defense” of free markets and shield (i.e., neutralize) Wikileaks with the same aegis. (That was pure facetiousness: I don’t think even the conservative establishment could defend Wikileaks ineptly enough.)
Perhaps no term has been more perverted and villified than “anarchy”, which has been coöpted by stone-throwing mob rule communists.
Back to the original topic of the “free market”: while I understand your concerns about corporatists claiming the label, the flip side is that “free markets” and “deregulation” have been blamed for all manner of ills, when in fact we’ve had neither. In a clash of mis-definition from both sides, the rent-seeking corporatists who call themselves “free marketeers”, and the media who blame them for market crashes, are using the same defintion, yet both are wrong.
Actually, that shift of language only happened in the USA. For instance, here in Australia the main right wing party is the Liberal Party.
Fuck off, KBCraig! While we’ve been pioneering new worlds and throwing ourselves into the gears of the old one, “anarcho-capitalists” haven’t done shit (except talk about how great contracts and exchange are)! Anyway, blame Hearst for the idea that Anarchy is about destruction- he’s the one who decided it would be profitable to lie to millions of people.
Sorry for getting sidetracked, but I’m not going to let that kind of cheap shot stand.
Unless you’re a rock-throwing mob-rule communist, that “shot” doesn’t apply to you at all.
I support a stateless society and market anarchy. I’m rather surprised that anyone reading C4SS could take offense at anything I’ve said.
KBCraig– a few rocks through windows pales in comparison to the violence of the State and Capital. Get over it.
Quite frankly, I’m thoroughly sick of seeing right-wing Republicans referred to as “free market fundamentalists” by people like Thomas Frank.
I don’t know who Thomas Frank is, but if I refer to anyone as any kind of fundamentalist, I don’t mean it as a compliment. Would you like me to concede that you and your mutualist-in-the-American-sense comrades, and not the right-wing Republicans, are the true free-market fundamentalists? Do you consider the Invisible Hand infallible? I consider it at best amoral.
Lori: I interpret an accusation of “x fundamentalism” to imply that the target takes x seriously or is an advocate of x. As someone who does take free markets seriously, I take exception to the Republicans’ claims to believe in or promote free markets, and think anyone like Frank who takes it at face value should have “sucker” tattooed on his forehead.
I think what you are up against is somehow akin to the question of whether it’s even worth bothering to restore whatever meaning the swastika symbol may have had in various ancient cultures. Sometimes the well has been so thoroughly poisoned that there is no looking back. Obviously the magnitude of your public relations problem isn’t as large (or is it?), but the disinformation campaign against what you consider the authentic free market has been long and hard (and of course well funded) and shows no signs of abatement, so reclaiming your terminology looks like it may be a lost cause. I applaud you anyway, despite appearances to the contrary. As a good faith measure, I’ll henceforth adopt the editorial policy of putting ‘scare quotes’ around ‘free market’ when referring to the practice of lumping ‘market oriented’ policies under the general heading of pro-business policy, even though scare quotes have become something of a cliché. Best fishes.
'Perhaps no term has been more perverted and villified than “anarchy”, which has been coöpted by stone-throwing mob rule communists.'
I assume, by that, you mean that the term anarchy has been used by libertarian-communists from, at least, the 1850s? Hardly a case of co-opting, when the vast majority of the anarchist movement has been, and is, communist. What is being "coopted" is when the name anarchist (or libertarian) is taken up by pro-capitalists, ignoring the explicitly anti-capitalist ideas which have always been associated with it.
As for the genuine individualist-anarchist tradition, well, it is true they were somewhat against communist-anarchist ideas — although they did admit that voluntary communism was perfectly anarchistic. And as we libertarian communists stand for free communism, well, that means we have hardly coopted the term anarchy.
I would also suggest that most of the individualist-anarchists would also have rejected many of Proudhon's key ideas. So as far as coopting anarchy, well, us communist-anarchists have kept true to Proudhon's opposition to wage-labour, the agro-industrial federation, communal institutions, socialisation of property, and a host of other ideas expounded by Proudhon from when he first proclaimed "I am an Anarchist" onwards:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/i-am-an-an…
And back to the topic, Kevin makes a very valid point. Free markets rhetoric is used by the right and big business. They have even managed to attach the term "libertarian" to corporate power. I'm not sure how to avoid that, unless you start to develop new forms of rhetoric to avoid the association. That explains why many libertarian communists avoid the word "communism" as people associate it with the USSR/Cuba/etc. Maybe consistently using terms of "mutualism" and such like would help, but then we have the problem that European and American mutualism differ.
Lori: One problem with equating the existing model of corporate capitalism to the “free market” is that it serves the purposes of the corporate economy’s legitimizing needs. It’s not only the statist Left that has a need to equate the present plutocratic order with the “free market.” The plutes have an interest in referring to this as “our free market system” because it implies their own wealth is the result of some merit. For a large number of people, “free market” is not a term to be rehabilitated, but a term that actually adds legitimacy to those who don’t deserve it.
There’s a good reason to stress that this is not a free market. Both mainstream Left and Right have a lot vested, ideologically, in the assumption that the corporate economy emerged through some natural process from a free market. So referring to the present system as a “free market” obscures the role of the state in its origins, and the central importance of an alliance between big government and big business in creating corporate capitalism from its very beginnings. Referring to the present system as “the free market” is bad because it makes reality harder to understand.
So thanks for putting “free market” in scare quotes.
Iain McKay tried to post this:
'Perhaps no term has been more perverted and villified than “anarchy”, which has been coöpted by stone-throwing mob rule communists.'
I assume, by that, you mean that the term anarchy has been used by libertarian-communists from, at least, the 1850s? Hardly a case of co-opting, when the vast majority of the anarchist movement has been, and is, communist. What is being "coopted" is when the name anarchist (or libertarian) is taken up by pro-capitalists, ignoring the explicitly anti-capitalist ideas which have always been associated with it.
As for the genuine individualist-anarchist tradition, well, it is true they were somewhat against communist-anarchist ideas — although they did admit that voluntary communism was perfectly anarchistic. And as we libertarian communists stand for free communism, well, that means we have hardly coopted the term anarchy.
I would also suggest that most of the individualist-anarchists would also have rejected many of Proudhon's key ideas. So as far as coopting anarchy, well, us communist-anarchists have kept true to Proudhon's opposition to wage-labour, the agro-industrial federation, communal institutions, socialisation of property, and a host of other ideas expounded by Proudhon from when he first proclaimed "I am an Anarchist" onwards:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/i-am-an-an…
And back to the topic, Kevin makes a very valid point. Free markets rhetoric is used by the right and big business. They have even managed to attach the term "libertarian" to corporate power. I'm not sure how to avoid that, unless you start to develop new forms of rhetoric to avoid the association. That explains why many libertarian communists avoid the word "communism" as people associate it with the USSR/Cuba/etc. Maybe consistently using terms of "mutualism" and such like would help, but then we have the problem that European and American mutualism differ.
That was my comment. I'll add that this is a difficult issue because you don't really want to be associated with big business, mainstream "Libertarianism" and such like. It will cause almost instant rejection by people who would be sympathetic to many individualist anarchist ideas.
For example, during Katrina, Kevin wrote about "market solutions" to the problem (if I remember correctly). By that I'm sure he meant voluntary methods and mutual aid, but it came across as people paying others to rescue then, people getting ripped-off simply to survive, etc. It is that kind of associations that are best avoided.
Iain
An Anarchist FAQ
Lori: "Laissez-faire" is less of a problem in terms of being used as a legitimizing term, because it lacks the positive connotations "free market" has for most people. But has the same problems insofar as it is misleading and hypocritical coming from the economic interests who toss it around. I would only use it in scare quotes in reference to anything remotely resembling the present system, and never quote a corporate spokesperson or neoliberal politician praising "laissez-faire" without pointing out that genuine laissez-faire would be the death of the system they represent.
Iain: Re KBCraig's shot on the stone-throwing mob rule communists, I would point out that the people smashing windows reflect a lot of tendencies, including people with no clear tendency beyond the desire to smash things. And there are few anarchists I respect more than Kropotkin. I see the boundaries between market anarchy and libertarian communism, Bakuninist collectivism, etc., as pretty permeable. Syndicalists and libertarian communists did not interfere with market exchange between self-employed producers, and allowed peasants to take their aliquot share of land within a commune if they did not care to work it collectively. Bakunin envisioned communes/collectives exchanging surplus goods. About the only serious conflict between individualists and communists is over whether wage labor would be *allowed*, and as far as I'm concerned whether residual claimancy is automatically vested in the work unit is one of those property rules that will probably reflect majority sentiment in a particular locality — nothing to fight over.
To me the main value of rehabilitating "free market," aside from the matter of howling inaccuracy in letting people get away with using the term in reference to corporate capitalism, is the value of demonizing those people in terms of their own value. It's a lot like workers' committees in Eastern Europe using Marx against the nomenklatura.
What about “laissez faire?” Would it make sense to use that as a term of unendearment? AFAIK ‘laissez faire’ has its origins in the 19th century nexus of neoclassical economics and social darwinism and is an invention of the elite classes and their toadies. I suppose it could be interpreted to mean ‘LET the market find its equilibrium,’ but I think the intention of those who coined the term, as well as the common understanding of it today, is ‘LET the business elite do whatever it bloody well pleases.’
[…] by Kevin Carson, C4SS […]
Maybe we should use "Anti-Capitalist Free Markets".
but think of all the mess from heads exploding
"Perhaps no term has been more perverted and villified than “anarchy”, which has been coöpted by stone-throwing mob rule communists."
Hey, this is a step in the right direction. A centuary ago we were 'bomb-throwing anarchists'…