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Economic activity is not so much about freedom and voluntarism; it is more about
material necessity. Economic activity is all about habitual and persistent production;
it is all about the everyday urgency and compulsion to industry and the interchange
of goods. Human beings do not, so much, volunteer to produce; we must produce.
Human beings do not,so much, volunteer to exchange; we must exchange, because
otherwise we would need to work more to produce the variety of what we need, or
else we would have to do with less of the variety we need.
Economic production and exchange are not optional -- in the sense of ideal -- activities;
they are not discretionary activities; they are not elective activities. Exchange is not
voluntary; it is mandatory. Production and exchange are imperative activities. There is
a very good reason for why Thomas Carlyle called economics "the dismal science".
Alexander Berkman defined actual-existing economic reality and practice as "the
savage struggle for a crumb that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep".
Is modern-day capitalist industry and commerce really at all about voluntary activity,
or even about fairness?
Is really-existing commodity exchange -- to use Friedrich Nietzsche's words --
"really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality". It so, then how can commodity
exchange be about freedom and voluntarism? If -- as Adam Smith claimed -- human
beings have a "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange", then how does a propensity
translate into freedom? How does a natural human motive force, an instinctive human
driving force, become expressed in the language of liberty, the rhetoric of voluntarism,
the oratory of spirit?
If competitive-capitalist commerce is -- to use the words of the French moral philosopher,
Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues -- "the school of cheating", then where is the voluntarism
and fairness in modern-day, really-existing commercial exchange?
Capitalism is -- in Karl Marx's words -- "a system of plunder"; it is not a system of honesty.
Human beings work and trade, not really for a living, but more to stay alive.
Really-existing capitalism is not at all about freedom and fairness.
What is a fair slice of the pie? Rveryday reasonable people can come to agree on a
common-sense view of what is really and truly fair. The more fairness there is, the more
freedom there can and will be. As long as there is material-economic scarcity, as
long as there is so much poverty co-existing with so much prosperity, as long as
"business is war" (a Japanese saying), as long as there is cut-throat competition for
pecuniary profits and for economic power, there can be no true freedom, and there
will be no real fairness.
"Commerce is a kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and
for compensation B picks the pocket of D for money belonging to E."
-- Ambrose Bierce |
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Posted by rallen2 on 2008-03-24 17:49:20 | Rating: | Views: 31
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