Defenders of free-market capitalism,
such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, have argued that capitalism
is both an economic and a moral system, whose moral superiority to
other forms of economic organization comes from its strictly
voluntary nature. Coercion and violence, they assert, have no place
in economies based on the voluntary exchange of goods and the
solemnity of freely-negotiated contracts. In my recent entry on
Corey Robin's “Nietzche's Marginal Children,” however, I noted
that it is very easy to challenge this rose-tinted view. Capitalism,
as I've observed before, is an economic system in which capitalists
can commodify economic inputs, such as labor and land, and mobilize
them through markets to generate profitable returns. Contracts and
voluntary exchanges are important to capitalists, providing them with
security and flexibility, but they are only means to the ultimate
end, which is the maximization of profits. If coercion and force
will serve the same end, capitalists are willing to employ them, and
as both Prof. Robin and David Graeber have observed, they have in the
past proven happy to do so. Indeed, military and legal violence have
proven essential to capitalists because some of their economic
inputs, notably workers, tend to resist being turned into
commodities, and because the most efficient way to mobilize inputs
was often through violence. More recently, capitalist states have
found violence a useful way to neutralize the “counter-measures,”
like labor unions and social-insurance laws, that workers and
political reformers created in the nineteenth century to
mitigate some of the worst effects of capitalism.
One can easily appreciate the important role that violence played in early capitalism when one realizes that Atlantic
slavery, arguably the most important economic institution of the
early-modern era, was actually a capitalist form of labor
mobilization. Modern historians like Stephanie Smallwood and Walter
Johnson have made this point quite eloquently, noting that
commodification was key to the success of capitalism and that
African-American slavery, unlike many Old World variants of slavery,
involved converting people and their labor into wholly fungible
commodities. This was a necessarily violent process, in which
African and European slavers ripped people from their communities and
families and converted them into disposable units of labor. Slavery
might appear to be an inflexible labor system, insofar as slave
owners had to buy an entire person rather than merely hiring their
labor, but in practice masters found ways to maximize the flexibility
and profitability of the system: they minimized their labor costs
(the average American master spent $2.50 a month
on the upkeep of each bondsman), hired out slaves to other masters
when the owner had less use for their labor, and sold them when this
proved more profitable than continuing to employ them.
Early modern slavery was both
capitalistic itself and essential to capitalists in other sectors of
the world economy. Native American slaves produced the silver that supplied merchants
with much of their actual circulating capital. Indian and African
slaves produced the sugar, coffee, and tobacco that built some of the
great European mercantile fortunes, as well as the cheap cotton that
was the feedstock for the British industrial revolution. Slavery
also indirectly justified the harsh treatment of wage laborers, on
the grounds that no matter how bad wage labor became, it could never
become as bad as slavery. Early wage labor was in fact much harsher
than celebrants of nineteenth-century liberalism would have us believe:
collective bargaining was difficult in some industrial countries and
illegal in others, workplace safety was non-existent, and the
ability of workers to quit one job for a better one was impeded by employers' practice (backed by law) of requiring “testimonial letters” from
workers' previous bosses, who could thereby deny their employees the
right to quit.
I've spent a lot of time here on
slavery, but there were other ways in which early modern capitalism
depended on violence, notably during the creation of a global free
market in land. English and Scottish landlords drove their peasants
off the land with enclosure laws, high rents, and anti-poaching
statutes, replacing them with more profitable herds of sheep and with
recreational hunting preserves. British and
European colonists elsewhere in the world seized indigenous lands by
force, claiming them by right of discovery, or took them with
treaties when they could not immediately overwhelm indigenes'
resistance, as in New Zealand and North America. (These treaties
were technically voluntary, but usually rested on fraud, bribery, and
the threat of force.)
Those who believe the Violent Era of
primitive capitalism ended in the nineteenth century need to think
again, according to Corey Robin and Naomi Klein. The threat of
revolutionary violence in the 1800s and the apparent success of
communism in the early twentieth century forced capitalist
governments to enact reform measures, such as legalizing
labor unions or partially nationalizing some industries, in order
to take the edge off capitalism. However, many capitalists bitterly
opposed these reforms – witness, for example, the long-smoldering
anger of American conservatives toward the otherwise popular New Deal
– and when they had the chance they gladly aligned themselves with
repressive governments in order to bring back the Golden Age of
violent capitalism. American and British corporations gladly aided
Francisco Franco in the hopes that he would crush Spain's labor
unions and make the country safe for foreign investment; he
cheerfully did the former (killing several hundred thousand people in
the process) though he held off on the latter until the 1960s. In
Spanish America, free-market reactionaries found a better ally in
Chile's Augusto Pinochet: after Pinochet seized power in 1973, his
army surgically excised the supporters of the previous socialist
administration, killing 3,000, torturing tens of thousands more, and
terrorizing the rest of the population into passivity. Pinochet then
brought in economic advisers from the University of Chicago to create
a new capitalist regime, free of unions, social subsidies, and other
impediments to exploitation of the nation's resources. Similar
“shock-therapy” measures, including the end of food and energy
subsidies, were imposed on Iraq by President George W. Bush's
viceroys, leading to the displacement of much of the
country's farming population and to increased chaos in the cities.
In the cases of Chile and Iraq,
free-market reformers had the opportunity to treat ordinary citizens
as conquered peoples. When Chicago-school economists tried “shock
therapy” in Poland (1989) and Russia (1992), they enjoyed the
sponsorship of popularly elected governments, but the circumstances
were unusual: in both countries communist regimes had just collapsed,
leaving behind huge debts, and the new democracies could not secure
the IMF loans they needed to function without embracing austerity and
privatization. In both cases the governments in question became
deeply unpopular, and Poland's Solidarity Party lost free elections
to the communists in 1994, while Boris Yeltsin suspended the
constitution and bombarded the Russian Parliament building in order
to remain in power. Indonesia, which had opened up its economy to
foreign business after Suharto's initial coup, adopted a new round of
free-market reforms in 1997 under pressure from the IMF. The IMF did
what dictator Suharto's own brutality and corruption could not
accomplish: they provoked an internal rebellion which ousted
Suharto and instituted a democratic government. Policies that
promote free-market capitalism are no more popular today than they
were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and
democratic governments that pursue them are likely to find themselves
voted or thrown out of office. This may help explain why the most
devout American defenders of capitalism aren't very big supporters of
voting, or of democracy. More important to them is the right of a
few people to become very rich and of everyone else to go hungry or
go to prison.
No comments:
Post a Comment