THIS IS WHAT YOU GET

THE ONE QUESTION AND THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

If historians were asked to pick one question that captured the most important topic of our age, I would suggest that 'who should own capital?', would be an obvious candidate. This is the question that forms the foundations of dominant ideologies that came to be formerly written down from around the 17th century (although the social conditions that lead to such philosophical and political inquiries go back much further in time) and have influenced some of the most significant chapters in our history.

The question of who should own capital is commonly assumed to have two possible answers (private interests should own it versus the state should own it) and whichever sounds most reasonable determines which ideology you subscribe to. That is to say, you either trust in the independent and self-interested actions of people working in aggregate to produce and distribute goods and services, or you are of the opinion that an anarchic system based on individuals competing to gain more material wealth by whatever means they can get away with is bound to end badly, unless there is some kind of centralised control and decision making that can referee the actions of market players and intervene when it's clearly failing to distribute rewards fairly.

Depending on the ideology one subscribes to, the State is either a necessary component of the global market, one with the capability to lay down the rules and regulations that inhibit unfair aspects of competitive behaviour (that is, if it can avoid being corrupted by such behaviour) or you regard the State as an interfering nuisance whose constant interventions harm the free market's ability to correct itself and naturally reach a mutually agreeable equilibrium.

(Image from wikimedia commons)

Those that favour a laissez faire approach dream of a world in which people have an unfettered chance to trade with one another, voluntarily exchanging goods and services without being frustrated by bureaucracy. So far as they can see, the totalitarian regimes that arose in the 20th century, such as Stalinism and Maoism, definitively prove that socialism leads to disaster. Any problems manifesting in the current system are believed to be the result of any left-leaning thinking that remains, as yet, unpurged from market logic.

While there is no denying the historical case against overly authoritarian socialist systems, it could also be argued that the laissez faire dream is just that: A dream. Just as the committed communist can claim that Stalinism was nothing like what Marx hoped for (because, after all, his communist utopia required the withering away of the State, not its becoming all-powerful) the die-hard libertarian can deny that the current global system has anything to do with true laissez faire capitalism.

But the thing is, the vision of the heroic individual bringing overall peace and prosperity through competitive self-interest appears to have no more basis in reality than the communist utopia that so often gets mocked for its 'obvious' impracticality. While it could be argued that laissez faire capitalism has been achieved to a limited extent at certain times in our history, it has never been achieved outright and the limited success it has managed has always tended to evolve toward a more powerful, centralised State, rather than to the anarchic free-for-all of the dream. The famous ending of Orwell's Animal Farm, in which you can't distinguish between pigs and men, could serve as an allegory for how, if capitalism runs long enough, it becomes impossible to distinguish between big business and big government.

This, I argue, is no accident, no consequence of something going 'wrong' with capitalism. Rather, it is the almost inevitable consequence of the underlying premises of capitalism combined with the actual evolutionary conditions under which human societies developed...

To be continued.