Free Trade

During the 1980's, the US effectively decided (despite some rhetoric to the contrary) to let the chips fall where they might in economic terms, regardless of the consequences to individuals, families or communities.

Market forces were let rip; and many people and communities suffered heavily. If you were a 45-year-old steelworker, it was not the best of times. "Sorry, nothing personal, there just isn't any role for you in the new global economy. Here's a pink slip; go drink yourself to death." As the saying went, it was no longer the strong who ate the weak; it was the fast who ate the slow. If you had roots, you were a plant to be harvested.

On the other hand, the current enviable state of the US economy -- where companies are so short of people that some are frantically sending recruiters into welfare centers and prison halfway houses -- is due to precisely that ruthlessness. America let creative destruction rule; the contrast with, say, France is vivid. The French find themselves either trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom -- thinking they can create jobs by legislating a shorter work-week -- or playing whining, reluctant, painful catch-up.

Add to this that the Cold War obscured certain facts.

First, that capitalism is a revolutionary form of economic organization; the only revolutionary form. It's the thing that the alchemists sought in vain, the Universal Solvent that cannot be contained.

Look at Eastern Europe as it emerged from Communism -- what was the overwhelming impression? That it was so old fashioned, both physically and in terms of ideas. Cloth-capped proletarians, grimy mill-towns, countries where books and intellectuals were still taken seriously and there were mass audiences for ballet. Not to mention the role of the Catholic Church in Poland... and the Church there has found, to its dismay, that hedonism and materialism are much harder to fight than Communism.

Communism was a set of competing ideas. Materialism doesn't fight religion; it just oozes around it and then dissolves it like a bath of warm acidic jell-o. It doesn't disprove the competing axioms. Instead, it just makes them irrelevant to the substance of people's lives.

Second, that the market has an inherent tendency to colonize the rest of society -- substituting the rationality of cost-benefit and rate-of-return for all other methods of human interaction. Commodification, to use a horrible neologism.

In the short run, there are pauses and stopping-places; the Victorian morality that Gertrude Himmelfarb is fond of represented one, with a competitive market economy outside the household and a patriarchal hierarchy inside it.

But that's like the guy who jumps off the World Trade Center and says "all right so far" as he falls past the 36th floor.

Possessive individualism will always seep through and over and around any cultural barrier set up to stop it; and the market will always intrude into new institutions or crannies or crevices. It's one of those "If A, then B; consequently, C" situations. The structure of the Victorian family, for example, dissolves as the servants go elsewhere, the women stop being dependent, and the paterfamilias finds himself just one more individual facing others in a constant bargain.

And as recent events in Asia show -- where "enduring Asian values" turned out to be merely "temporary pre-industrial customs" -- there's essentially only one way to do modernity. The exchange brokers turn out to be stronger than the governments; if you try to use force on them, they don't fight... they just shrug, hit a key, and take their toys elsewhere. Meanwhile your currency collapses, and eventually you end up as North Korea, useful as a horrible example.

You can have any national policy you like, as long as they like it. The Prime Minister of Malaysia is still in denial, unable to come to terms with the fact that he wasn't the strong, sovereign power he thought, but instead merely the hired debt-collector of the World Bank and the garden-boy of the bond traders.

Technological change is part of the same process, and magnifies it, of course.

Take this Web we're using. What does it do? It reshapes the world towards the ideal of the Market; a frictionless surface, where identical interchangeable units of capital and labor interact according to universal laws.

It abolishes locality -- it makes everywhere a suburb of everywhere else. It replaces actual physical communities with "communities" made up of anonymous individuals associating solely through individual choice, individuals who can move anywhere they want at the speed of light.

Someone may be sitting in a small Mormon town in Utah, but with the Internet, they're culturally in the Big City. They need no longer rely on interacting with their neighbors; their neighbors can no longer control the terms of interaction with the wider world. Their neighbors can't even know if they just downloaded "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom", much less control it. The ability to be invisible that was traditionally associated with life in places like New York is now available to anyone.

Traditional community and local culture requires control, the ability to discipline members and restrict their choices; it operates on the assumption that people are physically stuck somewhere. Increasingly, this is not so.

And increasingly, the anonymity and anywhere-ness is moving into the physical realm as well. Already you need never set foot in a local bookstore. Soon you won't even have to buy your groceries locally. Anywhere will be everywhere with a vengeance.

Look at the way e-commerce and shopping agents are moving business towards the hitherto unobtainable model of pure competition, for example.

Where will it all end? Nobody knows, of course. It will make for interesting times.

Yours, Steve Stirling

I can't find anything to disagree with, and there are aspects to all this new society that I like; but permit me to worry a bit about unintended consequences. I am not certain that the purpose of life is to make and consume more and cheaper goods, or that a social order organized that way can survive. Schumpeter had the same doubts, of course.

When I am a little less under the weather I will try to argue this more rationally.

-- I don't think the question is whether such a social order is desireable in the abstract, but whether any alternative is possible. That is to say, can any alternative setup stand the test of economic and ideological competition?

That's a moot point, of course, since none of us can predict the future, but my guess would be "no", going by the recent evidence.

Generally speaking, people will chose ease over effort, goods over lack of goods, and pleasure over pain; not to mention anything that flatters their vanity over anything that challenges it. Not everyone, of course, but most.

This market principle increasingly applies to ideas as well as to goods. More "rigorous" ideologies can't compete in the free marketplace -- to take an example within religious circles, look at the virtual collapse of predestinarian Calvinism within the Baptist-evangelical churches in this century. Virtually all of them have a thoroughly optimistic Arminian theology now, and all the churches of the West either have moved or are moving in that direction.

Getting back to the secular field, we see the worldwide triumph of the "American" ideology -- individualism, consumerism, hedonism. People want to consume; and they want to feel comfortable about doing so.