My aim in this post is to discuss the issues of capitalism, freedom, and power relations. This is my first post here, and on top of that my political views have only very recently moved toward free market libertarianism, so I’ll hope you’ll forgive my rather undeveloped notions.
To paraphrase Sartre, freedom is always in a situation. The environment and the individual are always intertwined, and as far as our capacities are embodied, we are not absolutely free beings. Rather, our interactions with the world, as beings both in and emerging from the world, naturally vary in terms of our perceptions of responsibilities and actions available to us, both in terms of the natural environment and the people around us. Freedom, then, also implies power. When we interact with others, we exercise both choice and responsibility, taking into accoount the others’ interests and choices as well as affecting and possibly producing new possibilities within the situation.
In the wider sphere of society, the state is, by nature, a primarily conservative institution; what I mean by this is that all government actions conserve particular power relations, through some form of coercion or another. When the government interferes with the interactions of subjects, it naturally narrows the field of possibility between them, making certain expressions of power unavailable to them, and thus also producing a sedimentation of a particular pattern/situation of power relations (such actions might merely include the government’s natural monopoly over coercion, or in manipulating relations between groups of people, as in affirmative action, redistribution, taxes, etc.)
State capitalism and socialism, then, rather than being progressive institutions that allow greater mobility and provide proper ‘conditions’ of creativity, as many might suppose, always narrow possibilities. Government manipulation is always autistic because it attempts to produce a standardized form and system of values of (economic) interaction between individuals; but in defining the conditions of such values and interactions, the government ends up also preserving the narrowed conditions of power in the situation. The individual may not choose, under government intervention, according to his or her perceived responsibilities and values and act accordingly in the situation, whether these choices are short-term or determined as a way of improving one’s conditions in the long run. A free market, on the other hand, would undermine the sedimentation of power (as produced by statist economies) as individuals would be allowed the widest range of capacities and responsibilities in the situation at their disposal, which would, by their own individual or community-based conception of welfare, produce a natural (and collective) progression of possibilities for action as the wider sphere of social possibilities and responsibilities accumulates more individual- and community-based varieties of welfare.
Basically, I’m trying to work out a way of relating market libertarianism to issues of power relations, particularly in light of social movements like environmentalism, women’s rights, LGBT rights, etc. Unfortunately, libertarianism seems to have been stuck with the label of being a kind of ‘pocketbook values’ political position, but, from my readings of Rothbard and Mises, I think it provides much more coherent and, more importantly, non-coercive means of empowering individuals and naturally the communities in which they live, not just those favored by the government and state-sponsored enterprises. Thoughts?