In speaking of the fictitious nature of the efficiency of unfettered market capitalism and the reality of its extractive and ultimately self-destructive nature Karl Polanyi wrote:
"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.
For the alleged commodity "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity "man" attached to that tag.
Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.
Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...
Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance, as well as its business organization, was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944
If you think that the financial repression in the economy, the manipulation of gold and silver prices, the rampant and largely unpunished fraud that almost bankrupted the country, and the years of victimization of the third world countries by economic hitmen are unrelated, then you might be in for a surprise.
For quite some time an element in western society has been promoting the market as the ultimate arbiter of value, best left unrestrained. And it is the market as they define it, and owned essentially by them, and designed to serve their interests. "Free markets" are as naturally occurring as seals that recite Shakespeare.
This fantastic conceit is not a new idea. In the last century such arbitrary, cold, and 'necessary' justice of the powerful was raised as if a god from any number of sources. And the value of human beings was calculated down to the last pfennig or rouble.
As the Third Reich so aptly put it, on the inner door of the hell that was Buchenwald, "Jedem Das Seine," or 'to each his own,' let each get what they deserve.
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people. What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."And that was the justice of the unfettered market.
Theodor Adorno
