Unfortunately some people on the left, like Murray Dobbin
still refer to the present state capitalist system as a free market system, without those telling quotes around the term “free market.” A little thought about how the present capitalist system works – with its corporate laws, government subsidies, patent laws, monopoly banking charters, injunctions against unions and other anti-worker legislation, not to mention imperialist wars – and this notion of “free markets” as well as “free enterprise”, “individualism”, and the “self-made man” are revealed as a load of bollocks.
Look a little deeper into the history of capitalism and you find the state virtually everywhere. Try the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the English peasantry, and the slave trade built on the strength of the British Navy, the destruction of the Indian textile industry, the Opium Wars… I could go on and on. All capitalism is essentially state capitalism, or to put it another way, capitalism is the state socialism of the rich. For anyone who wants to read of the statist origins of capitalism no better place to begin is the chapter on
primitive accumulation
of capital in Kevin Carson’s “Studies In Mutualist Political Economy”
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