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April 6, 2007
Peter Saunders has an article in the current issues of the CIS Policy magazine on the issue of capitalism and families entitled Families under Capitalism. Saunders is responding to criticisms of free market fundamentalism, Hayek, and the Howard Government recently made by Kevin Rudd, the leader of the federal Labor opposition. It can be seen as part of the ongoing debate about morality and markets that has its roots in the 19th century.
Rudd, says Saunders had criticised Howard for unleashing ‘unrestrained market capitalism’, which has encouraged ‘individual greed and self-interest’ and eroded the bonds that hold our society together. Saunders interprets Rudd to have acknowledged that Hayek understood the importance of family life, but that Rudd argued that Hayek's philosophy precluded him from protecting families from the profit-maximising logic of the marketplace. Rudd then extended this critique to the Howard government which he thought had pursued hard-line, Hayekian economic policies without regard for their impact on the quality of family and community life.
Saunders says that though Rudd's essays attracted considerable comment there was little serious discussion of what was arguably Rudd’s core claim—that free market capitalism is responsible for weakening family and community life.
Saunders spells this core claim out:
The core of Rudd’s argument in both of these essays is that capitalism will ‘tear itself apart’ unless it is regulated. This is because the self-interested pursuit of profit fatally undermines family and community life, which has therefore to be protected by government. He then applies this argument to the Howard government’s recent workplace reforms which he believes are dismantling a civliising framework of regulation that has kept free market capitalism in check for a hundred years. As a result of these reforms, families have been exposed to an ‘unconstrained market’ and are now being prevented from ‘spending sufficient time together’ as profit-maximising employers use the new laws to increase exploitation. ‘Market fundamentalism,’ he says, is making ‘ultimate inroads’ into family life
Saunders acknowledges that Rudd’s argument, that market capitalism undermines family and community life, is not original. He says that over the years, many social theorists have maintained that capitalism destroys intimacy and a sense of belonging, and many of them have been socialists seeking to make an ethical case for more state control or regulation of the economy. However, like many gloomy commentators before him, what Rudd is offering is not fresh analytical insights but tired and largely discredited sociological clichés.
It is a common view that capitalism actually undermines traditional moral foundations of a society. The argument is that the greater anonymity and mobility in society reduces the impact of pre-modern morality on people. As people pursue more self-interest, collective interest loses out. Some--Karl Marx, for instance, have argued that capitalism would ultimately erode the values needed for capitalism itself, leading to it's own self-destruction. Saunders does acknowledge the truth content of market capitalism undermining family and community life, as he says:
There is, of course, some truth in the claim that free market capitalism undermines traditional ways of life. Given the unprecedented economic growth and technological innovation that it unleashes, capitalism could hardly avoid destroying, uprooting and replacing long-settled patterns of social existence.... Doom merchants invariably... see only the decay, never the re-growth. Ever since Tönnies, they have over-emphasised the strength of family and community life in the past while under-estimating the persistence of family and community cohesion in the present.
What then is this regrowth in relationships family and community life? Saunders says:
We have more choice today over whom we interact with (traditional, small, settled communities could be extremely limited and suffocating), so we can build strong relationships with those we want to be with while avoiding those we don’t. It could even be argued that, far from being destroyed, ‘community’ has been extended and strengthened by the development of capitalism, for evolutions in transportation and communications allow us to sustain meaningful personal relationships over much wider geographical areas nowadays than we could in the past. When settlers left Europe for Australia or America in the nineteenth century, they often bade farewell forever to their families and friends.Today, they can text, email, phone and ‘Skype’ each other daily at minimal cost..
This is very much a free market view: modern associations allow for participation without absorption in traditional morality as they make it possible for the individual to develop a variety of interests and to become involved in a wider range of activities than would otherwise be possible, yet to do so without surrendering the totality of his time, income, or identity to any particular association, from the family to the state.
There is a slight of hand here by Saunders: we have different modes of exchange and association in terms of culture, society and markets; or to put it more classical terms different modes of ethical life. All Saunders is doing is reprising an old liberal riff: closed communities versus open societies without evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the different historical modes of ethical life. What we have is the conventional argument that capitalism creates ever wider forms of association, without an acknowledgement that he market has only one mode of valuing things — price— whereas in reality goods may be valued (and valuable) in ways that price cannot
capture.
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Gary, Another rant from me.
I think one of the keys to understanding the rigid true believer CIS mindset is on the CIS page that comes up on your link suggestion. The item on the left re enviromentalism. It has the line "predetermimed thinking".
Implicit in this statement is the common "right" wing idea that they (on the "right") see "reality" unencumbered by any kind of ideological bias--- Seeing Reality True, which is the title of a chapter in the superb (and chilling) book Between Jesus and the Market by Linda Kintz.
And that anyone, particularly on the left, who questions the capitalist imperative is inevitably deluded and have all kinds of sinister agendas to curtail the "god" given "freedom" to consume lurking in the shadows. And are even enemies of "civilization" and the future. Postrel.
I have just had a series of email exchanges with one of the Acton bloggers. His "righteous" certainty is scary to say the least--Jesus and the Market rules OK--all ordained by "historical" "evidence" and common human experience. Never mind that the "mind" that makes such assertions is totally embedded in the reductionist "world"-view of scientific materialism---despite its "righteous" religiosity. ESPECIALLY the western "mind" informed by one dimensional scientific "reason" that places such emphasis on an entirely linear version of HIS-story. Jehovah god "created" the world, jesus redeemed it and made sense and meaning to His-story. And His-story will be "fulfilled" on the second "coming" of "jesus"---the POVERTY of historicism wrapped up in self justifying religiosity
Meanwhile capitalism has been around for 150 years. What about the lived experience of the other thousands of years of human culture.
Acton is a curious outfit. They promote both traditional religion and libertarianism.
Never mind that the two "world" views are fundamentally opposed to each other. Libertarianism being the "philosophy" and justification of me and my family first and screw everyone and everything else. Everyone and everything reduced to solidified objects with no psychic depth or connection, to be exploited to the death----the death of the planet even.
It is just the retarded adolescence of eternal "independence" made into a self justifying "philosophy".
Another amusing thing about Acton is the quote on its webpage re the corruption of power. Never mind that Acton and its associated "conservative" outfits are all effectively propaganda outlets for the Pentagon death machine---the most concentrated source of unbridled power that this planet has ever seen.
And doesnt capitalism depend on its "success" by the fact that the former seven deadsly sins are now the seven cardinal virtues---the infinite expansion, and exploitation, of which, are the necessary driving force to keep the whole system growing.