Mike Konczal - Freedom from the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand

Americas Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand

MIKE KONCZAL

For Kendra, Vivian, and dreams about spring

No man or body of men who require such excessive labor can be friends to the country or the Rights of Man. [] The God of the Universe has given us time, health, and strength. We utterly deny the right of any man to dictate to us how much of it we shall sell.

Ten-Hour Circular, calling for a maximum ten-hour work day, 1835

It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus, and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.

R.H. Tawney, Equality(1931)

[W]e need to understand the nature of the corporationto make moneyand come to love it, and yet, to keep it in its proper place, just as you can love a tiger, but know that its not the sort of thing that should play with your kid.

Lawrence Lessig, 2007

O ver the past several decades, weve been fed an idea that free marketsthe unregulated flow of goods, services, and laborare the fundamental form of freedom, and that freedom itself functions like a market. The freedom of a business owner, the freedom to sell your labor, the freedom to buy the necessities of life like health and educationthese are the market opportunities that keep us free and allow us to express ourselves as members of a society. This narrow, limited view has extended into all parts of our lives, becoming like the air that surrounds us.

Americas market-oriented worldview is now breaking down. At a time of political upheaval, insecurity, and pandemics, people are hungry to reclaim a world outside the market. Their desires are animating politics, especially among younger voters, who are demanding that the government directly provide essential goods while also suppressing aspects of the market that threaten to swallow our lives whole.

These political demands are actually old ideas, though theyve long since been forgotten. For two centuries, Americans have been fighting for freedom from the market. Their stories provide a powerful legacy to draw from and build upon.

All around us, this old fight against the free market rages anew. There was a short-lived social media account that emerged alongside the 2011 Occupy movement, a Tumblr page titled We Are the 99 Percent filled with stories of economic hardship. The number one problem people expressed, the fear that permeated the whole website, stemmed from student debt and debt from medical bills. What was drawing people into that political moment was the idea of a space beyond the marketplace, one that wasnt ruled by debt and precarity. Later on, the desire for goods accessible outside the marketplace went crashing into the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary battles. Suddenly there were debates everywhere about free college and free, universal, single-payer health care. Old questions about the workplace were being resurrected, including through the grassroots effort to pass a $15 minimum wage in states and cities. Previous gatekeepers, who wanted peoples political imagination to keep to a more market-friendly, incremental approach, saw the debate simply move past them. That energy expanded even after Donald Trumps 2016 victory, motivating a whole new generation to run for office and change the political debate.

We see this energy reflected in recent polling about the appeal of socialism. Exclusive Poll: Young Americans Are Embracing Socialism reads one such headline. Gen Z Prefers Socialism to Capitalism reads another. An early 2019 poll found that nearly 50 percent of millennials and members of Generation Z would prefer living in a socialist country. Sixty-one percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a positive reaction to the word socialism, compared with less than 29 percent for those over fifty-five years of age. Younger people are more likely to believe that the government should provide universal health care and tuition-free college, though these opinions are broadly popular outside this age bracket as well.

Conservatives respond to this development with a predictable mix of hyperventilation and condescension. Yet it is easy to miss the motivating force behind this new political energy and the skepticism over capitalism it has unleashed. Central to this stance is the rejection of what the historian Ellen Meiksins Wood calls market dependence, where the market determines our access to all aspects of life. As Wood describes, under capitalism markets