Re: understanding Ed

WSN,

Speaking of hitting the nail on the head. Alan raises the proper criticism
of market ideology. The rhetoric of the market is idealism. Abstracting
markets from the concrete social formation in which they appear and
neglecting the central dynamic that drives the development of the
historical system (of which markets are only a expression) leads to the
false assumption that markets represent the essence of capitalism (or
whatever they want to call the world-economy) and that markets are in
reality what they are in the ideal. (Let's leave aside the correctness of
the worship of the market ideal.)

This bears on the claim made by somebody this afternoon that there is
something wrong with people blaming everything on capitalism because this
represents a form of economism. But capitalism is not just an economic
system. Separating economic systems from political systems or cultural
systems, etc., is an analytical operation. The reification of analytical
separation is what permits elites to falsely argue that political
democracy exists where substantive economic freedom and equality do not.
Rather we live in a historical system whose overall character is
capitalist and this is a fundamentally anti-democratic system.
Considering the world as a whole (which it really is) shows us that taking
political democracy by itself becomes a ideological weapon to legitimate
substantive inequality.

The rhetoric of markets by pro-capitalists is just like the rhetoric of
democracy by policy elites: both are designed to dissimulate the tyranny
of capital.

Andy Austin