Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

We continue the process – started on 30 January 2012 – of publishing as posts selected extracts, sometimes updated, from our Mission Statement. Today we attack the market economy.

 CAVEAT EMPTOR!

2 February 2012

The blog is opposed to the market economy in all circumstances.

The market economy is based on competition between human beings. It contemplates with equanimity the division of people into winners and losers – a tiny elite of the comfortably off sitting on top of a mass of more or less miserable wretches.

Antigone1984, by contrast, believes in an economy based on cooperation between human beings. We support Marx when he says: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).

We use the terms “market economy”, “the free market” and “capitalism” interchangeably.

The free market can be defined as the provision of the shoddiest possible goods or services at the highest possible prices.

However, the market economy is not the only show in town.

There are many different ways of organising an economy. Only you won’t hear about them in the media. The media don’t want you to know. Day in day out, the media pump out the free market mantra: “There is no alternative” (Margaret Thatcher, passim).  It is a lie.

While the blog is opposed to the market economy in all circumstances, forced to give a view as to which might be the lesser of two evils, then, albeit without much enthusiasm, we would prefer small businesses to giant corporations.

The blog supports the view of the economist E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977) that “small is beautiful”. Hence, the smaller the economic unit, the better.

However, small traders are not necessarily saints. In fact, they operate in the original market economy – the market. Market stalls with good apples at the front may conceal rotten apples at the back – and those at the back are the ones you are likely to be sold. As soon as a money relationship develops between human beings it erodes the human relationship.

Caveat emptor!

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