Page 131 [131]
OCR
What can I hope for (from politics)? 1129 It is true that the self-regulation of the market is one of the fundamental principles of a free society, but we know that this principle has never become exclusive. On the contrary, in parallel with the dominance of market-type relations, the state extends its own control over ever more areas of society to counter-balance the unbearable consequences of profit-seeking competition and to maintain the ordered cooperation and security of the participants. The prevailing of a third principle is likewise a logical consequence of the system of freedom. It is the independence of local, workplace, professional, religious, cultural, etc. communities based on free association among citizens, legally protected from the state and market. ‘The joint prevalence and incessant struggle of these three — bureaucratic administration, the autonomy of communities and market relations (which is simultaneously competition and cooperation) — ensure the functioning of modern society. “Capitalism”, i.e., the profit-seeking, accumulative and therefore growthoriented version of market economy is only one of these principles. To simplify the situation: while the state controls the operation of the market (or does not), the market ensures (or does not) that the citizens possess a living independent of the state. For their part, the citizens exercise control (or do not) over those who govern the state. Whenever an attempt is made to eliminate any part of this system, the result is always the total vulnerability of the individual and the immoderate waste of resources. It appears that legal security, private property, democracy and the market are inseparable from each other. Not for nothing does an attempt to separate them produce a crisis. The relation between the constitutional state, capital and civil society does not usually tend to be balanced, however. It is by no means peaceful; it is rather a ceaseless war between opposing interests. The aim of the market participants is to free themselves of the control of local society (citizens + public institutions). But when they succeed — first in the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19" century, more recently within the framework of economic globalism — they thereby unleash an avalanche of social and natural catastrophes upon the world, which, one way or another, must be followed by the correction (or collapse) of the system. For the interests of the owners of capital is to realise their profits as investments on the one hand and to decrease their costs on the other. The former drives them to constantly increase the volume of reproduction and the latter to pass on the natural, social and cultural costs of growth to others, if possible. The usual conclusion from this is that capitalism is incompatible with ecological sustainability. Based on
