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Through it all, Shkreli has been unapologetic about the huge price hikes he has engineered.
"No one wants to say it, no one's proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules," Shkreli said in an interview earlier this month. "And my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half or go 70 per cent but to go to 100 per cent of the profit curve."
The Real Free Market versus the Corporate System
The master term of the global system’s representation of itself is the
nominative subject, ‘the market’. ‘The market’ is always in control,
always infallible, and always to be obeyed. It requires, demands, punishes
and restructures societies’ production, distribution and survival across
the planet. With transnational corporate oligopolies as its moving parts,
it is the immutable law-giver of humanity’s material condition. Or so it
is believed.
In this Old Testament conception of ‘the market’, an invisible and
unerring hand of stern judgement produces economic miracles one day,
and economic meltdowns the next, usually of the same societies. It pushes
stockmarkets to new highs, attacks government social spending, transforms
social orders overnight, and generally comports itself in ways that are
understood as once God was comprehended by the godfearing. It is always
right, no more resistable than the laws of physics, and deviation from its
rule must inevitably end in disaster.
Yet we find that whenever we go to any real market, we move within
an entirely different world. We may be in central London or Paris, an Indian
or African village, an older town of Canada or Germany on the weekend,
a Latin American plaza or a Far Eastern backstreet on any morning –
everywhere there is a real market, a living community gathering together
to exchange what each needs to enable their and their families’ lives.
This free market is not remotely like the oligopolist corporate system
which now calls itself ‘the market’. It is not an hypostacized aggregate of
borderless money investors focused solely on having more money demand,
nor controlled by transnational corporations and financial syndicates
entering and exiting societies in nano-seconds to increase profit margins
as the single ruling objective of their being. There seems nothing in
common between this real free market we enjoy in the flesh, and the
corporate model which re-engineers societies across the world as ‘the global
free market’. How could such opposites be so pervasively called by the same
name?
The free market we experience in real life needs to be remembered to
recover from the cultural amnesia within which we are now submerged.
The real free market is made up of ordinary people meeting in a publicly
owned space, some looking and some buying and almost as many
displaying and selling what they have made or grown. The goods are
generally foodstuffs, mostly fresh, often live, grown typically by their
sellers, with personally made handicrafts on the open tables or ground
in between. No-one force-plays with a sudden invasion or desertion of
money demand. All are friendly and jovial as on a festival day. The buyers
and sellers inquire and talk with one another of the health of their families,
their shared community, and local affairs. Not a place in the real free market
can be privately owned, and the quality of goods is not hidden under wraps
or chemically engineered for false appearances.
Goods are sold without packaging or in recycled paper. The articles for
sale serve a need, not artificially contrived and ad-stimulated wants.
People walk within a community space without blacktop expressways and
fossil-fuel machines walling their lives in. Creation of desire by the
continuous operant conditioning of sex and power images does not
deform minds. There is no monopolist or oligopolist distortion of supply
or demand for the competition of alternatives is open. Every good sold,
unless the market is being undermined, expresses the local region’s
culture. Prices of different vendors are immediately comparable, directly
negotiable with the owner, and hard sells cannot entrap buyers in the open
public venue. Relations of community mediate everywhere, and no closed
doors, big-box conditioning apparatuses and distant manipulation schemes
by corporate head offices control transactions.
No non-contributing stock-owner can make a profit out of the real free
market. Bank and credit cards do not structure the exchanges, nor
appropriate a hidden margin from either vendor or buyer. Paper debts
and interest charges cannot enter the producer-and-buyer-controlled
process. No waste or pollution is generated by the direct transactions of
individuals exchanging for what they need, and nothing is sold to harm
people’s lives. Because no-one from outside the market can get rich from
producing nothing for it, it is democratic. Most profoundly, the sequence
of exchanges serves the growth of life on both sides, not the growth of money
as an end in itself.
The real free market was a great advance of the community’s control
of its own life when it was no longer subjugated to kings, lords or municipal
monopolies for the privilege of its existence. It was an opening of liberty
when ordinary individuals could freely exchange with each other in a public
space to acquire the foods or crafts they chose to produce or buy. Money
here was not a weapon to reduce others to instruments. Money in the real
market is a universal medium of exchange that enables individuals to
transact across differences of jobs and goods without incommensurables
of worth standing in the way.
I want to explain a joke about the "capitalist" system. The joke as usual is on all of us.
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