Economic liberalism is the child of two modern subversions, one against God and the other against kings. It constitutes the third subversion: that waged against human communities. It is anti-ecological.
1. It is the practice, depicted later as a scientific theory, of a social life without divine positive law to direct, regulate and soften its brutal mechanisms, and without political authority to subject private interests to the major necessities of the common good and so maintain a certain indispensable equilibrium and stability, a superior justice. And so material, and above all financial, social power develops all its effects without hindrance. The pursuit of the highest profit and yield, domination of the market, and the monopoly of goods, and thereby of power and honours, even to the buying of consciences, prevails over every other consideration.
Such is the materialist civilisation, or rather such is the triumph over Christian civilisation of the old talmudic concept of existence, become the basis of Anglo-Saxon society, calvinist and puritan: wealth is a sign of blessing!
2. Such a theory of life in society would in itself be quite inhuman. To invite millions upon millions of men freed from all constraint and from all moral reserve, to organise and lead their lives as they like, guided only by their immediate material interests, constitutes the most senseless manifesto of social revolution. Such a frenzy for economic freedom implies a radical negation of all the natural factors of ecological equilibrium, for want of which man becomes his own worst enemy! All family, communitarian and corporative prudence will be banished from individual relationships, as will all political order and any fraternal spirit of charity.
3. The practice of this liberalism is even more monstrous still. For it gives rise – above and beyond the billions of individuals freed from every law, or rather deprived of all protection by virtue of the System – to an even more powerful owning class. This class is authorised by the System to enrich itself still more, to dominate the economy, and to consolidate itself in dynasties, coalitions and multinational societies, it alone benefiting from the social cadres, from the ecological prudence and force which it keeps for itself and refuses to others, especially the poor, in order to guarantee its own prosperity! For such is the hidden malice of the liberal capitalist system.
But this prudence of caste which is maintained amid a theory and climate of general imprudence, this dynastic family ecology whose strength lies in the general dissolution of society, finishes by being contaminated itself by the very anarchy it preaches. And plutocracy, having systematically decomposed society, meets its own ruin in this very same system.
Just as a loop added to the letter of a word enlarges it out of all proportion and makes it difficult to see what precedes and follows it, detracting from its logical meaning, so the liberal fixes his attention on mutual agreements, interpreting them as no more than a meeting of simple economic forces, without restraint, without subordination, without moral reserve, without human face, without family, without nation, without religion.
1. Such is "the market" in the eyes of a liberal – and in this matter the whole world has become liberal. The first consequence of this is that everything comes to be seen as merchandise. Everything can be bought and sold. The interest of human life is to buy and sell. Progress consists in producing more in order to sell and earn more, in buying in order to consume. The result of this is a prodigious acceleration and increase of exchanges, and a consequent increase in the production of goods, the mobilisation of savings, the commercialisation of everything including even cultural and religious goods, and a fantastic growth in consumption and waste, ending in a burning up and annihilation of the world’s natural resources.
Through the magic of the "market economy", the whole man, or every man, is at last able to satisfy his every need and desire in universal abundance. Liberal progress is fundamentally philanthropic.
2. It is to attain this ideal – which exclusively flatters the interests and passions of the human individual, his greed, envy and pride – that liberal capitalism has broken every barrier restraining its expansion, has overturned every obstacle and quashed every attempt at reaction.
Rural communal life was the first to be sacrificed to the demands of industrial progress. In England this involved the violent suppression of rural family smallholdings along with its system of enclosures. In France it involved the revolutionary abolition of common goods. Everywhere in the world it involved an exodus from the country and an urban concentration that immensely widened the labour market to the detriment of family ecology and its domestic prudence. Man thus becomes merchandise.
Later, liberal capitalism prevented the formation of new social cadres, such as working men’s unions and peoples’ friendly societies, but even more it prevented any national or religious re-awakening in the measure that they threatened to hamper the full liberty of the market, the absolute condition for general progress.
3. The price to be paid for the abundance of industrial goods and unlimited growth in consumption is only beginning to be felt by the majority. It is the loss of all freedom, the mutilation of any other life but that of the market, the impossibility of breaking out of this passion for having which, more than any other, strips and debases being. It is the alienation of the subject from objects, about which one discovers in the end that it is not just an innocent theory, but a system for plutocratic domination.
As long as free exchanges and contracts were effected within natural living communities, they remained civilised, empirically moderated by ecological prudence, moral justice and Christian charity. The measure of value, laws of exchange, mechanisms of competition and conditions for maximising profits remained almost unknown, such a study being of no interest other than theoretical. On the other hand, since liberalism has isolated the market and deprived it of every external rule, its free play has become the object of a deceitful science called "economics". Aristotle saw this as no more than a secondary science, "chrematistics", the science of the production and exchange of goods within the City. How right he was!
1. Modern "economic science" is therefore the systematic and practical knowledge of the mechanisms of the market, spontaneously instituted, set in motion, developed and automatically regulated by the free encounter and confrontation of individual interests in a society that is neither frozen or protected but open on principle to every initiative. And so at any given moment we find the various operators of the life of the economy – capital and labour, production and consumption – reciprocally informed, evaluated and balanced. Liberal society is in a state of spontaneous self-management. Economic science applies itself to knowing the mechanisms of this self-management.
2. In reality, this science of the market’s mechanisms is only of use to the owning classes, who alone have the effective freedom of entering or not into the play of the market and of directing a part of the market for their own convenience. The consumer needs to buy such and such a product immediately; the business man, the worker, the peasant need to gain a wage or some immediate profit for the work they have to offer; and the investor the interest of the capital on which he lives. All are constrained by need and tied to the particular character of their contribution. They arrive at the free market as job-seekers. The financier, on the other hand, with his "anonymous and vagabond fortune" (Philippe Duke of Orleans, 1899), is constrained by no necessity of time nor bound by any form of employment. He rules over the market and his knowledge of its mechanisms allows him to win every time.
And so economic science is at his exclusive service, unless the State gets involved. This science informs him how to obtain the maximum profit from his liquid funds in an unprotected market. In this way the great banks end up directing the whole game and in accordance with their own interests they steer the concentration of capital, industrial production, business and even the consumption of goods! This science, which is supposedly directed towards the maximum general prosperity, in fact facilitates the fatal process whereby money dominates the entire economic life – "freed" from every other constraint – and subjects it to the laws of its own profit. It is a very peculiar form of "philanthropy".
Human life on earth is regulated both divinely and naturally by secret harmonies, which prudence demands that we know and respect. Otherwise, God punishes the ungodly, nature takes its revenge on the imprudent, and society rebels against the false brother and excludes him. Liberalism should be acquainted with this boomerang effect. The idea of freedom, hurled by capitalism against every other power, will in its turn hit back. The vital force of traditional society used to be the family interest prudently managed. Liberalism has replaced this with the free individual pursuit of the maximum profit in a market without constraint, where money is the absolute deciding factor in everything. But "what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul", and even his life?
1. The benefits of liberal capitalism are obvious. They are: the fantastic increase in the production of material goods and the constant perfecting of the means of production; the increase in volume and mobility of capital investment; the unprecedented progress of the mechanisms of the market, and finally the growing satisfaction of individual needs, amplified and diversified beyond reason. It is a fine performance.
The most remarkable performance, and that most forcefully asserted by the liberal economists, consists in "the automatic information and regulation of economic activity by the free market", making this creature of liberalism "a highly desirable institution" (Aftalion).
2. The misdeeds of economic liberalism are nevertheless very grave. They consist essentially in the systematic destruction of other regulating factors of social life or in their degrading assimilation to the law of profit, and in the internal corruption of its own model of society – its inevitable "decomposition" (Schumpeter).
The system is wrongly criticised for the severe "crises ‘ it encounters in its ever accelerating progress. These crises come from a transitory lack of balance – so called "endogenous factors" – between production and consumption, supply and demand, means and ends. Hitherto the system had always surmounted them despite the crushing mediocrity of its leaders and appointed thinkers.
Capitalism’s unpardonable imprudence lies elsewhere. It lies in its blind obstinacy in destroying every force other than that of money and in crushing, exploiting and devouring every weakness which it believes it controls. The great crises which will block the system and bring about the collapse of the capitalist world will come from external causes, from "exogenous shocks", which will be unforeseen because unprovided for: the revenge of slaves against Money.
Economic liberalism places money and man, Having and Need, in a direct relationship without any need for mediation. It thus creates a collaboration, not of communitarian exchange, as it would seem, but of servitude, coupling the natural flow of the production of goods for consumption to the profit flow of money lent and repaid with usury. The whole of liberal economic science is the organisation of this parasitical addition of the capitalist flow to the economic flow, all for the purpose of its own maximum profit.
1. It was foreseeable that those exploited by the system, the proletariat of the 19th century, the third world of the 20th century, should become aware of this perfect trickery in order to pay back in kind. All they had to do was to stand together and maintain high demand in the face of short supply, at the risk of starvation; and in the face of high demand to maintain a meagre supply, come what may! It is the fight for wages, increases in the price of petrol... There comes a time when everyone is equally good at the game, equally devoid of scruples, and also just as exclusively focused on making a profit as is the capitalist class. Then, there is no great profit in the game for anyone.
The great epoch of capitalism is over. The liberal economy only runs now through habit. Enterprise is becoming paralysed; a generation of techno-bureaucrats is succeeding the class of the great employers. An egalitarian machine, without soul or brotherly kindness, has come – after the great liberal explosion – to replace the old communitarian life, the only profoundly human form of life. The computer has replaced freedom!
2. The outcome may be dramatic. Capitalist cynicism flaunts itself shamelessly: money rules and dominates everything. It will provoke the vengeance of those who are duped by it, and it will incite the revolt of its slaves. It will be enough for them to denounce the hypocrisy of the system and overturn it to shouts of Freedom through an uprising of the human masses or by force of arms. General strikes, revolutions, dictatorships, nationalisation of foreign goods.
Faced with these "exogenous shocks", neo-capitalism imagines that it can translate them into "collective costs", and that a price can be paid to bring them under control. In vain. To struggle against ideas and armed revolution requires a "supplement of soul", a spirit of military heroism, a civic sense, a solidarity – all forces and virtues that have been killed by liberalism. These non-market values, so-called "externalities"… because they are external to the market, neo-capitalism dreams of "internalising" them and promoting their rebirth with the price of money. It will pay for more children to be born, for military honour, for prayers in Church, for submission to the law, for social generosity!
Capitalism ends by finding itself caught between an enemy that is not for sale and its need for vital and spiritual resources that cannot be bought on any market. It must therefore step back before the politician and the soldier; it must come to terms with them or else founder in fire and blood.