When is regulated industry the free market? Never.
That’s a good idea
Food sovereignty is a good idea. It is good if the idea is that people who grow the food can eat the foods they grow and sell the excess food they grow.
La Via Campesina is a worldwide organization for food sovereignty.
They make a decent case for local farmers, peasants in many cases, to grow their food. They cite, in the September 4, 2020 blog post “It’s time to transform. It’s time to Globalize Solidarity, Localize Agriculture!” Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer who self-martyred himself when he and “thousands of farmers in Korea who lost their farm and livelihoods after the country decided to import its food. This policy had the blessing of the WTO.”
A few paragraphs later, La Via Campesina indicates that the food system, “enabled by this neo-liberal push, the global food system, right from the point of production, processing, and distribution, has come under the firm grip of a handful of Transnational Corporations.”
Their main point is governments have allowed corporations to take over food and agriculture, to import foods that displace local farmers and all for control and power.
Their article has, as the saying goes, lots of irons in the fire. Peasant-read farmer-rights is one important issue.
Incentivized (by who is another issue, but for La Via Campesina, mostly it means governments or government-approved corporations) monoculture farming is another issue. Neoliberalism is identified as a foe as is the misidentified “assault of free-market-capitalism on rural families.”
What they need is a free market.
The first two are important issues. Both examples reveal something common in governments, the usurpation of and monopolization of power. Abuse of power by the State will be addressed in another post.
The last two are less concrete. Neoliberalism sounds terrible. It must be stopped, whatever it is. The over and oft used free-market capitalism is another verbal bomb, but now lacks the sobering punch of neoliberals. Both are used as boogeymen phrases meant to conjure nearly insurmountable foes. Such phrases succeed to polarize and divide, but both phrases mean nothing, or they mean anything, or they mean whatever the speaker wants which gets us back to them meaning nothing.
What do you mean?
Neoliberal. The phrase means nothing. A quick search on Youtube or the internet will yield a lot of content about neoliberalism. I’ve read and watched some of it.
The Three Minute Theory Youtube channel has a video about neoliberalism which states it is the “idea that society should be shaped by the free market and that the economy should be deregulated and privatized.” According to that same video series, neoliberalism is the belief, “that people were free to live their lives without a great deal of interference from the government.”
Noam Chomsky discusses neoliberalism and reaches different conclusions, stating “specifically designed to undercut democracy.” Chomsky says privatization undercuts democracy, which seems to stand as a thought. His next statement assumes any power taken from the democracy is given to large, government-approved corporations which seems very much the antithesis of private entities, or, as in the Three Minute Theory suggestion that there is not a great deal of interference from the government.
Naomi Klein comments that neoliberalism is understood in Latin American countries as the “La Modelo.” She states, “Everybody knows what the model is. It’s the so-called Washington consensus. It’s the policy that has been imposed on Latin America, first through military dictatorships then as conditions attached to loans that were needed during the economic crisis—the so-called debt crisis—of the 1980s.”
Patrick Iber, in this newrepublic.com piece, writes, “The neoliberals sought, Slobodian writes, to ‘encase’ markets, not to liberate them. Their project was not anarchy: It was a global system that sufficiently ordered the world so that capitalism would be safe from certain forms of political interference.”
There’s more. Each article or video offers some different points and argues them well. Iber wraps his essay up nicely with the concession that it is a nearly impossible web of confusion then adds, “[p]reserving the rights of capital is the goal, even when that means sacrificing democratic demands. That is why our world is a more neoliberal one than it once was, and why it matters. However fractious and internally contradictory neoliberal thought may be, and however overused it can be as a term, it is describing something real.”
Klein, in her video, comments that what she saw happening in Iraq in the 1980s looked very much like what had happened in Latin America. She says it is, “social re-engineering of society in the interests of corporations, which is what I think we’ve been doing under the banner of free trade.”
Corporatism under the guise of free trade is the very thing La Via Campesina identifies when they call out neoliberalism as part of the problem. Corporatism, governments granting preferred status on corporations, is what they are calling free-market-capitalism. It is anything but a free market.
Neoliberalism, as argued, is all of those things. The question remains, what is it? The closest I can find is it is the government getting in the way of the proper free market.
What kind of capitalism was that?
Capitalism is a stupid phrase. It means nothing. It means anything.
Gary Chartier, in his essay, “Advocates of Freed Markets Should Oppose Capitalism,” writes, “I distinguish three potential meanings of “capitalism” before suggesting that people committed to freed markets should oppose capitalism in my second and third senses.”
Chartier’s first sense “features personal property rights and voluntary exchanges of goods and services.”
Simple enough. You go to the store, buy your stuff, trade green pieces of paper for those things and go on your way.
Forms 2 and 3 are more complex. Either there is a relationship between the business and the government, take corn farming as an example. Or, in the third case, a state or the State can interfere with business in the form of licensures and operational licenses. Such barriers prevent the true freed markets since there is a barrier to entry to cut hair, for example.
A decent understanding of capitalism is the exchange of currency for goods or services. When you buy groceries or pay the lawn crew, that’s a voluntary exchange. When the government gets involved, say a trade policy between nations, then that no longer is capitalism. It has the new phrase of crony capitalism. Chartier’s point, if I can make it for him, is all three forms of capitalism are called by the same word. Only the first one even comes close.
Capitalism is meaningless because it is used too often to name too many transactions that are not.
The overlooked issue
To their credit, La Via Campesina does identify the issue.
Governments have favored corporations and arranged deals that push out local farmers. Their post identifies 6 trade deals, including TPP and TTIP which do not help local farmers. Of all this, La Via Campesina writes, “[i]t must stop. Time has come for us to take back control of our food systems and promote local production of our food systems because the importance of our demand is more evident than ever: we must continue to fight for food sovereignty. That is, people in each region must have autonomy in the production of their food.”
Quite right. Food sovereignty, then, is decentralized food.
The how of that is the puzzle. In the US, at least one bill remains alive which addresses decentralizing meat so local butchers everywhere may sell to their customers. That bill is Representative Massie’s PRIME Act.
Part of my beef with La Via Campesina is the use of such phrases as neoliberal and free-market capitalism. I don’t know their intent, but I can guess they mean to move readers. Those terms elicit an emotional reaction, and very successfully. Farmers needing to sell their foods to feed all families also reaches the emotional level.
Food sovereignty’s fight is misnamed and the enemy misidentified. Capitalism is vital for every local farmer. Without voluntary transactions, he’s done.
In the 1982 Washington Post article, “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,” editor Charles Peters writes, “We also favor freeing the entrepreneur from the kind of economic regulation that discourages healthy competition. But on matters of health and safety, we know there must be vigorous regulation because the same capitalism that can give us economic vitality can also sell us Pintos, maim employees, and pollute our skies and streams.”
I’m all in on the first part. What Peters seems to miss is that government regulations have done nothing to make industry safer. Government regulation has only made items more expensive. Consider the centralized beef industry. When a case of E. coli O157:H7 is detected, up to 100,000 pounds of beef can be affected causing issues in dozens of states. I know there is a retort, and I’ve addressed some of that on this podcast episode with Pete Kennedy, former president of the Farm To Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
The confusion in Peters’ comment might be in line with neoliberalism. Writing freeing entrepreneurs and vigorous regulation in the same paragraph seems peculiar. James Harrigton of the Words & Numbers podcast called that paragraph, “world-class nonsense.” Free markets and government regulations simply don’t mix.
Writing for the American Institute of Economic Research, Phil Magness writes in his article “The Pejorative Origins of the Term ‘Neoliberalism’,”, “[f]or a movement with next to zero actual claimants, neoliberalism attracts an inordinate amount of scorn, much if it viciously profane and spiteful.”
Scorn gets attention. I contend it generates the wrong attention focused on the wrong thing. The right attention and the right thing is the farmers, all of them, and decentralizing the food system. Take the teeth out of the tiger, so to speak.
Food sovereignty, the idea that we should be able to buy from local farmers, is a good idea. The movement seems to have found some demons. I think they are fighting the right war but the wrong battles. The series has no determined stopping point. I hope you enjoy these posts.
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