roachboy

i take it that "the invisible hand" ends up being god.
there are so many problems in going from the level of metaphysical statements about the "eternal principles" that capitalism is supposed to embody to the discontinuous and problematic historical reality of capitalism as a mode of production in the actually existing world that it is hard to know where to start a transposition game. or even if its worth doing.

it simply is not the case that actually existing capitalism can be mapped onto the fantasy markets you find in adam smith--any more than actually existing america can be usefully understood as a community of yeoman farmers.
you can't get started.
it's a waste of time.

competition does not mean a single thing---read some nietzsche. if you want to fetishize an abstract notion of competition, it seems to me that you have to necessarily extend that into notions of hierarchy--so following nietzsche, there are formal/bureaucratic hierarchies that exempt agents from competition in any meaningful sense---there are economic and social hierarchies which are arbitrary relative to this idea of competition uber alles--even if actors from a seriously advantaged economic position and ones from a seriously disadvantaged one "compete" in the giant wrestling match of some "market" the folk without the arbitrary advantages--say material resources--will loose. that is about attrition and resources more often than it is about abilities or "fit"----you can go on and on with this sort of thing.

and the claim that more and cheaper goods is necessarily an index of anything beyond the availability of more and cheaper goods is a strange one. again, it takes nothing about the historical world into account. think about, say, the effects of systematic american dumping of agricultural overproduction in dairy or corn onto southern hemisphere countries in the context of structural adjustment programs---more and cheaper goods has generally meant the destruction of food self-sufficiency to the exclusive advantage of american corporate agricultural interests--if you can figure a way to equate dependency with an improvement in the quality of life, go for it: i could use a laugh.

and this is not even really STARTING to contrast the metaphysics of markets with the actually existing historical world---this is all still inside the distant world of religious faith---which are aspects of the historical world in the way that any other fiction is.

generally, the way these arguments go is the accumulation of a vast heap of "exceptions"---well this is an exception, that a distortion, that a mitigating circumstance---if only "pure competition" if only "pure" markets, everything would be hunky dory--if only these distortions would stop always everywhere happening. but you'd think this would eventually pose a problem of the argument itself, particularly when the pile of distortions and unfortunate mitigating factors is exponentially bigger than the examples of "pure" competition/markets, once the world is expanded beyond the front and back covers of "the wealth of nations"...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite