The black utopia of total competition

There can be no doubt that the totalitarian market, as we know it as the condition and functional sphere of capitalism, has the totalitarian state of the absolutist regimes and its bureaucratic apparatuses as its father. Thus, private capitalist entrepreneurship, which emerged through world trade and domestic system/putting-out-system, was also a changeling of this socio-historical constellation. However, it was inevitable that the new social figure of the private "factory owner" would gain an increasing momentum of its own in the context of growing markets. To the same extent that the logic of money-making initiated by absolutism began to take over social reproduction and became the medium of social relations, a structure of specific "interests" of the various functionaries was inevitably formed on this new ground of society.

The great merchant lords of the Renaissance had already developed a considerable self-confidence vis-à-vis the early modern royal houses. The great putting-out-system drivers and manufacturing capitalists soon took advantage of this. In a society that was becoming increasingly dynamic, particular self-interests gained momentum. The emerging market economy entrepreneurship secured a strong position in society, but at the same time was no longer bound by the traditional structure of the authoritarian hierarchy. This new breed of "unattached masters" did not look back on great and ancient family traditions, but had often risen from the yeast of the "people" themselves.

The unmistakable disgustingness of these figures, exhibited for example in the gallery of Honore de Balzac's "Comedie humaine" (1799-1850), fuelled conservative, backward-looking resentment clinging to the old authority for a long time. Since then, the ideologies of "equality of opportunity" and reactionary (originally aristocratic) elitism, state conservatism and economic freedom have competed with each other in the metier of socio-economic cut-throatism to see which doctrine produces the worse characters and the worse consequences; this noble contest is probably undecided. In any case, the mercurial mobility of money also began to make the social structure mobile. The milieu of social decline, exhaustion and impoverishment for the many was at the same time the milieu of advancement for the few: for the lucky, clever, elbow-checking, enrichment-hungry and "successful achievers".

These creatures of the market, who thought of themselves as subjects of the "new mobility" and indeed were, felt increasingly constricted and harassed by the state bureaucratic regimentation of the absolutist apparatuses. Thus they had to produce their own ideology of rule, which not only legitimised their specific interests, but was also able to formulate an explanation of the world and a comprehensive image of man, which has since become hegemonic for the entire Western thought of modernity up to the present day and is currently more dominant than ever before. This makes it all the more interesting to uncover the historical roots of this free-market ideology of so-called liberalism.

The name alone is not only misleading, but a downright perfidious distortion. For the activity and mentality that until then had been considered one of the lowest and most despicable among all peoples and times, namely the transformation of money into more money as an end in itself, the dependent wage labour included in it and thus the unspeakable self-abasement of having to sell oneself, was reinterpreted as the epitome of human freedom. This sullying of the concept of freedom, which culminates in the praise of self-prostitution, has the most astonishing career in the history of human thought.