Jeff Bezos is requiring the Washington Post to prioritize opinion articles about personal liberties and free markets.
He is clearly an egomaniac trying to make an established and important news source into his personal propaganda board. A deeper look at his requirements shows the contradiction between the way capitalism and the state describe themselves and what discourse they consider to fit those descriptions.
People trying to promote capitalism and the state use words that mean something endearing to us, the people, but to them using those words is just a way to do whatever they want. Chomsky describes the tactic in his book Manufacturing Consent. He talks about how capitalism and the state strip democracy of its meaning and use the word as a way to do whatever they want.
The phrases “personal liberty” and “free markets” can produce discourse revealing capitalism and the state’s lack of redeeming qualities or good endearing ethical things for the people. Good endearing things for the people are antithetical to capitalism and the state which is antithetical to a radical interpretation of “free markets” and “personal liberties”. Capitalism and the state are founded on slavery and will always be slavery. They share the aim of concentrating power rather than creating more freedom and liberty by distributing power.
Free Markets
The phrase “free market” does not mean what it is supposed to mean when Jeff Bezos says it. When he says it, it is a way to call forth any market-based scenario that could benefit his market goals. He is not as invested in a discourse that displaces him for an idea of free markets that benefits more people.
If free markets exist, it would consist of people being able to sell things freely without requirements of permits, without taxation, and so on. That is not the case. Capitalism does use markets but how free they are is not important. Capitalism uses markets to centralize power. The state has the same purpose which is why they can work together.
Furthermore, capitalism, which Bezos supports, is a slave market, and the phrase free market is used to replace the largely controversial and many times negative word capitalism with a so-called positive stand-in implying people have the ultimate ability to make a living and prosper as a market person.
Even if true the implication isn’t a good one, because not everyone wants to be a market person. To make all life about markets or basic survival about markets is largely inhumane. People should be able to survive from their own labor and community without needing to go through a market first. A life without markets is rare in capitalism if at all possible, because of the dictatorship of the markets.
Then the requirement that people must write about free markets would not exclude one from writing about anything they want. The interpretation is left up to the person. All one has to do is dispute what a free market is and if we live up to the definition.
What is a free market?
The most common definition for a free market is a market with no rules that unfolds according to the goodness of business deals and is governed by something like supply and demand.
The application of the idea immediately falls apart once someone makes rules, or the markets fail to create goodness, orsomeone monopolizes an industry and then lobbies for rules to grow their monopoly, or someone needs to get bailed out, or supply and demand crashes the economy. After the idea of a free market comes into contact with reality, what are the rules of a free market? No longer free.
The truth remains undefeated. To continue talking about free markets beyond the point of them falling apart as a concept that works with capitalism and the state, would begin to answer questions about what to do in a truly free market with no rules.
Things with no rules tend to be anarchistic. The contradiction between the idea of an anarchistic free market and capitalism would tear capitalism apart if anyone were ever truthful about attempting it.
The more beneficial theories for building a free market would move towards spontaneous cooperation. Such ideas would possibly be censored by the Bezos-controlled Washington Post even though it is exactly what they asked for.
Spontaneous cooperation means people work together without planning or structure to dictate what people do. The structure and planning occur from the activity that moves towards a beneficial end.
For example, a community needs clothes, food, housing, art and medicine. People automatically get to work on the part that they see fit for themselves. They accomplish providing that for the community and themselves by solving all the problems and answering all the questions along the way to provide their product.
The process is not hard to imagine because it is naturally how we get things done. The difference is that it would be done out of common sense and good will rather than an outside logic of markets that can conflict with the spontaneous processes of building community, survival, and prosperity.
The spontaneous cooperation alternative is the result of the development of culture. People should become more accustomed to new ways of thinking about what is possible and build up routines, processes, and systems that match their organic needs and ambitious goals.
Spontaneous cooperation applied to a market would make it free. There would be no outside power to dictate the market according to other ideological laws. For example, power would sway much more easily, if (through the market) Black people in America could keep their stable economic communities instead of losing them to redlining, lynching, and other systemic sabotage. The power given to racist White people would fade more easily and quickly. The dynamics creating the slave market make the very question of a free market a footnote in a larger conversation about power, production, and humanity.
Personal Liberty
The requirement to write about personal liberty is laughable coming from a strikebreaker. Personal liberties include the liberty to negotiate for one’s labor the way one wants. They go beyond that, but that would be one example of something that could be a popular idea to read about in the Washington Post.
Of course, a capitalist could make the rebuttal of having the personal liberty to have a business. This is true, but only if the business owner is doing all the work. If not, then the business shows the fundamental capitalist contradiction of the forfeiture of personal liberty to the one who purchased the labor. That purchase is the legal theft of liberty. The purchase can only be made under the foundation of theft of human life and property (property and people seized by the state and merchants). Paying for it is the bargain or compromise that saves the parties involved from warfare. Wage labor is negotiating a slave situation.
Only having the choice of for whom to be a slave and not having the choice to not be a slave at all ever certainly negates liberty. The law makes it legal to enslave others through a wage and yet capitalists and the state create an essential contradiction by calling it personal liberty.
The contradiction can only be solved by allowing business and personal liberty to go together only when there is no wage labor (paid slave labor). If one does all the work themself or gives a share of profits rather than a wage and so on, then that would be a different situation regarding personal liberty and labor. At the very least, when people can negotiate for their wages the way they want (including unions), then it can be said they have more personal liberty.
Freedom
The topic of freedom is key to both concepts of interest to Bezos. It is a common word capitalism and the state use to manipulate people.
One does not free oneself by getting their desires— they are beholden to the desire. Complete freedom— a freedom that excludes one from limits and consequences— is an illusion. To make it real can only be done through slavery which makes it the contradictory illusion it is.
Responsibility is the key word to understand freedom because the only ethical freedom is the one where responsibility and freedom go together. We need responsible markets not markets that act in ways that neglect the consequences of their choices.
The freedom promoted by the state and capitalism is not real. It is an illusion or a desire that is continuously chased—making it a good goal to rally people behind and mentally enslave them.
Conclusion
Capitalism and the state misuse positive virtuous attributes deceptively to perpetuate a cruel version of those words or the complete opposite.
In the case of free markets and personal liberty, Jeff Bezos and other people like him use those words to get away with slave markets and the infringement of liberty. The true meaning of those words would suggest that people could develop systems for spontaneous cooperation capable of maintaining markets that are completely free and that people could use their personal liberty to advocate for themselves and acquire the things they need to make use of their labor and will.
Those things seem to be contradictory to Bezos and his contemporaries’ aims. They tend to play the fence and try to claim things they do not live up to. When they are unclear with their words, when they monopolize, manipulate the government, control the press, and so on they clearly show they are up no good; leaving openings to create clear and long-lasting doctrine against them.
