Intellectuarium

To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘labour power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without also affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of man’s labour power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscaped defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardised, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.

Their economy, instead of being based on the idea of buying, was based on the idea of giving. Everybody gave a share of whatever she or he had to everyone else. So, a man who had grown a lot of oranges gave some to everybody he knew. A woman who made cheeses gave some to everybody she knew. And so on. Everybody ended up with all the oranges, apples, cheeses and everything else that they needed, which is all an economy is there for in the first place. And if, for example, the man with the oranges had something go wrong like his orange trees getting a disease and dying, then it didn’t mean that he had to starve because everyone carried on giving him things even though they didn’t get any oranges back. They had everything else so missing out on oranges wasn’t that terrible. And as soon as the man got some new orange trees he’d start growing oranges and giving them away again. Economists from all the other countries of the world had heard of this idea and said that it couldn’t work because people were naturally greedy and selfish and that they liked having more things than everybody else. But Illyrians continued to make it work in complete disregard of economic theory, which was very rude of them in the opinion of the economists. And because they weren’t always competing with each other and trying to make a profit, the Illyrians ended up being friendly and generous to one another and they were the happiest people in the world. It made all the economists mad.

[Capitalism’s] concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is anti-human and intolerable in the deepest sense