The abolition of market capitalism is a necessary if not a sufficient condition of freedom. A market economy gives only the freedom to purchase your needs and beyond according to your income. You are not free to develop your talents only those that are marketable or saleable.
If you don't have inherited income or benefactors then you are forced to sell your labor and in a situation where globalisation has tended to make labor less and less able to extract a reasonable share of the pie from the owners of capital.
A market economy functions to bind the masses of people to a capitalist system. Bouregois democracy is a form of enslavement.
--- bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
> relevant to discussion some time ago.
>
> Print This Page
> Web| Jan 31, 2007
>
> Opinion
>
> Friedman, Free Market & Freedom
>
> The free market is the only mechanism that has ever
> been discovered for
> achieving participatory democracy. So spake Milton
> Friedman. But political
> freedoms may not flow naturally from economic
> freedoms...
>
> PRANAB BARDHAN
> BERKELEY
>
> The lives of two recently deceased nonagenarians,
> one a brutal military
> dictator, Augusto Pinochet, and the other a
> brilliant and influential
> economist, Milton Friedman, came into brief contact
> three decades back –
> and it landed the economist in political
> controversy.
>
> Friedman met Pinochet in 1975 during a lecture tour
> to Chile, and critics
> of Friedman, unfairly charged him, a champion of
> freedom, with endorsing
> the military regime. What did soften him somewhat
> toward that regime was
> its eagerness to listen to the economic advice of
> the "Chicago boys" on
> the value of free markets. Beyond the ephemeral
> oddities of personal
> behavior, there is a substantive issue worth
> pondering, particularly on
> the occasion of "Milton Friedman Day," celebrated on
> January 29, 2007.
>
> Friedman openly gave primacy to economic freedom
> over political freedom.
> In his 1994 introduction to the 50th anniversary
> edition of Hayek’s Road
> to Serfdom, he categorically stated: "The free
> market is the only
> mechanism that has ever been discovered for
> achieving participatory
> democracy."
>
> In this, he seems to have gone beyond his line of
> thought expressed in the
> classic 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, where he
> stated: "History
> suggests only that capitalism is a necessary
> condition for political
> freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition."
>
> His 1994 statement implies that economic freedom is
> a necessary and
> sufficient condition for political freedom. This
> important systemic issue
> in the transition paths of many developing countries
> today has not been
> adequately discussed.
>
> Take the two largest countries in the world, China
> and India. The last
> quarter century of history in China suggests that
> while there has been
> dramatic progress in economic freedom in the sense
> of expansion of market
> reform, it has not been sufficient to bring about a
> substantial expansion
> of political freedom. The first four decades of
> India after independence
> in 1947 show that a considerable amount of political
> freedom was quite
> compatible with what Friedman would consider large
> restrictions on
> economic freedom in the form of heavy bureaucratic
> regulations and control
> over the economy. (Many years back in a conference
> when Friedman
> attributed the widely-acclaimed postwar advance of
> the Japanese economy,
> in contrast to the relative stagnation of the Indian
> economy, to the
> regulations and controls in the latter, I pointed
> out to him that the
> Japanese state was not particularly a paragon of
> non-interference. His
> answer, unfalsifiable as it happened to be, was that
> the Japanese economy
> would have done even better without the state
> interference!)
>
> It is possible that a quarter century is not long
> enough for the effects
> of economic freedom in China to work out in
> political liberalization, and
> people point to other East Asian countries – South
> Korea, Taiwan – where
> capitalism, which thrived under initial decades of
> authoritarianism, may
> have paved the way for the eventual ushering in of
> democracy. But the
> police state in China shows no signs of loosening
> its grip soon, despite
> the dramatic progress in the opening of the economy.
> While there has been
> some relaxation in individual expressions of
> thought, the state never
> fails to clamp down on political activities that
> have even a remote chance
> of challenging the monopoly of power of the central
> authority. Some
> observers have even claimed that the large numbers
> of reported local
> disturbances in recent years in different parts of
> China – mainly around
> economic issues like land acquisitions, toxic
> pollution or mass lay-offs
> from state-owned enterprises – have allowed the
> central government to
> scapegoat and punish local officials, localize and
> diffuse unrest,
> identify discontented groups before they can
> coordinate across regions,
> and retain its tight control over the citizenry as a
> whole.Elsewhere in
> Asia, leaders in Singapore, poster boys of economic
> freedom in the eyes of
> many, have continued for decades to repress
> political freedom. Lee Kuan
> Yew’s famed "Asian values" were market-friendly, but
> not very hospitable
> to political dissent.
>
> In the Heritage Foundation ranking of countries in
> terms of their Economic
> Freedom Index for 2006, India’s rank, even after a
> decade and half of
> market reform, is much below that of Hong Kong,
> Singapore, Saudi Arabia,
> Kuwait, Cambodia, Kenya, Uganda and most of Latin
> America. Yet over
> several decades India has proved itself a vibrant,
> though unwieldy,
> democracy. Friedman sometimes made a distinction
> between political freedom
> and "human freedom." In terms of both, whether you
> take the well-known
> scores for political rights and civil liberties
> assigned by Freedom House,
> or the overall democracy scores given out by the
> Economist Intelligence
> Unit, India performs much better than those
> countries ranked far superior
> in economic freedom. Economic freedom does not seem
> to be a necessary
> condition for political freedom.
>
> A look at the history of Western Europe does not
> clearly show that
> economic freedom, or "Manchester liberalism,"
> brought about the victories
> of democracy. Theorists of democracy have often
> pointed to many other
> political or structural factors. For example, some
> ascribe the extensions
> of franchise and other democratic rights for the
> working class in the 19th
> century in Britain to the rivalry and conflicts
> between traditional
> aristocracy and the rising industrial bourgeoisie.
> Others suggest that
> democracy in Europe came as part of the political
> elite’s strategy to
> prevent widespread social unrest. In mid-19th
> century France, Louis
> Napoleon shrewdly used the restoration of universal
> male suffrage to play
> the landed classes against the urban; he even
> reportedly advised the
> Prussian government in 1861 to extend universal
> suffrage, because "in this
> system the conservative rural population can vote
> down the liberals in
> cities."
>
> In India it is arguable that the survival of
> political and human freedom,
> against all odds and at a time when government
> control over the economy
> was pervasive, had something to do with the fact
> that the elite was
> heterogeneous and fractured. No individual group
> could
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