The Global Market's Syntactic Structure of Inverted-Meaning

John McMutry

An Excerpt from John McMurtry's book Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 52-54

"On the surface, preference for 'the global free market' is dinned into the heads of publics by slogans saturating the corporate media around the clock, and by clubbings, tear-gas and rubber bullets if the slogans don't imprint; but underneath the instituted violence and propaganda, a primitive syntax of value equations is always at work preparing the public mind for acquiescence. Freedom is equated with 'the free market', and 'globalisation' is, in turn, equated with transnational corporate rights to all of the world's resources. Thus, the question is permanently made to arise against the opposition to this global occupation: How could any sane person not believe in the self-evident principles of freedom and global interconnection? Although the slogans trail in their wake the regulating principles of cultural genocide as their system of meaning, this way of seeing masks the destructive consequences as the triumph of freedom.

Those who oppose 'free trade' and, thus, 'the free market', are by the same value-set inversion perceived as opposed to human freedom and cross-cultural exchange. The only issue for those governed by this frame of reference is how to ensure rapid acceptance of this 'freedom' across human borders. This is the global  marketeers' autistic circle, and nothing breaks into its final certidude—as long as it is acquiesced in. Conformity to the value-set is all the while perfected by media and academic idealisation, whose function is to reproduce this group-mind circle, while repelling all facts which expose its life-destructive effects.

Freedom = the Free Market is the grounding equation of this ruling doctrine and the system it legitimises. The further equivalence of the free market to the global corporate system is, in turn, unthinkingly assumed. What is not seen in these non-sequitur transitions is that the free market is, in fact, the opposite of the global corporate system. For the free market in principle rules out the domination of supply by corporate oligopolies and intra-firm international trade which now rule trade and investment across the world. Just as foundationally, any true free market rules out the domination of demand by oligopolist firms' pervasive advertising, domination of public regulators by political funding and media control, and semi-monopoly of public contract bids. Yet these contradictions between the ruling doctrine and the structure of reality are contradictions that the regulating mind-set cannot discern because it rules out reflection of itself.

The grounding equation of the system thus becomes extended to mean an extraordinary and absurd master assumption: Freedom = the Free Market = the global Corporate System. Conversely, it allows from this primitive regulating equation that those who oppose the global corporate system must also oppose the free market and are, thus, the Enemy to human freedom itself. Consequently, the negative corollary of the grounding equation of the doctrine becomes Opponents of the Global Corporate System = Opponents of the Free Market = Opponents of Freedom. We have seen the genocidal terror for dissenting societies which this primeval value-set has entailed over much of the last century. The world's indigenous and subsistence farming peoples have been suffering it for over five hundred years.

This primitive assumption-set has, in the surface world of global market ideology, many elaborations of substitution and reversal which together generate an entire omnibus ideological programme. In place of 'Freedom', the basic syntax of the doctrine also substitutes for the prime term 'Democracy', 'Prosperity', and 'Development'. One can discern the locks of linkage here by trying to find where any of these declared master values is anywhere publicly distinguished, or conceived as in opposition. Each of these concepts, that is, is substituted for any other in the primitive set of equations. The convenience of ideological defence or aggression then triggers this programme of false equivalences into repetitive assertion.

At the same time, the mind-set inverts, at will, the order of equations so that the following structure of equations simultaneously becomes the automatic and overriding programme of 'Free World' discourse: Global Corporate System = Free Market =  Freedom = Democracy = Prosperity =Development. Accordingly, in converse, opponents of the global corporate system become the Enemy of each and all of these goods as invalidation requires, so that the original equation becomes by negation: Opponents of the Global Corporate System = Opponents of the Free Market = Opponents of Freedom = Opponents of Democracy = Opponents of Prosperity = Opponents of Development.... Precocious assumption of the doctrine's foundational false equations has fatal consequences. The opposition fails to target what it opposes in public, so the remainder of the chain of false equations which the public has been conditioned to assume recoils on their criticism. Because they say they are opposed to 'free trade' and 'globalisation', they are assumed by conditioned minds to be opposing freedom and international interconnectedness as such—an impossible position to defend. It is as if the opponents of human slavery were to assert in compliance with the slaveownner's language game that they opposed 'the rights of private property'."   

As a supplement I recommend the videos provided below on discussions with Noam Chomsky regarding what socialism and libertarianism actually mean.