First though, I shall refer to a small passage from Naomi Klein's 2007 book, 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism'
https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/
that is in large measure about the economics of the late Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics who was one of the influencers of Thatcherism, and integral to the CIA plot that destroyed the democratically elected Allende Government in Chile on September 11, 1973 in order to bring in an American economic experiment of rebuilding an economy by shock and awe. (That was the original '9/11', as Klein has pointed out.)
Like all fundamentalist faiths, Chicago School economics is, for its true believers, a closed loop. The starting premise is that the free market is a prefect scientific system, one in which individuals, acting on their own self-interested desires, create the maximum benefits for all. It follows ineluctably that if something is wrong within a free-market economy — high inflation or soaring unemployment — it has to be because the market is not truly free. There must be some interference, some distortion in the system. The Chicago solution is always the same: a stricter and more complete application of the fundamentals.
When Friedman died in 2006, obituary writers struggled to summarise the breadth of his legacy. One settled on this statement: "Milton's mantra of free markets, free prices, consumer choice and economic liberty is responsible for the global prosperity we enjoy today." This is partially true. The nature of that global prosperity— who shares in it, who doesn't, where it came from — are all highly contested, of course. What is irrefutable is the fact that Friedman's free-market rulebook, and his savvy strategies for imposing it, have made some people extremely prosperous, winning for them something approximating complete freedom— to ignore national borders, to avoid regulation and taxation and to amass new wealth.
This knack for thinking highly profitable thoughts appears to have its roots in Friedman's early childhood, when his parents, immigrants from Hungary, bought a garment factory in Rahway, New Jersey. The family apartment was in the same building as the shop floor, which, Friedman wrote, "would be termed a sweatshop today." Those were volatile times for sweatshop owners, with Marxists and anarchists organizing immigrant workers into unions to demand safety regulations and weekends off— and debating the theory of worker ownership at after-shift meetings. As the boss's son, Friedman no doubt heard a very different perspective on these debates. In the end, his father's factory went under, but in lectures and television appearances, Friedman spoke of it often, invoking it as a case study for the benefits of deregulated capitalism— proof that even the worst, least-regulated jobs offer the first rung on the ladder to freedom and prosperity.
A large part of the appeal of Chicago School economics was that, at a time when radical-left ideas about workers' power were gaining ground around the world, it provided a way to defend the interests of owners that was just as radical and was infused with its own claims to idealism. To hear Friedman tell it, his ideas were not about defending the right of factory owners to pay low wages but, rather, all about a quest for the purest possible form of "participatory democracy" because in the free market, "each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants." Where leftists promised freedom for workers from bosses, citizens from dictatorship, countries from colonialism, Friedman promised "individual freedom," a project that elevated atomized citizens above any collective enterprise and liberated them to express their absolute free will through their consumer choices. "What was particularly exciting were the same qualities that made Marxism so appealing to many other young people at the time," recalled the economist Don Patinkin, who studied at Chicago in the forties— "simplicity together with apparent logical completeness; idealism combined with radicalism." The Marxists had their workers' Utopia, and the Chicagoans had their entrepreneurs' Utopia, both claiming that if they got their way, perfection and balance would follow.
(I have copied and pasted the above from online source https://archive.org/stream/fp_Naomi_Klein-The_Shock_Doctrine/Naomi_Klein-The_Shock_Doctrine_djvu.txt
)
Now I move to the matter of 'No Sweat: T-shirts that Fight Sweatshops — and, by extension, 'free market economics'.
'No Sweat: T-shirts that Fight Sweatshops!'
The Housmans Radical Booksellers e-newsletter wrote:No Sweat: T-shirts that Fight Sweatshops!
Our friends upstairs at anti-sweatshop campaign group No Sweat are crowdfunding to expand their ethical T-shirt project that sources T-shirts from a workers co-op in Bangladesh and uses the profit to fund sweatshop workers unions. Find out more here:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/no-sweat-t-shirt-that-fights-sweatshops
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| Screen capture of the 'No Sweat: T-shirts that Fight Sweatshops! Crowdfunder website https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/no-sweat-t-shirt-that-fights-sweatshops |
I copy and paste text from that Crowdfunder page, that includes an online video:
No Sweat: T-shirts that Fight Sweatshops!
by No Sweat in London, England, United Kingdom
No Sweat! Our T-shirts are made in a workers co-op run by ex-sweatshop workers & we use the profits to fight against sweatshop labour.
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| "We did it. On 26th November 2019 we successfully raised £5,264 with 142 supporter in 42 days." |
Radical Booksellers
For more on Housmans Radical Booksellers, go to https://housmans.com/For more on Radical Booksellers in general, go to http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/
