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market theology
Market theology is a pejorative term describing the apparent belief that value conflicts are always best resolved by markets. Critics believe this represents a wilful ignorance of the role of states and state power balances in underlying political economy.
Market theology is said, by its opponents, to be an assumption of neoclassical philosophy, and also taken for granted by other globalization advocates who practice right-wing politics. Even if they profess some other value system, in practice, say such critics as John McMurtry, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva, they permit commodity markets, currency markets, and other financial architecture (which are influenced by such institutions as the IMF and WTO) to make value decisions that they have themselves abandoned any attempt to influence. This, in the eyes of critics, simply serves the current holders of material and intellectual property rights and shows a sort of fatalism derived from lack of ability to see any other way to resolve basic moral conflicts. They describe this as a sort of market fascism or hegemony; they also call it the new totalitarianism.
Some advocates of globalization argue that there is little or no viable alternative to nation-states ruled by representative democracy, and that those elected do in fact represent the views of those who elected them and do in fact actively negotiate both property rights and intellectual rights and their limits—as was the case in smaller-scale unions such as the European Union. This is the view taken by, for instance, Francis Fukuyama, who argues that there is no alternative to global capitalism as a single and united global economic system. Thus, Fukuyama and others claim that any degree of anti-capitalism as such is simply a disguised or explicit form of anarchism, and, in their view, a step backwards to a time when no global dispute resolution existed, other than war, which is not preferable to bids in marketplaces.
Critics of "market theology" respond that to present the choice as being between war and bids in marketplaces (in what they call casino capitalism) is itself a symptom of the market theology, and leads inexorably to a degraded value of life and value of Earth. They further argue that the choice presented by proponents of capitalist globalization is not only false (since other options do in fact exist), but also immoral, like presenting a man with the choice between death or slavery. Human development theory is one of the more developed criticisms of market theology, but it too often has elements of acceptance of the market ethic, most notably in its view of capital, where social cohesion for instance is quantified as "social capital."
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