Here is an incident that occurred in Honduras. It demonstrates how the power distributions of a free market society can act with brutal effect on existing social relations.
Not long ago the veteran author and journalist John Gerassi wrote to me: “Honduras is run by a tight little oligarchy which includes its congress and supreme court.” The oligarchs kill those who dare to challenge their privileged exploitation. They even kill just to demonstrate their absolutist power. “When I visited the farm of such an oligarch, while researching my book The Great Fear in Latin America,” Gerassi goes on, “I asked him why he paid his peons so little. ‘They’re pigs,’ he answered, ‘the only thing they respect is power. They have to know that I have life and death power over them. Only then will they work.’ Stupidly, I asked: ‘Do they know that?’ He laughed, called over one of the peons, took out his pistol and shot him in the head. When I reported this killing to the Tegucigalpa chief of police, he quipped: ‘Yes, but he owns that estancia [farmland].’”1
The investigative writer Andre Vltchek informs me that similar atrocities have happened in the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, a region in which he has spent many years. “In Indonesia, the owner of a former Hilton Hotel shot to death (in public) a waiter simply because the owner’s friend complained that the service was bad. After one year in prison, the murderer is once again free.”2
In the free market society of a Third World country like Honduras or Indonesia, the peon is little more than a slave. His or her life is of no value apart from its capacity to create value for the owner through hard work at a subsistence wage. In the murderous vignette Gerassi described, we see how the landlord’s immense economic power translates into political and moral impunity. Conversely, the peon’s economic powerlessness translates into political impotence, the inability to make a minimal legal claim to one’s labor and even to one’s own life.
That is what the free market is about: the freedom of plutocrats to do whatever they want to those in economic servitude whose lives have become expendable and easily replaceable.