It is legally sanctioned private jurisprudence-neo-feudalism.įor part of the 20th century, the democratic state served as a counterweight to the concentrated power that flowed to concentrated wealth in a capitalist economy. This is not deregulation or neoliberalism. Companies like Monsanto, manipulating intellectual property and trade law, prevent farmers from following the ancient practice of keeping seeds for the next planting season. The unity of common scientific inquiry has been balkanized by confidentiality agreements and abuses of patents, as scientific knowledge comes to be “owned” by private entities. Tech platform monopolies have created a proprietary regime where they can crush competitors and invade consumer privacy by means of onerous terms, often buried in online “terms of service” provisions. Trade law permits similar private tribunals to overturn or sidestep public regulation. Laws to protect workers and consumers, reflecting 70 years of struggle to expand rights, are now erased by compulsory arbitration regimes. The financial collapse of 2008 is best understood as the seizure, corruption, and abuse of entire domains of regulation and jurisprudence. The system of finance, once supervised by bank regulatory agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been delegated to private realms of law. Elites are pursuing something aptly described as a new form of feudalism, in which entire realms of public law, public property, due process, and citizen rights revert to unaccountable control by private business. Western democracies are not simply embracing neoliberalism in the sense of deregulating the economy. Today, this centuries-long democratizing trend is rapidly being reversed. The history of the modern democratic state can be understood as a story of shifting authority and lawmaking, first from private potentates to sovereign monarchs, and then to publicly accountable democracies.
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