Market theology

Market theology is a pejorative term describing the apparent belief that values conflicts are best, or only, resolved by markets - a wilful ignorance of the role of states and state power balances in underlying political economy.

This is said, by opponents of these movements, 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 (based on such institutions as the IMF and WTO) make value decisions that they have themselves abandoned any attempt to influence, simply serving the current holders of property rights and intellectual rights with 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 called the New totalitarianism.

Advocates of globalization usually 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 view is taken by Francis Fukayama and others who view there as being no alternative to global capitalism as a single and united global economic system. Thus any degree of anti-capitalism as such is simply a form of anarchism in disguise, a step backwards to a time when no global dispute resolution existed, other than war, which is not preferable to bids in marketplaces.

Critics respond that to contrast the choice as that between war or betting 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. Human development theory is one of the more developed criticisms, 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."