The Friedman Doctrine starts off mentioning the notion of social conscience, in reference to his resentments to other businessmen cunning illusory notions of social conscience.
What Friedman certainly does well in his due credit was to break through the illusory wall created by most corporate businessman to bring up its own excuse-making of social theory. Though of course, naturally such illusion has never been followed through–such as the nature of liberal sense of theory: only existing in one’s mind.
Friedman does not shy away from criticizing this classical, old-school liberal way of business. He fret that classical liberals are merely “undermining the basis of a free society these past decades”. The liberal conception of a social relation does not address the inward nature of a class-based society: the workers and the ones who accumulate wealth from the workers.
“What does it mean to say that “business” has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but “business” as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom.”
What Friedman was unable to see through via this assertion is that “business” is shown here as much of an abstraction as what he considers “people” to be. His notion of people is isolated, and responsibilities of one’s actions do not affect the other subjects that surround them. That is the usual characteristics of bourgeois thought, as one’s actions can only change one-self in his own mind.
“In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. “
A corporate executive however, is not an employee. His labour is at the utmost advanced level of illusory and estrangement, as the labour that he is partaking in is either abstract, or not his own.
“In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.“
The “individuals” include only the manager, and the manager himself. The atomization of the individual, and the internal antimony that bourgeois thought has inflicted upon the the notion of individualism contains the dilemma of voluntarism and fatalism. Through the false notion of free will of liberal thought, the individual inadvertently from the rigid determination of the economy ends up falling into its own contradiction. Friedman would go on to establish that “the corporate executive is also a person is own right […] he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes and assumes voluntarily…” in which this assertion abstracts the individual (the corporate executive), and alienates themself from their position inside of a relational class society that operates through massive processes within a totality.
Friedman would then begin to criticize what is known to be a common theme of old-school liberal thought: He considers the “social responsibility” inscribed by liberal thought towards businessman to be one of “pure rhetoric“, and claims that this notion allows the businessman ought to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.
Friedman lays out these scenarios in which he assumes the social conditions to be mostly self-contained inside of the economic superstructure e.g claiming the contradictions of inflation to merely be a “social objective”, monetary policies to address the environment, and advocating for the selective mode of hiring new employees for the company. Of course the inflation itself is not a social-objective, as it is based on fetishism and is also a mere reaction to the immanent failings of political economy to truly distribute “value” evenly towards individuals. He would also claim that the expenses from the corporate executive to cover what he so-called “social responsibilities” would be spent as someone else’s money. He is inadvertently correct, but it is unlikely that Friedman was able to notice this immanent contradiction to what he is claiming.
Friedman would advocate for the incentive to go towards liberal abstractions such as “shareholders” and “customers.” These aspects of the economy are also equally abstracted, and are the baseline of neo-liberal thought. He would then attempt to critique the contradictions of government taxes and considers them towards the “preferences and desires of the public,” lamenting the “battle cry” of the American Revolution: “taxation without representation.”
Friedman didacts the reader on what he believes, to be a complete mythologizing view of the ideal businessman, in which one serves the “own interests of his principal”, criticizing his supposedly ideological means of “sociality” and considers ones who serve the interest of social conditions to not be the religious icon of the businessman one desires him to be. He considers an executive to be acting upon social conditions to be falling down towards the status of a civil servant, subservient to what he considers to be an illusory concept of social objectives. Friedman considers social responsibility to be a political doctrine, independent from the market that is characteristic of socialist policy.
Friedman would then propose the possibility of the corporate executive to estrange himself from social responsibilities, through strictly what Friedman view to be towards the utilitarian purpose. Since the businessman is an expert in the realm of money, in comparison to the shareholders and the average civil servant, the businessman has the reasonable incentive towards spending the surplus-value that he has extracted from his labour force, and the illusory processes that run what is now the stock market. He insists that if the businessman fails, the customers, shareholders and employees are freely allowed to “desert” him thus inscribing the freedom of the working force inside of a supposedly free market economy, ideally.
Friedman addresses another dialectical movement within the trade unions inside of a capital-based political economy. Considering the trade unions in name are meant to represent the civil servant, the civil worker inside of a civil society as a faction that can freely act safely against one’s employer once one feels like his labour may be estranged from him, but one the labourer falls into the trap that is a trade union, he will fall right back into that realm of estrangement towards another institutional apparatus that acts upon capital. Trade union leaders are the leaders of institutions, in a liberal economy. Thus they are incentivized to act in the interest of a liberal economy, thus they will have a general tendency to object to government interference with the market, subordinating the interest of the working class inside of the union itself. Of course, Friedman’s solution to this dilemma is to assure the reader of the ontological good natured-ness of the businessman, to be freely perfect inside of a rigid and restricted mode of economy. The individual, the businessman has the freedom to have absolute dominating control over your means of living, and means of survival. As long as the individual, the isolated individual cannot exploit other people for personal purposes through the rigidity and iron law of political economy. Though that itself contradicts a “free” economy, and naturally and historically that itself has never came to fruition. Of course, Liberals would excuse this through complete denial of the free economy being a reality, and affirming themselves that it will manifest as an ideal reality once they have done wrested the government out of the economy.
Friedman considers the internal contradictions of political economy to be “too urgent” to wait for monetary policy from the government at hand for the sake of “social” purposes. He negates the supposedly moral doctrines from the process of “social responsibilities” and claiming them to be a main interrupter of the “democratic” process of corporate expenditure. He would establish a nihilistic nature of the “free society” in which good and evil are equally contradictory, thus in a free society morals are merely a means towards power through ressentiment, in a Nietzschean sense.
Friedman would further lay out the imperfection of the otherwise: the Free Individual Proprietor e.g the Executive. The “individual proprietor”, as per Friedman would have all the right to spend his money for himself, as a free individual, and through those incentives he is free to “impose costs on employees and customers.” Though the twist is, Friedman considers the individual to be one that is truly free enough (in a free society) to lack monopolistic power like an existing corporation, or an existing trade union. He thinks the way the free individual acts upon his wealth, will have minor side effects that are completely self-centered. Friedman considers the individual corporation has its free self-interest to devote one’s own resources to provide one’s own amenities. Of course, the analysis here is completely atomized and abstract, in which the manner the corporation spends its wealth is for its reified conception. The corporation does not however, address its own internal processes, the origin of its wealth.
Friedman would then turn his criticism into the theological blasphemy he himself would consider to be the “social responsibility.” He would consider this view to be self-contradictory, far sighted and “schizophrenic”, and he would then inflict upon social responsibility to be the one and all cause of the decay of a free society. The short sightedness of “social responsibility” to Friedman himself consists of its potential to disrupt the steady processes of mythologized market, in which directing the immanent nature (and contradiction) of political economy can only disrupt its continuation of that inward contradiction. Friedman’s rather paranoid notion of addressing the totality of political economy completely is built upon his fear of its own destruction. His ideal free market that rests on complete private property, in which all individuals are responsible for their own actions and which society is a collection of those individuals–unfortunately can only operate under those contradictions, as through the course of history. But Friedman has no interest in breaking inward towards the reality of political economy, he is ready to continue to stand still outside of the political economy, and civil society as a detached spectator. He laments in a romantic parlance:
The political principle that under lies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve more general social interest— whether that be determined by church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and a say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform. It is appropriate for some to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to or not.
Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible. There are some respects in which conformity appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political Mechanism altogether.
The detached nature of Friedman’s “solution” unfortunately leads to its dead-end. As per bourgeois thought, they are deeply content as the inheritor of wealth. Yet through this thought, has in itself been the main mode of sublimated thought of the American working class. As the blue-collar workforce in America continue to remain alienated from every aspect of living through reification of their subject, the nature of labour as abstracted by Friedman can only remain abstraction for long. Through the ones who have found out about this wretched reality as itself continuing to be upheld by the capitalists, we must not continue to uphold this form of middle-class detachment by continuing to perform inaction. As per the inward nature of civil society, we are not merely individuals. We, as ones who work and perform labour as creative beings, as human beings who interact with nature are all connected into a social relation that is the class. As per Lukács, we as a class, the identical subject-object of history can only negate this detachment, through de-alienation. As we gain self-consciousness as a class, class consciousness of the internal processes of civil society towards the totality of things, we as the labour force can only continue to put this theory into action. As subjects who interact with nature, we also contain the ability to change it. If we can put theory into practice and negate and abolish the continuous state of affairs–the proletarian, through the means of praxis will change the course of history.