Laissez-Faire Liberalism

The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of State “regulation”, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a political programme, designed to change – in so far as it is victorious – a State’s leading personnel, and to change the economic programme of the State itself – in other words the distribution of the national income.

In the case of laissez-faire liberalism, one is dealing with a fraction of the ruling class which wishes to modify not the structure of the State, but merely government policy; which wishes to reform the laws controlling commerce, but only indirectly those controlling industry.

(Gramsic, Antonio. 1971[2005]. Pp. 160 in Selections from the Prison Notebooks. NY: International Publishers).