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General introduction to global justice in a market society

The main argument of this book is that although the capitalist mode of production represents the source of an unprecedented accumulation of well-being, and has contributed so far to an increasing extension of human capabilities, it has posed a substantial obstacle to the exercise of individual autonomy, because for most people it has meant the subjection of the individual possibility of obtaining well-being to participation in a market relation – most commonly, a job contract. From this premise, I shall maintain that capitalism exercises a form of structural domination over all those individuals who are excluded from the control of productive assets. Capitalist structural domination, which does not necessarily materialise either in realised coercion or in destitution, consists in the fact that those who can only hire out their labour performance are deprived of any acceptable alternative to seeking sustenance in the market and hence they lack social freedom in the exercise of their basic capabilities. More specifically, I shall neither engage in arguments such as those declaring that at least some people are worse off in terms of income or capabilities than they would be in a pre-capitalist or a hypothetically alternative mode of production, nor shall I seek to demonstrate that people are less secure in the exercise of their basic capabilities than they were before – when they were vulnerable to health, atmospheric and similar risks. Instead, I shall maintain that capitalist structural domination prevents most individuals from exercising their basic capabilities without someone else being willing to rent out their labour performance. This latter fact creates two normative problems. The first one is that this peculiar form of domination can pave the way to economic exploitation, even in highly obnoxious forms. The second one is that capitalist structural domination is a normative concern in itself, because it curtails freedom, regardless of its secondary consequences. In this book I shall mainly focus on the second problem. With capitalism I refer to an economic system, and more generally a social system, in which the majority of the means of production have been privatised, labour performance has been transformed into a commodity, and the production and the allocation of goods – including the same labour commodity – is entrusted to the market mechanism, that is to say to the logic of supply and demand (Van Parijs 1984; Crouch and Streeck 1997, pp. 1–18; Milanovic 2019, pp. 1–11). This system