Socialists and Markets

We did a previous episode on market socialism, in which you talked about why markets are not inherently capitalist, and how the socialist movement should think about markets and think seriously about, you know, for its future visions of society, how to incorporate markets.

So today we're gonna take a bit more of a theoretical and historical approach, and look at what markets are, what role do they play in capitalism, and, you know, talk again about why markets could be compatible with a socialist society.

Yeah, because one of the interesting things about political discourse is we know that the neoliberal right, and a lot of versions of free market economics, take markets to be synonymous with capitalism.

So they see capitalism simply as a quantitative expansion of the market.

Ironically, there's a mirror image of this within the left, too.

Right.

So that they see that whenever there's a market, it h- has to be a capitalist market.

And this is why a lot of the objections come to market socialism.

So I think it's good to see if we can detach markets from capitalism conceptually.

Mm-hmm.

And then try to show that the market itself is very limited in its properties.

How it functions will depend on how it's embedded in the wider and more encompassing context of other social relations.

And that'll help us think better about what aspects of the market are intrinsic to it, and what aspects of the market actually are ones that are endowed through capitalism.

And hence, if we were to s- take it outside of capitalism, we can see s- which aspects of markets will remain, and which aspects of market will fall away.

And it might turn out that the aspects that remain are actually not only unobjectionable, but quite useful.

Why don't we start then with the markets that existed before capitalism? What did markets look like in a pre-capitalist society?