Really depends on what you mean by market. Like a market has existed since humans have and probably will until post-scarcity. The market we have now with arcane rules that all end up enriching people with more money than any one human will ever need is something that has been in the making since industrialization. That market is pretty much at a point where salvaging it is not really possible even if there was any attempt made to do so. Control of how that market works seems to be at the hands of bad actors who just want to squeeze as much wealth out of it as they can, screwing over anyone else.
Like for example the power companies in my country stopped producing power on their own and bought power from neighboring countries just to sell it to locals at a higher rate. Basically just acting as middle men without providing anything of worth. That drove the price of power to hit 300% more than the year prior. The only reason they stopped was because our government started their own power plan with locally produced power forcing those companies to compete with it but the damage was done and power prices never went back to normal like they never do when companies inflate prices. A market regulated by people who only care about profit will never work.
This is not true. Market economies originate with the state. Prior to markets, most societies engage in gift-economies, where value and price are relatively arbitrary and dictated by personal relationships, not scarcity. It is only when an army comes in and forces you to trade with it do we see the emergence of market economies. You are however, correct that the market we engage with right now focuses primarily on capitalization, which is generating the most amount of money. That is the structural logic of a ‘capitalist’ mode of production. The liberal (or really neo-liberal, but we are splitting hairs at this point) lie around this is that this mode of production is and encourages the most ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’. This is not true, as demonstrated in your example.
Within capitalism there will always be perverse incentives to value the ‘fetish’ (money) over the commodity (the object being produced). And it is this ‘fetishization of commodities’ that ultimately creates the series of rolling crises within capitalism, as the fetish must grow larger and larger even if (and especially if) the commodity production itself does not. The incentive isn’t to satisfy demand, it is to generate profit.
That’s why I started with “depending on what you mean by market”. There are like a ton of different academic and colloquial definitions.
Though I don’t agree that you need an army to enforce the current market system as the current system seems quite capable of being perpetuated by capitalists themselves.
Ehh, kinda, but not really. It’s pretty standardized (which is hilariously rare for these disciplines) within sociology, anthropology and even economic theory. At most economics would label it an ‘inefficient market’ but even they are stretching their definition to the breaking point when there is no actual expectation of reciprocity for most transactions.
You absolutely need an army to sustain market economies. Somebody has to collect the debts. Why do you think America spends more money than anywhere else on it’s police force? You have to have a monopoly of force in order to sustain obviously unfair and arbitrary property relations. Why does America have military bases across the globe and sanction countries that refuse to engage on it’s market terms? Because we need to have the potential to place a boot down or provide training for those that will do our enforcement for us.
Look at crypto, without centralized financial support it all but crumbled, to only resurge as a speculative asset, only to dip again. Maybe it will make a resurgence, but it is capital with no army, never to break the bounds of the fin-tech industry.
Force is what drives and has always driven market economies. To believe otherwise is to be an-cap, to separate the historical development of markets, capitalism and the state.
Though I don’t agree that you need an army to enforce the current market system as the current system seems quite capable of being perpetuated by capitalists themselves.
Great, then that means cops are unimportant and don’t need to enforce the sanctity of capitalist property, right?
