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.
The US police is a very weird anomaly in the world, the hiring standards and educational requirements are below anything most other countries consider acceptable while the budgets are higher than anywhere else as well while producing the worst outcomes of most other police forces.
Debt is pretty much never collected by a police force but usually by banks (or what ever other institution gave out that loan). Most of these relations are not maintained by cops or military since working class people lack a unified front to combat anything (France is the only place where that has even remotely shifted in recent years). So maintaining anything by cops hasn’t even been necessary for like the last 50 years at least. If workers had any unified front that may change.
Also the only country that does imperialism with their army in modern times in Russia, the US, China, France etc all do their imperialism by investments making another country dependant on them and then exporting their resources.
Crypto was always a speculative asset. It has been used effectively as a stock market with no regulations the moment it contained any considerable amount of capital. At no point in time did it have a shot at replacing the current monetary system.
Force may have been a method to maintain the capitalist system once but in modern times it’s division and complacency.
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?
In 99.9% of cases yea we as a society have ended up enforcing it unfortunately. Gotta win over hearts and minds to change that and if most people can be convinced to change I’m sure there will be a bigger threat of violence and probably more than a threat but if enough people back changing from the capitalist system it won’t matter, cops will never outnumber the working class. If only the working class learned to work together (and also stop putting dictators in charge who fuck over the working class).
