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ButtBidet [he/him] @hexbear.net

Shower thought - using "market" as a euphemism for capitalism is super dishonest

I assume that people have good associations with markets. Granted there's not much markets left in the West except for random farmer's markets or other touristy stuff or local flee markets, but even then people generally like those. If one goes to a country not yet fully destroyed by capitalism, local markets are cool and neat, one gets to meet people closer to the production and distribution, and the price is and quality generally are much better. Markets are places that people build relationships. You can forget your wallet one day and the seller who knows you very well will just go "no problem, just pay me tomorrow".

I just assume that markets in the traditional sense are mostly gone from the West since rents are too damn high, and it takes far too much capital to open a shop. That and cars took all the rest of the public space. I assume, with a tiny effort being put into research, that our great grandparents knew actual markets and had good vibes with them. And capitalist propagandists just decided to co-opt it.

Saying "the market knows best" is so fucking disingenuous. People aren't gonna come out and say "billionaire with enough capital to invest know best" because of course that sounds like a poor choice to any social issue.

5 comments

  • I assume that people have good associations with markets. Granted there's not much markets left in the West except for random farmer's markets or other touristy stuff or local flee markets, but even then people generally like those.

    Supermarkets?

    I think you're mixing some things up here. Markets as an abstract ecosystem rather than a physical place are not an invention of capitalism, but a consequence of the digital age. Hyper-financialized capitalistic markets are an abomination, but even if we had communism tomorrow, the world wouldn't go back to what you're describing. "The market knows best" is not an untrue statement in a lot of situations. It shouldn't dictate social issues, yeah, but markets in the abstract sense are still real and by no means exclusively apply to billionaires.

  • You can forget your wallet one day and the seller who knows you very well will just go "no problem, just pay me tomorrow".

    I see eyes rolling at this, so let me just say that I live in Spain, buy most of my groceries on a market, and have had this exact thing happen to me more than once. There is something genuinely nice about the personal relationship you develop, and being able to ask e.g. how are the strawberries this week

  • Markets are places that people build relationships. You can forget your wallet one day and the seller who knows you very well will just go "no problem, just pay me tomorrow".

    An excellent point. That's one thing I think people forget about our age of retail and transnational industries, there is no relationship between buyer and seller any more. Zero humanity in the commerce. I understand at certain scale there needs to be some rule-based transactions where you need to balance the books (though if you're rich enough you don't have to because oligarchy/plutocracy warps the rules of reality), but there is no such thing of buyers and sellers having any real person-to-person relationship. Even the the "wheeling and dealing businessman" types don't really exist anymore. There is just no place for human relationships in the capitalism because we have utterly done away with the market's humanity. It's been optimized out for efficiency sake.

  • I mean farmers markets and the like are nice, but when people are talking about markets in economics they don’t mean stalls of fruit or bazaars or something, they mean a system of distribution where goods are produced for profitable private sale as commodities