What Do We Mean By "Market?": Some Thoughts

In a particularly memorable passage in his very worthwhile book The Predator State James Galbraith remarked the usage of the word "market" by those of orthodox economic mind. As he observed "the word lack[s] any observable, regular, consistent meaning," is in fact "nothing at all," such that they can make it whatever they want it to be, freeing them for wildly irrational, fantastic, mystical characterizations of the market that make of it "a cosmic and ethereal space, a disembodied decision maker . . . that, somehow and without effort, balances and reflects the preferences of everyone making economic decisions."

It seems to me entirely fair to say that this is how those advocating for the invariable superiority of the market--or The Market--to other mechanisms of collective decision-making tend to speak. But it also seems to me fair to say that even Galbraith's remarks falls short of exhausting the subject of the irrational, fantastic, mystical vision of the Market and its (supposedly) transcendent nature. The Market, they tell us, exists above and beyond Man, emerged before the written word, is sure to exist for so long as any such thing we would call economic life and therefore humanity and any other sort of sentient species that may exist After Man, an immutable reality to which humanity can only submit or be destroyed, with those who would think it harsh presumptuous in questioning its Ways, and the skeptic who would bother to compare what the economists tell them about its working with the evidences of history ("But Karl Polanyi said, and Michael Hudson said, and David Graeber said . . .") lacking "FAITH!" For indeed with them The Market is a deity, The Deity, and those who would expect it to be describable in ways graspable by mere human minds fools failing to recognize its transcendent Alpha-and-Omega nature whose priests insist on what they hold can be known of it to even the heathen through the light Reason sheds upon Natural Law, above all that this Deity, this God, is a Jealous God who will have no others before it as they treat adherence to its dictates as a religion. But what sort of religion? The Temple whose secrets William Greider sought to reveal so many years ago would seem to many the Temple of Doom, with a central banker presiding over ceremonies before the piously chanting ensemble of the economics profession that, in their perversion of an ancient heritage for purposes of insane power-lust, entail ceaseless human sacrifice on the way to preparing vastly greater catastrophe for humanity--the Mola Rams of the age of polycrisis.