Market Madness

Although they usually cut to the chase and just bark about what a jackbooted thug I am deep down in my dark socialist heart, I am also used to getting dressed down at greater length for my "economic illiteracy" by the better sort of marginally more thoughtful market fundamentalist types, all of whom have lots of pie-charts to show why all their libertopian dreams will someday come true even if they haven't got much else on offer.

But I have to admit that I was a bit surprised earlier today to hear from a colleague on the left that I am myself little more than a debased market-sympathizer who should be right ashamed of himself for it. Here is the gist of the complaint, condensed from a few rounds of conversation, with my feeble efforts at a reply appended thereafter:

I am disappointed that you, [and] others are actually marketeers of a different sort, less odious to be sure -- while admitting that markets don't work as advertised, [you're] certainly not on the avant-garde of post-market thinking, of what information they even in theory fail to transmit, info which would we agree is important, but taking the market as a desirable given nonetheless... it's rather sad.

[Y]ou and James [Hughes] advocate for market socialism, or social democracy, or some variation of the european market model that has shown itself unable to sustain in the face of the pernicious market effects I mention above, because it relies on those same signals. And I advocate someting quite different.

Let me begin by pointing out that I don't really think of "the market" as desirable or undesirable, because I just don't believe "the market" exists in the sense my interlocutor seems to mean here.

A number of contingent historical arrangements get called "the market," some of which I might find more congenial than others, but none of which functions in a way that swings free of the regulatory effects of social norms, laws backed by force, or architectural constraints.

It is true that I recognize "market signals" of supply and demand under conditions of imperfect knowledge and unequal distribution as comparably indispensable sources of regulatory effects as such norms, laws, and the rest, but it is hard to see why this is any more problematic than taking account of changing weather conditions in modeling social life.

Market fundamentalist ideologies of the neoliberal, neoconservative, and market libertarian varieties, on the other hand, weight market signals unduly, privilege market signals over all other regulators, or indulge in eliminative fantasies in which market signals replace most or all other regulatory forces altogether. These facile and pernicious market fundamentalist ideologies typically conjoin with an equally facile and pernicious market naturalist ideology that likewise treats "the market" as a spontaneous order or as the expression of deep tidal forces inhering in or upwelling out of "nature" in an ahistorical fashion indifferent to social norms, implemented laws, contingent but stubborn architectural constraints, and such.

It is hard to see how I could be mistaken as advocating either market fundamentalist or market naturalist ideologies, and it is even harder to see how James Hughes could be so accused, in my opinion. But come what may I do concede that prices -- like words or like numbers -- have regularly demonstrated themselves to be useful tools when used within their proper limits.

I would no more identify the contemporary European Union with "the market" than the contemporary United States with "the market" in the general archetypal way this critique seem to depend on, either on the way to championing or vilifying "it" or them. These are different implementations differently sensitive to and differently provocative of market signals with both of which implementations I have plenty of complaints. But none of this makes me think I cannot make recourse to social analyses that talk, for example, of functional specialization, division of labor, or pricing signals without buttressing up what passes for "the market" in some neoliberal or neoconservative apologias for whatever unjust prevailing institutional arrangements the elites with which they identify have a taste for at the moment.

I'm a social democrat but also a democratic experimentalist -- which is to say I value certain things in a social order (among them, fairness, freedom, human rights, equality, diversity, representation, accountability, and legitimate nonviolent recourse in disputes) but that I think there are probably indefinitely many institutional arrangements that might satisfy these values or facilitate their implementation.

I can tell you where I want to go, but when it comes to blueprints I prefer that they emerge in real-time, peer-to-peer.