16 - If Markets are Social Constructs, how Might we Construct them Differently?

Summary

The need for a constantly changing market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of its world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of old national and local seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal independence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creation of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx and Engels 1848)

This quote from the Communist Manifesto appears to be an ode to the dynamism of capitalism and to globalisation. Certainly, it highlights capitalism’s immense powers to innovate and to create wealth – and in the process to destroy old forms of social organisation and to create new ones.

That power has impacted in differential and contradictory ways on human history and human lives ever since, because the flip side of this hubris is that poverty and exploitation have also been characteristic of capitalism’s global expansion, with epic struggles focused on how to contain and resist its destructive power at the same time as to harness its ability to create wealth and reduce poverty. In essence, these are struggles over distribution; they are also struggles over power: over who gets to determine the rules of the game. Such struggles have taken many forms, with highly differential outcomes within and between societies and interest groups across the globe – with the process continuing unabated.