How Should Socialists Relate to the Market?
Bourgeois economics treats capitalism as simply a market economy. Vivek Chibber traces how markets and private ownership worked under feudalism and under capitalism, and argues that socialism could use markets without restoring class society.
Markets predate capitalism by thousands of years. What gave them their power over people’s lives was capitalist class relations. Under socialism, markets could become a tool rather than a master. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
It’s all too common for people to associate the existence of markets with capitalism. But because we know markets had a life before capitalism, we can also imagine them having a life after.
On this latest episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek compare how markets operated in precapitalist economies versus modern capitalist economies to see if markets may prove useful in future socialist societies.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here.
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