FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE THIRD WAVE

In short, wherever the Second Wave struck and the purpose of production shifted from use to exchange, there had to be a mechanism through which that exchange could take place. There had to be a market. But the market was not passive. The economic historian Karl Polanyi has shown how the market, which was subordinated to the social or religio-cultural goals of early societies, came to set the goals of industrial societies. Most people were sucked into the money system. Commercial values became central, economic growth (as measured by the size of the market) became the primary goal of governments, whether capitalist or socialist.

For the market was an expansive, self-reinforcing institution. Just as the earliest division of labor had encouraged commerce in the first place, now the very existence of a market or switchboard encouraged a further division of labor and led to sharply increased productivity. A self-amplifying process had been set in motion.

This explosive expansion of the market contributed to the fastest rise in living standards the world had ever experienced.

In politics, however, Second Wave goverments found themselves increasingly torn by a new kind of conflict born of the split production and consumption. The Maxist emphasis on class struggle has systematically obscured the large, deeper conflict that arose between the demands of the producers (both the workers and managers) for higher wages, profits, and benefits and the counter-demand of consumers.

* The market as a switchboard must exist whether trade is based on money or barter. It must exist whether or not profit is siphoned out of it, whether prices follow supply and demand or are fixed by the state, whether the system is planned or not, whether the means of production are private or public. It must exist even in a hypothetical economy of self-managed industrial firms in which workers set their own wages high enough to eliminate profit as a category.

So overlooked is this essential fact, so closely has the market been identified with only one of its many variants (the profit-based, private-property model, in which prices reflect supply and demand), that there is not even a word in the conventional vocabulary of economics to express the multiplicity of its forms.

Throughout these pages, the term “market” is used in its full generic sense, rather than hi the customary restrictive way. Semantics aside, however, the basic point remains: wherever producer and consumer are divorced, some mechanism is needed to mediate between them. This mechanism, whatever its form, is what I call the market.