Markets, socialism, and communism: a thread
Markets tend to excel at exchanges that are less important (e.g. lemonade) and become monstrous with things that truly matter (e.g. kidneys)

Adam Smith defined economics as being concerned with three broad areas: production (the making of goods and services), consumption (the use of goods and services), and distribution (how the economic product is apportioned: who gets what and how much)

Markets are primarily about the economic sphere of distribution (though market prices affect all three areas), and what I mean when I say they become monstrous with things that matter, is that markets not only provide, but are also a way of rationing & denying goods & services

Now this rationing effect is ok for certain things, like perhaps designer clothing and other luxury goods, but when goods and services that are vital to human life and flourishing are sold in markets, the inevitable result is that some will not have access to them,

because they cannot afford it. That is a kind of structural monstrosity that will inexorably lead to mass human suffering

Is this some kind of dark prophecy? No, it is a description of our current world, in which 9 million people starve to death each year globally. Another 3.5 million perish each year due to lack of access to clean water. Another 1.5 million die due to vaccine-preventable illnesses

And this only really scratches the surface of the structural violence of capitalism, violence which is created and enforced through markets and the maintenance of private property, even at the cost of tens of millions of lives destroyed each and every year

In the field of economics, sometimes this brutality is bundled up under the heading of ‘market failures’, as if to imply that markets don’t mean to do this, it isn’t a case in point of markets simply doing what they do, they simply have failed and may need a correction

This is why most societies place limits on markets for certain things, such as human beings, organs, blood, sexual services, the killing of others, etc., even while allowing and encouraging markets for many other goods and services

But this limiting of markets does not have an immediate connection to communism, which I define and discuss in greater detail here: https://twitter.com/asatarbair/status/1352061678314168320

It is not correct to say capitalism equals markets, and hence communism equals the lack of markets, for instance. Communism has long been understood to be a classless society based on sharing and cooperation, a notion far older than Marxism.

What Marxism adds is a focus on the elimination of exploitation, defined as when those who did not produce surplus value take, own, and control that surplus value.

Since such a society has never existed in the recorded history that we have, whether or not it would contain markets is unknown.

Now there are critiques of markets and the commodity-form in Marx’s writings and in the Marxist tradition more broadly, but these are mostly scattered thoughts, relevant to some time in the future when socialism has been established globally, & the state has begun to wither away

The abolition of markets does not figure in the works that lay out specific policy interventions, such as the Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism. Here is the famous list of policies from the Manifesto:

It would truly be putting the cart before the horse to say we will abolish markets before we have abolished homelessness, hunger, needless deaths due to lack of health care, and so on.

It will require some period of time under the regime of human-centered socialist development before we are able to do this.

The history of actually-existing socialism gives us some hopeful signs of what the beginning of this process looks like, as I describe here https://twitter.com/asatarbair/status/1356973625623015430

But it seems clear that a future socialist society would not use markets to ration such things as food, clean water, housing, and healthcare, for example, and that would be a very different world, and a much better one, than our current reality