Market Devolution

There was a time and there still are places where the market was a periodic activity conducted between tribes within a bioregion who may be otherwise in a state of alliance or animosity. This was a time to suspend hostilities, to exchange surplus and to share in festivities.

With the advent of aggreculture (sic)* and the rise of conquering tribes, urbanization and literacy, a cyclical process set in. Following one after the other these societies rose in population density, fragmented into castes and classes, supporting a progressively dysfunctional, self serving elite disconnected from primary production, all the while drawing down on the energy and resources of the ecosystems they exploited. For some time even these cultures had a market day.

What dislocations led to our present perpetual enslavement to this so called, “invisible hand”?

Generations of the educated spent more and more time in the intellect, developing abstractions on abstractions. Within this historic movement we can locate the rise of the economist:

“…views on the origin of value, which over time became increasingly disembodied and subjective. Mercantilists located wealth in precious metals; physiocrats argued that since the ultimate source of value was nature, all social wealth was ultimately derived from agriculture; the political economists claimed that value was a product of human labour (in other words, that it emerged through the body, at exactly the point where our minds become a physical force in nature). For neoclassical economists it transcended the physical altogether, and became simply a subjective measure of desire. From their time on, the value of an object became increasingly indistinguishable from its price: how much potential buyers were willing to give up to acquire some product on the market. It exists only in the eye of the beholder.”      David Graeber, A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, page 440

The war against nature at the root of science leads our best minds to ignore the very knowledge they pursue. Physicists living in houses that waste energy, farmers who destroy the soil they depend on and economists who ignore the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. There can be no such thing as perpetual growth on a finite planet.

“The entropy of the physical universe increases constantly because there is a continuous and irrevocable qualitative degradation of order into chaos. The entropic nature of the economic process, which degrades natural resources and pollutes the environment, constitutes the present danger. The earth is entropically winding down naturally, and economic advance is accelerating the process. Man must learn to ration the meager resources he has so profligately squandered if he is to survive in the long run when the entropic degradation of the sun will be the crucial factor, "for surprising as it may seem, the entire stock of natural resources is not worth more than a few days of sunlight!”

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen ‪

*Aggre(ssive) culture: waging war on biodiversity to foster human’s favourite foods