DEMOCRACY: THE MISSING ELEMENT IN THE MARKET CELEBRATION

Markets are a particular form of social organization in which exchanges are regularized. Capitalist markets are those in which: (1) most things traded are commodities, that is they are “identical” for purposes of sale (Appadurai, 1986); and (2) there exists a class of people for whom the end goal of selling in the market is not to buy goods but to “make money” (Marx, 1967 [1867]). Today, nearly everyone in the world lives in some form capitalist market society.