. . .in the view of Barry Hindess and others, markets are stereotyped by modernist Marxism in that they are always seen as disorderly and incapable of meeting social needs. Marxists have tended to exaggerate the negative consequences of market disorder, to see only one side of the disharmonies that are characteristic of markets. Hindess (Freedom, Equality, and the Market [London: Tavistock Publications, 1987]), for example, discusses and criticizes the "essentialism of the market" (and, from there, of planning) that can be found not only in Marxian thought but also in the Austrian economics of Hayek and others. We quote at length:
To write of essentialism in this context is to say that the market is analyzed in terms of an essence or inner principle that produces necessary effects by the mere facts of its presence. In this case certain consequences are thought to follow merely from the fact that goods and services are provided through market exchanges rather than in some other ways. Precisely what those consequences are supposed to be, of course, will vary from one of these positions [Marxism or Hayekian liberalism] to another: they are anarchic and wasteful, they leave too much power in private hands, they generate indefensible inequalities; they are a realm of freedom and efficiency; they foster a spirit of egoism which undermines the altruism of social policy; under conditions of wage-labor they are the means of capitalist exploitation; and so on. The diversity of markets themselves and of the consequences that are alleged to follow from their existence may be obscured by reference to "the market"-as if what is at issue is an institutional structure of interactions with roughly similar properties in all significant cases (149-50).
Hindess concludes that such essentialisms "mask extremely complex and heterogeneous sets of conditions" (150). As a result, "liberalism, Marxism, socialism, and many positions in between, treat market provision and public control as if they represented distinct and incompatible principles of social organization" (151).
But, just as critically, the degree of disorder has, we think, been overstated by modernist Marxists. In their rush to criticize and to distance themselves from economic discourses (such as neoclassical theory) that celebrate the existence of markets and generally express a preference for markets over all other forms of social exchange and distribution of produced goods and services, modernist Marxists (ironically, like their neoclassical counterparts) have tended to neglect the implications of an insight long ago provided by the Marxian tradition: that economic institutions and identities are socially and historically constituted in a capitalist social formation. One possible implication of this social constitution of institutions and identities is that the activities of capitalist exchange mostly take place on a regular and orderly basis.
Consider, for example, the "normal" activity of consumers in an economy characterized by markets. They often shop in the same locations, purchasing many of the same goods, even when prices vary (sometimes considerably) from one location to another and new products are placed on the shelves. In this sense, the participation of individual consumers in markets is a much more stylized and ritualistic activity than is usually presumed (by Marxist and neoclassical economists alike). Similarly, firms often negotiate long-term contracts with other firms (both suppliers of inputs and distributors of outputs) precisely in order to "stabilize" deliveries and to avoid the "disorder" attendant upon the continual recontracting and renegotiating that would be necessary every time the price and/or quality of a commodity changes. In neither case-and these may be the norm rather than the exception-do markets exhibit the disorder frequently emphasized by modernist Marxists or, for that matter, implicit in those neoclassical stories that portray the instantaneous reactions of consumers and producers through the metaphors of supply and demand, "fish auctions," and tâtonnement. Instead, markets can be seen as sites (historically, symbolically, and culturally constituted) in which consumers and firms are often guided by tradition and habit, set prices, make contractual commitments, and otherwise "arrange" their transactions to contain or eliminate disorder.
This "anthropological" approach to markets is consistent with those views found in other heterodox economic discourses that focus on conditions of stability in capitalist exchange. In most modernist versions of economic analysis, these conditions themselves are essentialized so as to find the "origin" or essence of market stability in some unique subjective attribute or institutional arrangement. For example, while neoclassical economists may have no particular recourse to "institutions" as ultimate explanatory variables, they do have the possibility of explaining the recourse to consumer and producer habit and ritual through such concepts as "risk averse" behavior, "impatience" with respect to the choice between present and future consumption, and "lack of foresight." In these cases, habit and ritual are reduced to and are said to originate in an individual's preference for acting habitually. Yet, in our view, rationality itself can be seen as habitual and routine. That is, so-called rational behavior must be learned (and thereby turned into a "habit" of mind and action), requires repetition (at least if consistency is to be achieved), and, of course, is itself a matter of culture (that is, it only arises within certain social situations and discourses and varies accordingly). The ritualistic nature of rationality is usually ignored by most neoclassical economists who wish to use the notion of rationality as term opposite to habit and convention and to essentialize them, in fact, as an alternative-and nonrational-origin for economic and social behavior. Many Marxists (as well as institutionalists and post-Keynesians), on the other hand, see social convention and habit in market behavior as stemming essentially from sociocultural norms (usually conceived as "outside" of markets and "historically determined"), as dictated by an individual's class position and interests, and/or as a rational economic strategy in the face of fundamental uncertainty. In all three of these cases, once again, habit and ritual have an essential time and place of origin, do not arise for the most part in the process of exchange itself, and are not "overdetermined" in their constitution.
We stress this last point since it bears as well on the concepts of habit and ritual that are especially appropriate to a postmodern Marxian approach to economic analysis. There is no reason to view habit and ritual as necessarily "orderly" because there is no reason to view the constitution of habitual or ritualistic behavior as other than always contingently and discursively constituted. In this regard, we note that there are, of course, many forms of habitual economic behavior that are normally viewed as disorderly. The "exuberant" attitudes and behavior of commodity traders and their markets-indeed, most forward markets and forms of speculation, which proceed according to well-defined rules-provide one such example. While the habit and ritual of market transactions may permit the discursive introduction of more order than that which is found in the atomistic view of instantaneous markets-the view that comprises both the self-consciousness of neoclassical theory and the critique of the same by modernist Marxists-the conjunctural and overdetermined nature of habit and ritual (and thus their intrinsic disorderliness, because they may or may not be reconstituted from one moment to the next) makes it impossible to treat these as mere synonyms for socioeconomic order.
Even with the introduction of habit and ritual, capitalist markets cannot be seen as uniformly orderly processes. In addition to the provisos we note above, there is no guarantee that a particular market will come into existence when it is called for (i.e., when either side of a potential transaction or some outside observer finds it "necessary") or that a market, once it exists, will continue to exist over time (e.g., that an object, once produced, will successfully complete the process of circulation). Markets, in this sense, are not self-organizing or self-regulating activities; they are always being broken up and need to be created anew. And this formation and re-formation of the activity of market exchange is predicated on the existence of processes and institutions throughout society in and through which the means and identities of such transactions are continually being created and destroyed. When markets are understood in this manner, they are seen to be "socially embedded" (indeed, socially constructed) institutions that are disorderly precisely because they are not the expressions of any underlying essence-whether a given economic rationality (as presumed by classical and, more recently, neoclassical economists) or a universal law of value (as often put forward by modernist Marxists). As with habit and ritual, markets are disorderly at least to the extent that their continued existence must be reproduced in each moment, and this reproduction requires its determination by myriad institutions and subjects, themselves requiring such reproduction. Change and dislocation, therefore, may be the rules rather than the exceptions.
Abolafia, M. Y. 1989. "Markets as Cultures: An Ethnographic Approach." In The Laws of the Markets, ed. M. Callon, 69-85. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kopytoff, I. 1986. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 64-91. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Parry, J. 1989. "On the Moral Perils of Exchange." In Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch, 64-93. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Watkins, E. 1998. "Your Dog's Just a Dog: Literary Scholarship and Market Politics." In Everyday Exchanges: Marketwork and Capitalist Common Sense, 128-59. Stanford: Stanford University Press.