chat

Even in the west we have Farmer's Markets, where you can interact directly with the people who grow and make food. Or local artisans.

These are getting worse though, as individuals are being driven out by corporations.

You can forget your wallet one day and the seller who knows you very well will just go "no problem, just pay me tomorrow".

I see eyes rolling at this, so let me just say that I live in Spain, buy most of my groceries on a market, and have had this exact thing happen to me more than once. There is something genuinely nice about the personal relationship you develop, and being able to ask e.g. how are the strawberries this week

I assume that people have good associations with markets. Granted there's not much markets left in the West except for random farmer's markets or other touristy stuff or local flee markets, but even then people generally like those.

Supermarkets?

I think you're mixing some things up here. Markets as an abstract ecosystem rather than a physical place are not an invention of capitalism, but a consequence of the digital age. Hyper-financialized capitalistic markets are an abomination, but even if we had communism tomorrow, the world wouldn't go back to what you're describing. "The market knows best" is not an untrue statement in a lot of situations. It shouldn't dictate social issues, yeah, but markets in the abstract sense are still real and by no means exclusively apply to billionaires.

I mean farmers markets and the like are nice, but when people are talking about markets in economics they don’t mean stalls of fruit or bazaars or something, they mean a system of distribution where goods are produced for profitable private sale as commodities

Markets are places that people build relationships. You can forget your wallet one day and the seller who knows you very well will just go "no problem, just pay me tomorrow".

An excellent point. That's one thing I think people forget about our age of retail and transnational industries, there is no relationship between buyer and seller any more. Zero humanity in the commerce. I understand at certain scale there needs to be some rule-based transactions where you need to balance the books (though if you're rich enough you don't have to because oligarchy/plutocracy warps the rules of reality), but there is no such thing of buyers and sellers having any real person-to-person relationship. Even the the "wheeling and dealing businessman" types don't really exist anymore. There is just no place for human relationships in the capitalism because we have utterly done away with the market's humanity. It's been optimized out for efficiency sake.