This essay argues that markets are an ideational construct, constructed through a milieu of ideologies, power structures and authority relations. Rather than modern markets being spontaneously ordered mechanisms that have evolved naturally from the progressions of history, they are in instead constitutions of power and ideas, acting as a semiotic mechanism for underlying socio-economic realities….

The capitalist market system is defined by the strictures of wage labour relations and the regulatory mechanisms, which are the used for the valorisation of capital and the commodity production which maintains, expands and homogenises this valorisation. These are the inevitable products of capitalist exchange relations and the creation of a general equivalence in which…