Why do we have Markets? David Graeber in Debt - pre-capitalism:

• King charges tax and pays soldiers in gold

• Outside of the capacities of sovereign royal governance, cowboys and pirates plunder - Israeli settlers, mobs in Brazil killing indigenous people and burning forests for pasture Red Skin, White Masks - Colonial primitive accumulation If We Burn - Brazil Amazon mobs

Wallerstein:

• The state helps firms externalise costs - the less the state provides for businesses, the more competition in markets because externalisation enables monopolisation and it is inherently differential
• The global periphery has limited sovereignty because it has been plundered by colonialists and ‘capitalists’ but there isn’t really a difference - whether or not it is ‘primitive accumulation’, the present-day political status of the global periphery is a function of historical profits by expropriation rather than exploitation. Exploitation simply functions to perpetuate the dynamic

As consumers we benefit from competition in the sense that it protects us somewhat from exploitation. (Inflation is the collective name for individual acts of price-gouging by capitalists that effectively reduce our payslips by making it harder to live. It’s a crude and sneaky weapon in the class war)

However we have very few if any direct ways to express the natural incentive to promote market competition and to limit the monopolising tendencies, the externalisation of costs to the state. Dominant businesses use externalisation and economies of scale to reduce prices of goods when needed to crush competition - this is counterintuitively anticompetitive, it works alongside inflation to incentivise consumers to accept the monopoly. If you start a business to compete, you are incentivised into profit-seeking which is what from the capitalist perspective you are actually competing to do - not competing to provide superior or cheaper goods.

Open source software is pro-competitive, maybe an aberration from the trend enabled by the privileged position of its creators? But it also presents an opportunity for the decentralised externalisation of costs by firms