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Comment by thrw42A8N | Hacker News Reader

The market is the only way of organizing people, thankfully it doesn't mean much.

(Even non-profits etc are part of the market)

The market is not an organization, the market is a disorganization—except in the case of a monopoly/monopsony, in which case intervention is desirable.

Nobody said that the market is some organization, it's a way of organizing people, and it happens naturally. It's not something you invent, create and maintain, it's something you discover and observe - and try to control, often in vain or with unintended consequences, like weather. There was a market long before anybody thought of the word - and it was one of the first words. The oldest known written text is not some religious fluff or descriptions of market-less utopia, it's a "warranty claim" about a shipment of copper.

My point was that the word organization implies a planned structure, and a free market is explicitly not that. I'd consider it fair to say a market is a way of humans self-organizing, but a market is not an organization in any common sense of the word.

"Organization" (verb) doesn't necessarily result in "an organization" and almost definitely not in something "optimally organized". Your brain is organized and yet nobody planned it and it's definitely not an organization.

I also disagree that "an organization" (noun) implies anything other than "a group of people" as described in dictionary. An organization can exist without any planned structure - doesn't stop it from being an organization. In my teenage years I was part of few "hacker" groups (in the HN sense of the word) - we tinkered with computers and had a website with cool stuff, all under our 1337 H4X0R-esque name and logo. We definitely were an organization, but we really didn't plan any structure at all. We just liked tech.

See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organization

The Open Source movement was definitely a different way of organizing people

I wonder if non-religious subcultures like that can last very long though

Oh my friend, you have some reading to do!

The capitalist market system is really only a few hundred years old! If you believe Meiksins Wood, she puts it at about the mid 1700s, others put it a little later.

And even then, it took quite some time to reach the rest of the globe.

We've had non-capitalist market economies, anarchist economies, communist economies (of various flavors), gift economies, and many other ways of organizing people.

Ask the folks who run Food Not Bombs about whether they are 'organized by the market'. :D

"The market" doesn't imply "the capitalist market system". Yes, the current structure of world economy started forming around that time. There was market since pre-history and will be long after Earth is dust.

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