nin.’s Reviews > The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet > Status Update

…And what facilitated this trick was, of course, the market. Europe got its supplies because it had money, or, at least, more of it than other places; and money, in markets, talks.”

“Thus Martin Sandbu’s rhetorical ‘What Energy Crisis?’ was the conceit of someone who only failed to see crisis because it had been successfully displaced elsewhere. While it is capitalist markets that facilitate such displacements, it is the fetishism that haunts market capitalism that perennially makes it difficult for us to see the displacements in question. Sandbu, after all, was scarcely alone. Markets are the supreme vehicles of desocialization. What we see being traded in markets is a thing –a trinket, a laptop, liquid natural gas. We systematically reify this thingness, thereby treating it, rather than the social and geographical worlds in which it is embedded, as what really matters.”