Markets thrive only when capitalist firms are dismantled

Evidence

Capitalist firms are market-free zones within which a non-market process extracts surplus value from employees which then takes the form of rent, profit and interest. … In contrast, the democratised companies I propose here, and in Another Now, are more consistent with well-functioning, competitive markets in which prices – free from the scourge of rent and concentrated market power – are formed. Put differently, doing away with capitalist firms, through terminating labour and share markets, paves the ground for truly competitive product markets and a process of price formation that powers up the great engine of entrepreneurship and innovation which conventional thinking, wrongly, associates with capitalism. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 714

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Coase’s theory of the firm and to Milgrom’s institutional analysis — firms are islands of central planning inside a market ocean, and Varoufakis inverts this to say firms corrupt markets. — connects to: US public corporations were dismantled in the 1980s as capitalism shifted toward financial speculation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 128; Markets and profits still exist but no longer drive the economy — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 15; Capitalism breaks with prior production yet continues domination over objects — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1602
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard move of equating capitalism with markets: Varoufakis claims markets only function properly once capitalist firms are eliminated, a genuinely paradigm-shifting framing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 714

Broader Connections

• Capitalism breaks with prior production yet continues domination over objects #complicates (0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1602