Anyway, I’ll try to suppress my bitterness. In fact, by drawing on the stuff I studied, I will deploy an observation about the nature of the collaborative free market you suggest. It would have to be embedded in a kind of society which we are systematically destroying in order to make an atomised society which is important for the kinds of free markets which seem to work so well in econometric models.

The kind of society where there is trust between people within the market - built on what? Many-sided relationships, repeated interaction, common internalised values…. These sorts of things require enduring relationships with people and long-term expectations of stability and subtle sanctions which can easily become oppressive and coercive in turn.

What kind of economy would such a society produce - probably one which develops more slowly and, let us face what we see happen to such societies now and in the recent past, vulnerable to destruction and dispossession by more rapacious socio-economic models.

Change needs to come about slowly - by taking back bits of control over what we as individuals and groups produce and consume. Living simply and using local resources as much as possible. Any new model we raise in opposition will have itsown problems as people do not fit into models and we hate the results of being forced to do so. Phenomenologically, a free market would be a market where people feel their decisions are not coerced. So many people feel free now as they naturalise their conditioning and take as given the conditions under which they make their choices. If you and I feel unfree, it is because we have questioned the conditions and criteria of choice presented to us - perhaps through an interest in the conditions in which production takes place, the impacts of our consumption of the environment or the limitation of choices to things which seem superficial and leave only unethical outcomes, or the power which it has given to impersonal organisations to construct the conditions under which we work, play and take political decisions.

Draw attention to these, and the game starts to unravel. The high priests of economics will have to compete with atheists and humanists just as all other religions have to. But please let’s not construct a new Marxist-like religion, for one thing it’ll be an excuse to create more modules of indoctrination at university to crush us! David Harvey is fun and provides radical critiques, but he still does not see that technological development can go in different socially conditioned directions which have power implications which aren’t neutral in their societal impacts. I reckon we should focus on the kind of society we want and let the economic theorists follow!