Successful hegemonic projects necessitate both coercive capacity on the part of the governors and consent on the part of the governed. In other words, the state and the social relations it protects must be granted, at least by a significant part of the population, sufficient legitimacy. Capitalism requires legitimacy. What is not so clear, however, is the means through which it acquires legitimacy: are we fooled into acquiescing to capitalism by cultural institutions like the church, or by transactions that cheat us in ways we don't understand? Are we "bought off" by the welfare state, basic amenities, and the possibility of upward mobility? Is capitalism the "best possible" or "least bad" system, thus meriting our reasoned endorsement? Furthermore, to what extent does the state participate in the legitimation process? If we are dupes, is it the state that dupes us? Capitalists? Both? If we are bought off, surely the state is important, but in whose interest is it acting? Is it extracting from capitalists in the interests of workers? Or is it appeasing workers in the interests of capitalists? There is, of course, no one universal answer to these questions.

[...] Consider the following: even if it were true that capitalism and democracy have always gone together (and it is definitively not true), this would in no way justify the claim that they will go together until the end of time. Transhistorical claims originating in particular historical modes of production have never proven true [...]

[...] It is not a mere tool of any particular class or interest, but is linked in different ways to them all, while enjoying some independence at the same time. It is the "factor of cohesion": its relative autonomy from any one class or class fraction is what makes hegemony in capitalism possible.

[...] relative autonomy allows the state to protect capitalism when capitalists themselves threaten to tear it apart. The state is the ideal institution to protect capitalism from the capitalists, who, when they each act on their own, tend to cause more than minor bumps in the market-mediated road. The state can legitimately coordinate and regulate their actions, and keep information on their actions in ways that the capitalists might hate, but that nonetheless are often the only reason the system works at all.

[...] In standard introductory economics textbooks, money is commonly said to perform four functions: (1) It is a medium of exchange that facilitates the exchange of qualitatively different commodities. (2) It is a means of payment or transaction settlement, the thing with which you settle a debt, and usually legally defined as such. (3) It is a store of value; you can hold it as an asset in the form of abstract or potential purchasing power. (4) It is a unit of account; i.e., the standard unit by which all "economic" values are calculated and compared.

[...] classical and neoclassical economic analysis suggests that all of these functions from an original and primary function, (1) medium of exchange. [...] However, when examined in a more historically sensitive--and analytically adequate--manner, it is clear that as capitalism evolved, money became central primarily because of its key function as a standardized unit of account, which at least in capitalism is the most important role money plays. [...] as a unit of account it represents an abstract claim on or in circulation as a whole. Money measures and stores abstract purchasing power, and transports it through space and time. [...]

[...] Contract to the impression one gets from the media, just because the market is essential to capitalism, does not mean that capitalism is the market. [...] In truth, markets are only part of the capitalist system, a substantial and essential part to be sure, but there are others: state, family, nonmarket institutions like community groups and teams, and so forth. Nor are markets neutral realms in which supply and demand coolly intersect via the logic of competitive prices, as the harmonious classical and neoclassical models suggest. Markets are principal sites of conflict in capitalism, usually between actors who are not themselves organized according to market logic. If you think about it, even though the capitalist enterprise, the family (however defined), the state, and workers' organizations are among the key participants in capitalist markets, and some of them (especially firms and the state) are the loudest proponents of the benefits of market organization, not one is organized internally according to market principles. Internal relations in firms are not determined by atomistic competition any more than internal distribution of incomes in the civil service are determined by individual marginal contribution to productivity.

Orthodox economists do not walk the Earth naively believing all markets are actually perfect, if only the rest of us could see it. They know full well they are not. But orthodox capitalist analysts do not assume perfection because it accurately represents the world, but rather because without it, the formal modeling they do is impossible.

[...] The common claim that economics is evil because it "quantifies" everything is a weak and distracting argument; too many radical critics give it too much emphasis. It is hard to imagine that whatever world anticapitalism produces will not require lots of "quantitative" analysis. The very notion of redistribution--central to any anticapitalist politics--is unavoidably, if not completely, quantitative. [...]

Orthodox arguments about what markets can do only understand the "market" dimensions of markets, and can only understand those relative to a mythical standard. They cannot comprehend markets as dynamic social institutions, embedded, sometimes deeply, sometimes precariously, in real times and places. They cannot comprehend politics as anything other than external "disturbance" of the market, an obstacle to perfection.

Ultimately, orthodoxy does not have a very strong argument for the superiority of market organization, in the sense that it cannot base it on any sort of proof or logic. On the contrary, the commitment to the market is more a leap of faith; a leap, we are told, that if we all take it together, will performatively make it so. The fact that many of us are reluctant to take the leap has paradoxically become one of the go-to excuses for the failure of markets to work their magic. When capitalism does not deliver the goods, free marketeers almost inevitably attribute it to the fact that we are not committed enough to the market, that somehow we still intervene, preventing competition from realizing its potential.

[...] there are situations in which they don't seem to work all that well--and not merely relative to the perfection some assume they should attain, but even relative to suitably diminished "real-world" expectations. Economists call these "market failures," and perhaps the most commonly noted is the case of so-called "public goods." In political economy, public goods are not just things that are good for the public, but goods or services that it helps everyone to have, but for which there is insufficient incentive for capitalist investment. [...] even if an entrepreneur could come up with a way of "cleaning" the air, there is no way he or she could make a return on their investment because it would be impossible to prevent people from breathing cleaned air for free. Clean air, at least so far, is what economists call "nonexcludable" and "nonrival"--you may be able to provide it for a price, but it is impossible to prevent someone from using it at no cost (nonexcludability), and no matter how much one person uses, it does not diminish available supplies (non-rivalry). In the case of clean air, then, there is no market incentive to provide it: you can't exclude those who don't pay from using it, and no matter who or how many uses it, there is always enough left for others. In other words, you can't control its distribution via contract and you can't make it scarce enough to merit a price.