Core Idea
Market society is not simply a society with markets in it. It is a society in which access to life's basics depends on market participation, above all on selling labor for wages.
What changes when society becomes a market society
Varoufakis's point is historical and structural. Markets existed before capitalism. People traded goods, bargained, and exchanged across long distances. Capitalism begins when those markets stop being one part of life and become the main mechanism through which people gain access to food, shelter, and security.
That transformation required history, not nature. Commons had to be enclosed, people had to lose direct access to subsistence, and wage dependence had to become normal. Only then could labor itself become a commodity sold inside a market. Once that happens, market logic stops being peripheral and becomes constitutive.
Why this matters for value
When society takes this form, market price starts to dominate what is publicly legible as worth. That does not mean non-priced goods disappear. It means they become easier to ignore. Friendship, beauty, reciprocity, leisure, and care still matter, but they are no longer the most visible currencies of life.
This is why the concept naturally connects to value and exchange vs reciprocity. Market society does not merely increase trade. It changes what kinds of relation look central, natural, and serious.
Why it matters
This is one of the book's anchor concepts because so many others depend on it. Inequality, labor markets, unemployment, and profit all look different once wage dependence is treated as the central historical fact.