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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I'd be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn't even define capitalism. I count myself among them.
Capitalism is a Mode of Production by which the Means of Production are bought, sold, and traded among individuals. This results in Capitalists, ie owners of Capital, and Workers, those who Capitalists employ to create Value using said Means of Production.
And what’s the problem with owning, buying and selling things? We’ve been doing that for millennia. Obviously, unregulated American style capitalism is very broken, but there are better ways to do business. It’s just that those ways are not that appealing to the greedy.
Markets aren't Capitalism, Capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.
I think the simplest way to put it is "an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital"
Technically, Monarchism falls under that definition as well, which is why it gets a bit more complex than that.
A monarchy can be capitalist as long as peoples property rights are respected. The moment the monarch decides to lop somebodys head off and take their stuff you'll be back to the old-school feudalistic "might makes right" societies.
Sort of. Monarchism is more about respecting a family's right to rule, than a claim on economics, though usually Feudalism goes hand in hand historically. The British parliamentary system with a vestigial Monarchy is an exception, not the rule.
I would call monarchism a form of religious capitalism where the ruling class claims divine right as the methods to accumulate capital, rather than using financial means to accumulate capital
Certainly more hierarchical than Socialism, but also more than Capitalism. Fundamentally, the lack of a market for Capital separates Capitalism from Monarchism, the class dynamics of today are different from before. This is helpful to understand IMO when trying to see how to solve it.
Does the exchange of land between kingdoms via wedding dowries/treaties/violence fulfill the definition of a "market for capital"?
Not really. Capitalism allows anyone to buy and sell Capital, whereas these more primitive exchanges aren't the same. The Bourgeoisie are fundamentally different from the Aristocracy.
That's pretty fair. It may feel impossible for me today to afford any capital, but if I were somehow able to accumulate enough money I would be legally allowed to own capital. Under monarchy, even if I got that much money, it would be illegal for me to purchase capital as an individual. That's enough of a distinction to make them different for me, thanks for bringing it up.
Yep, that's the idea! Functionally, Capitalism is more revolutionary and progressive than Feudalism, which is why it's a good thing that Feudalism is fading and Capitalism is the status quo, just like it will also be a good thing when Capitalism is fading and Socialism becomes the status quo.
Kinda. It’s not a very efficient market, but a market doesn’t have to be efficient to be a market.
I guess technically any system of trade could be thought of as a capital market, as long as capital is for sale.
What’s “exclusionary ownership” mean here?
It's the idea that because you own something, you're the only one who is allowed to use it, whether you're actually actively using it right now or not. You can contrast it with usufructuary rights, which are based on the idea that you only have rights to something while you're actively using it
So that would be like one of those rental scooters, or a set of scuba gear if you lived and worked on a ship? It’s yours while you’re wearing it, or maybe while you have it checked out?
Yep! I wouldn't say it would be "yours" exactly because you would never have actual ownership of the thing while you're using it, but it would be your right to use it and profit from it so long as you don't destroy it. A good example would be the way Native Americans viewed land use, following herds of wild animals wherever they went and moving from depleted areas to more fertile ones. This clashed heavily with European and American colonialists, who enforced their views of exclusionary ownership with barbed wire fences and violence.
Like territory. Your crew sets up camp somewhere, that’s your property until you move. You walk into a bar, you take over a corner. It’s your corner for the night.
Don't see the problem in that
The problem comes in what you define as "capital". Food and housing are the biggest issues for the modern world but there still exists the problem of PEOPLE being considered capital that can be owned by other people.
Food isn’t capital. Capital is wealth used to produce other wealth. A house definitely is. Foods just consumable.
Classic “capital” is a hammer owned by a laborer (that situation is one person playing both roles). The classic capitalist separation of layers is a guy who owns a truck full of tools, and he hires other guys to work on things using the tools, but he retains ownership of the tools.
You should be able to own a house. Everyone should be able to own a house. Food of course needs to be owned to be consumed.
Capitalism: The best system for harnessing the greed inherent in humans for the benefit of others. Capitalism produces the most wealth, and it's spread more evenly, than any other system.
Not sure how anyone can sanely argue that Capitalist wealth is spread more evenly than any other system when disparity is rising everywhere it's practiced, even if at slower rates in Social Democracies.
Not to disagree, but what examples are there of a different system being practiced which have a more even distribution of wealth?
Numerous different systems. If you want to look at modern, developed economies, Worker Co-operatives are smaller, Socialist entities that have far more equitable distribution, happier workers, and more stability. If you want a more Libertarian approach, EZLN doesn't seem to have very high disparity, a bulk of the wealth is owned by the Workers, though they reject terms like Socialism. At the risk of being called a tankie (I'm not, I am incredibly critical of more centralized Socialist projects), even the USSR had far lower disparity during it's time than Tsarist Russia or the current Capitalist Russian Federation.
The answer is for Workers to share the Means of Production in a democratic fashion, as opposed to having petite dictators focused on accumulating Capital.
https://calxylian.com/food-scarcity-and-the-fall-of-communism-in-eastern-europe/
Nobody brought up the USSR, and your linked comment has several issues, even as someone who is a critic of the USSR and does not wish to rebuild the USSR:
What is the point of your comment?
Because the comparison is between systems. In other systems some people often end up with nothing, as in not even enough food to survive. That happens less under capitalism, hence there’s a more even distribution of resources.
Kinda like two pieces of paper are both thin, but one of those pieces can be thicker than the other one, despite still being considered thin.
People end up with nothing under Capitalism as well, and there is less disparity in some non-Capitalist systems.
third person checking in here