Sounds like no true scotsman.

Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory

wredcoll 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The term "capitalism" was literally only created for the purpose of writing criticisms of the (then) current system of markets/trading/taxing/investing.

Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.

Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.

The formalization of the process of buying shares in a company and receiving dividends/profits as a result is a bit newer, but the general concept of "I give you money, you use it to make something and sell it then give me money back" has been around for roughly the same amount of time as currency itself.

Anyways, my point is that there is a lot of things to criticize about our current world/economy, using the term "capitalism" while doing so is too vague to be useful in any way.

(Communism/socialism does have more of an actual definition, but very few people are aware of or use it, so it doesn't help all that much).

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danudey 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.

	▲	wredcoll an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would more simply define that as "wealth inequality" rather than capitalism (or more broadly, power inequality) and perhaps go on to say that the real problem is that, while you can't realistically prevent/remove all inquality, most systems do a poor job of preventing the people with more money/power from using that to consistently increase their own share.
	▲	atmosx an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Nah, Ancient Greece has nothing to do with today’s capitalism. It’s a dumb example and the parallels will fall down to a close inspection. Different world.
	▲	alistairSH 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Pretty sure Adam Smith captured that in his writings. Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).

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thewebguyd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.

That's a market economy, which may or may not be capitalist. Markets have existed for thousands of years under various economic systems.

Agree on your other points though, 'capitalism' was coined to just describe and criticize the system they saw emerging, one of private ownership of the means of production, combined with wage workers who do not own their tools or the product of their labor, but instead sell their time.

But its hard to have discussions around because too many people conflate "market economy" == "capitalism" but you can have markets in a feudalist, socialist, communist, any other society, that doesn't inherently make them capitalist. But I still think its useful as a term, but only to specifically describe who owns the capital.

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sebastiennight 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.

.. feudalism?

Which, AFAIK, lasted much longer, and is just not the same thing?

	▲	wredcoll an hour ago \| parent [-]
		History.com says: > Feudalism is a term often used to describe the social, economic and political conditions that existed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At its core, it was a system in which a landowner, or lord, granted a piece of land called a fief to a subordinate known as a vassal. In return, the vassal pledged loyalty to the lord, providing labor, military service, payments—or a mix of these. And then the next paragraph goes on to say that historians think this is way too simple to describe what real people were actually doing. Either way, unless every single piece of property in the kingdom (including, like, plows and mill stones and spinning wheels) was granted by the king (or someone he had granted to) it seems like there's still a lot of room for buying/selling/investing. I mean, it's an interesting answer but my basic point is that the "real world" is far too complex for a term like capitalism to be at all useful. Even stuff like "free market", can a market be "free" if a government exists? What about monopolies? Etc etc. I just want people to be more specific when they criticize systems!

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qeternity 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Empirically this isn't true. However you feel about "true" capitalism vs socialism, countries underpinned by capitalism have prospered, even the socialist flavors (China, Scandinavia)...while the countries that have attempted pure socialism have all failed.

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thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem with that logic is you're treating economic systems as if they all exist in a vacuum, and you're setting up a circular argument of if its successful its actually because capitalism, if it fails it must have been socialism.

It completely ignores the decades of external hostility toward any nation that attempted to build a socialist economy. Almost every attempt has been met with near immediate intervention from captialist super powers, particularly the USA. Nixon activeley worked to cause the military coup in Chile, Cuba has faced the longest trade embargo in modern history (and yet still managed to outperform its peers in the region in healthcare and literacy). Its unscientific to attribute these struggles purely to internal failure when they are subject to deliberate economic warfare.

Secondly, your definitions are being stretched to fit your thesis. Scandinavia is not "socialist flavored" it IS a social democracy, with free markets. Claiming China's success is from captialism is ignoring that its economy relies entirely on state owned land, state owned and controlled banks, and state owned companies, and mandatory five year plans coming from the state.

If we classify any successful state-led initiative as "capitalist" and any blockaded, intervened upon state as "purely socialist" then the argument is an unfalsifiable truism.

	▲	exhumet an hour ago \| parent [-]
		agreed. its almost like... we need a healthy mix of economic systems to prosper