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).

▲

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 21 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).

▲

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.

▲

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!