It bothers me that the term “capitalism” is being overloaded to mean “patents and intellectual property”.
Other than that, this is a fantastic read, and it sounds like they are doing great work.
Other than that, this is a fantastic read, and it sounds like they are doing great work.
It's like when people say "competition is good for innovation". HN (the hobbiest stuff featured here, not the venture capitalist stuff) is proof that people will always do stuff for the fun of it. Hobbiests aren't competing - they're cooperating. Cooperation is far better for innovation than competition as you're helping each other and sharing resources, not making it harder for others to work in a similar area.
[1] Apple don't build Mac, Mc Donald's don't operate most of its restaurants, car manufacturers merely attach together a bunch of spare pieces built by contractors, etc.
The point is that capital is not defined as the property of the capitalists. There are virtually no pure "capitalists" in the sense that they only own capital and do no work around that capital.
In developed countries there aren't even that many pure workers, because most workers own insurance policies, some "means of production" or even equity in a company or two.
The problems which are often called "capitalism" are in my opinion more about a power disequilibrium causing exploitation, especially using capital as power to take capital away from poorer people or distributing the value gain in a way that is perceived as inequitable.
Oligarchies can be justified by different reasons: religion, lineage, etc. In the case of Capitalism, it's an oligarchy legitimated by the “merit” of the dominant, who were somehow chosen in the great market competition.
And capitalism is not about "merit" but about possession. Lots of "Capitalists" (by which I mean people who derive most of their income from capital investments rather than labor) have inherited much or most of their wealth. Merit is not a requirement. Enough property to exert power and therefore redistribute wealth however is.
This is not accurate. Capitalism describes a system where people are free to own means of production. A hypothetical system where everyone owns some means of production, would still be capitalism.
No, it wouldn't, because it is marketable ownership of the means of production that defines capitalism; that is, it is the buying and selling, not the ownership alone, that is key (particularly, historically, the marketability of the means of production is a key factor distinguishing capitalism from feudalism, in which much of the means of production was owned but attached to entailments which the current owners were not free to alienate.)
For a version of your example, if everyone owned a fixed, equal share of the means of production which was not marketable, that would be an implementation of socialism.
I have to be sincere, I never saw this definition involving marketability anywhere, this is new for me. Perhaps it's really like you say, but that's not the definition I had, nor the one I see as the generally accepted one when checking up the definition of capitalism.
> For a version of your example, if everyone owned a fixed
But that is the thing, it isn't fixed. You are free to manage it, sell it, buy it, as you wish. That's why it's an hypothetical situation, where everyone would end up with a part voluntarily and not forced by the state.
> I never saw this definition involving marketability anywhere, this is new for me. Perhaps it's really like you say, but that's not the definition I had
But then also this about your hypothetical about a “capitalist” system where “everyone owns capital” which makes it capitalist as opposed to socialist:
> You are free to manage it, sell it, buy it, as you wish.
You seem to explicitly recognize that marketability—the right to buy and sell—is an essential element of the kind of capital ownership that defines capitalism in the same post that you claim that it isn't.
In any case, that is the reasoning of my second point when originally answering to you: A hypothetic situation where most people would own means of production, would still be capitalism when means of production are free to exchange hands.
That is too say: it's capitalism by definition as long as the means of production can exchange hands freely, it doesn't matter if they are all concentrated on the possession of a few or not.
If they can be freely exchanged, absent active as social management if distribution (which is not capitalism), they will become narrowly concentrated over time. Broad distribution is not a stable condition.
That's a fairly broad definition, so broad you lose all the meaning. By this definition, half of socialism (all but Marxism-Leninism) counts as Capitalism. Same for many economic system around the world since the beginning of History, while historians unanimously describes Capitalism as born in the late Middle-age/Renaissance in Europe (they don't agree where though, some talk about the Protestant counties (Max Weber), others think it was born in northern Italy (Fernand Braudel), while some consider the Jewish community as being the cradle of Capitalism).
I think your definition is highly influenced by the US anticommunist propaganda of the world war, who tried to create a dichotomy between Capitalism and the totalitarian communism. The reality is way more complex than this black-and-white narrative.