Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

OK so... the "no true scotsman" game between warring ideologies is what it is. Marx more or less invents "capitalism" in his critique of it. Pro capitalists then came in with their own definitions of capitalism. Later anti-communists insist(ed) that socialism=stalin, and capitalism means liberalism. Whatever. Capitalism means different things. I'm not going to unknot that mess.

But... I will say that etymologically (ie in the early rhetoric), the word "capitalism" meant "regime where capitalists rule." Monarchy = monarchs rule; democracy means the people rule, etc. IE, the old banana republics would have represented near perfect capitalism.

In any case, I don't see why "Academy of Management Perspectives" decided to bring big-c "Capitalism" into it. What part of capitalism are they examining/exonerating? Defining capitalism simply as "private ownership & the existence of markets" is silly. This exists in many times and places that you couldn't credibly call capitalism.

Considering the context (Macedonia?) I think what is meant by "capitalism" is economic policies & changes of the last 30 years. Washington Consensus monetary policies, international/american compatible corporate/contracts law and such.

I've also long been perturbed by the definition of capitalism largely focusing on markets, private property, and even entrepreneurship. Since those are like, as old as human civilization probably.

Why does the idea that capitalism has co-existed with civilization perturb you? Not criticizing, just honestly curious.

Not what I said at all lol

It looks like what you said:

>I've also long been perturbed by the definition of capitalism largely focusing on markets, private property, and even entrepreneurship. Since those are like, as old as human civilization probably.

It seems like you want another definition of capitalism that would reflect a more recent development of it. Again, I'm not criticizing at all, just wondering what the perturbing aspect is.

Capitalism, as the term has been most over 200 years of its existence, refers to something that emerges in the industrial era.

Human civilization goes back further than the 18th century jfyi

Of course. How is that related to the point you're trying to make?

The point being the things I listed are pre-capitalist sociological and economic structures.

Thanks. I guess that goes along with the discussion in the thread above about just when capitalism emerged. I would argue that it was essentially there at the beginning of private property, but that it was overshadowed by government until the 18th century, when it became relevant to talk about capital apart from government because it was now capable of creating change in society at a scale formerly only associated with the state.

(I'm the GP, not P)

.. It perturbs me because it's usually a (imo) dirty rhetorical trick. The argument never really sticks to a "just markets & property" definition of capitalism. The way it usually works is: (step 1) define capitalism in a way that applies to most societies at most times; (step 2) proceed with the rest of the argument with a much more specific definition.

In this case, what the paper actually means by capitalism isn't just "Markets & Property," even though they do define things this way. What they actually mean by capitalism is privatisation and other major policies adopted post Yugoslav and Soviet dissolution. None of the paper makes sense otherwise.

If we're discussing history (the original context for the term "capitalism") the uber-broad definition doesn't work either. Capitalism has something to do with the industrial era, the ascendancy of merchants over medieval aristocracies & such. No one actually sticks to a definition of capitalism where the early stock markets of Amsterdam & London are not more capitalistic than feudal systems or whatnot.

It's just disingenuous, basically. If that's the definition of capitalism, there's not much to discuss. Most systems are capitalism. It's also ahistorical, since it ignore most usages of the term.

The dictionary definition is pretty straightforward:

"An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." But wasn't that true in many ancient civilizations? Haven't individual merchants and property owners been around for a long time?

I think the significance of industrialization for capitalism was that it marked the first time that an individual could rapidly amass a large fortune within their own lifetime. Prior to that era, you had to be affiliated with the government in some way, able to raise taxes from a large number of subjects, to pull in that kind of money so quickly. The gap between the royals and the serfs began to fill with a middle class. Once capital became disentangled from government, people started talking about it more as an independent entity. It wasn't so much that capitalism emerged as phenomenon in the 18th century so much as it emerged into the public consciousness then.

Capitalism is at heart about none of those things. The most important component of it is the idea that the return to capital should be larger than the return to labor or ideas. That is, given that all human enterprise of any type generally requires capital, labor and ideas, capitalism is the name we give to a system in which the profits from that enterprise go primarily to whoever provided the capital.

There is always a justification offered for this, which is that the losses go to capital also (i.e. investing capital in some enterprise is more risky than investing labor or ideas). There are numerous, excellent refutations to this claim.

Of those, private property - the Marxist definition of it, at least - is mostly new. For anyone not familiar, that definition of "private property" is something like productive assets used by other people for the profit of the owner, and "personal property" is like, your clothes or your TV. It's a little artificial, and fuzzy in some cases (but not that fuzzy, it's a useful way to look at society).

Prior to the industrial revolution, most private property was land and slaves (or serfs, same thing). Land supports only so many people, and land is finite, so both of those have limits on growth. And tools for any given trade were generally cheap enough that anyone of that trade would own their own set.

With the industrial revolution, suddenly the best ways to produce certain goods were wildly more expensive than what any given worker can afford, and even more wildly more productive. So there needed to be a mode of organization besides "every worker owns their own set of tools," and at the same time, factories were the first thing ever to be more valuable than owning land. So that's why "who owns private property" suddenly became an important question about 200 years ago, when "who owns land" would've been the entire discussion for most of human history.

> Of those, private property - the Marxist definition of it, at least - is mostly new.

It is newly independently significant, not new.

> Prior to the industrial revolution, most private property was land and slaves

No, “private property” in the Marxist sense excludes both land and slaves, but most private property was generally held in the same hands that held land and, if not actual slaves in name, power over subject people equivalent to that of government (and often recognized as governmental authority) as a personal (though often not freely transferrable) property right.

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