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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
.. 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.
"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.