What holds workers back from starting companies with the culture they want?
No? Why is it capital can dictate what labor does, but the reverse isn't true? Is it some law of nature, or a cultural victory by capital.
That’s why some labor is more highly paid or has more power than other kinds of labor. Capital, likewise has inherent leverage and scarcity power.
We have not, in fact “all come together and decided that we want” the capitalist model of property rights, and indeed the long term evolution since the early 20th century has been away from that model, which was largely imposed top-down jointly by the rising capitalist class and the fading pre-capitalist aristocracy.
Perhaps, but the upthread discussion doesn’t hinge on merely the existence of property rights, but the very specific capitalist model of property rights, which obviously, not all settled agrarian societies have needed, since it is several millenia newer than settled agrarian societies are.
Defenders of capitalism love to argue about the need for “property rights” and then just leap from there to “and, therefore, capitalism”.
The right to accumulate capital, and the freedom to voluntarily transact with others without outside interference is all that's needed to accumulate enormous wealth.
There is no dismantling of capitalism without compromising either property rights (ownership of land/stuff) or individual liberty (labour regulation).
No, one very specific model of property rights (plus no individual liberty not subsumed within that model) = capitalism.
But, again, the capitalist model of property rights isn’t the only one, and the developed West, where capitalism first became dominant, has been drifting away from the capitalist model of property rights for about 100 years now. (While at the same time rejecting alternatives that much more stridently oppose the capitalist model that grew up in places that attempted to avoid capitalism entirely.)
Would you say that the ancient world practiced capitalism? Surely they had wealthy classes of merchants, landowners, bankers, etc. who accumulated capital and did stuff with it.
Our current system of real property ownership is a result of adopting feudal legal structures to the growing need of society to build durable capital investments on land during the advent of industrialization. The 'fee' in fee simple is etyomologically derived from 'fief', a system in which land titles were granted to people in exchange for fealty and servility.
Agrarian societies had significantly different needs and organized their affairs differently and they didn't starve during the winters. Except for those that did, like the settlers in iceland, who died from potentially too many property rights as landholdings became concentrated in the hands of a few small families which left their society brittle enough to be wiped out by inuit raids.
Anyways, the naturalistic fallacy isn't good support for current property rights, which are about as artificial as any law gets.
I would agree with the former, and not the latter. As soon as dispute resolution and contract negotiation became sufficiently formalized, and our societies became sufficiently nonviolent, a class of people emerges who are able to accumulate capital legitimately (merchants, bankers, landowners). This all happens prior to any sort of industrialization, and can rather be seen as a prerequisite for it. Nowhere is this more clear than in Edo Japan, which was hardly industrialized, yet saw the emergence of a wealthy merchant class due to the legal structures which protected their assets from arbitrary seizure and redistribution. Wealthy non-ruling classes also existed all over Europe prior to industrialization.
> the naturalistic fallacy
The assertion that property rights ought to exist isn't a naturalistic one. I was simply pointing out that property rights are hardly a new development in civilization. Property rights can be asserted morally, without any naturalism, by equating the outputs of one's labour with an extension of one's self. If you have produced something for yourself, with your own time and labour, it should be yours do dispense with as you see fit, in the same way that your body is. A claim over one's property must therefore be justified as though it were a claim over one's own person, and this rather reduces the scope of legitimate claims.
[0] https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/salop/vol4/pp20-26
Because the answer is capital.
Vision, good ideas, the ability to inspire, bringing people together, luck, etc. all factor in. To single out capital is to say if anyone has money they will be able to start a successful business.