Sounds like no true scotsman.
Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory
Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory
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).
.. feudalism?
Which, AFAIK, lasted much longer, and is just not the same thing?
> 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!
That being said, if we're talking about the lord owning the mill you labor at, how is that different than tesla owning the car factory you work at?
A better comparison to support your "capitalism = feudalism" argument would actually be the era of company stores and truck wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
The distinction between that and some kind of stereotypical medieval serf living on a farm he was granted by a lord and producing crops that he uses to pay his rents and so forth seems somewhat minor.
Yes in general a modern american has more government enforced rights and protections, but at the end of the day a lot of rights aren't really all that relevant if you can't afford them in the first place.
Musk and I both have the right to build a factory to produce electric cars, but one of us is going to have a much harder time exercising that right.
(Not to say that we aren't living in a better world, we absolutely are, I would never trade places with basically anyone from "the past", but the point isn't that things aren't as bad as they used to be, the point is how do we improve what we have today)
If you don't understand the difference between a feudal lord an Elon musk I'm not sure I can help you. We live in a world where individual rights are orders of magnitude more significant that those of a feudal serf.
People who might qualify for the label "serf" had all sorts of differing rights and responsibilities and cultures across the literally thousands of years of history we have access to, anything from slaves in all but name to people who had (the equivalent of) bills of rights and legal protections for things they owned and produced and what duties and obligations they had were enforced by contracts laws and judges.
Musk and I both have "the right" to build a factory to produce electric cars for sale, but one of us is going to have a considerably easier time exercising that right.
It's illegal for both Steve Jobs and I to to park in a handicapped space, but when he gets a fine for doing so, it doesn't affect him in the slightest and he (used) his power to avoid suffering from any consequences, whereas I am meaningfully impacted by the punishment.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Are things better "now" than "then"? Yes, of course. I wouldn't trade places with basically anyone from more than 100 years ago. But that's irrelevant to the point that people like Musk and the thousands of similar but less famous people have too much power and that power is used to corrode our society.
Living in a house you rent and working at someone else's factory has a number of downsides. It's not all bad, but it's still worth actually considering what is good and what is bad so we can improve things.
What makes capitalism different is that the power is distributed along capital (as opposed to handpicked by the king under feudalism; or embedded in government monopoly under mercantilism).
In other words, in capitalism, the owners of capital (or the owners of the means of production; i.e the rich; the aristocracy; etc.) are the ones who get to dictate the living conditions of the rest of society. The rulers (be it democratically elected government; an absolute monarch; a military dictatorship) will legislate in order to maintain the interest of the owners of capital. The police (or military) will fight for the interest of the owners of capital, and will suppress any resistance against the interest of the rich, etc.
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).
The problem is that extreme wealth imbalance leads to a power imbalance that tends to throw society into turmoil. The French Revolution being a canonical example.
Even if they perhaps work the same number of hours a year, Maria has more training and (maybe) some kind of rarer aptitude and as a result we have a lot more house cleaners than neurosurgeons (in america and other places there a whole bunch of other factors like who gets access to the training and so on that causes some of these imbalances, but that's a whole 'nother comment).
The people, in general, are probably considerably less happy with the idea that jk rowling the ultrarich author gets to use her money to try to pass laws taking rights away from people she doesn't like.
Look at the difference between Ellison and Musk. Ellison is probably has similar levels of power to Musk, but he (afaik) mostly uses it to buy giant yachts and annoy other fortune 500 companies, and as a result most people don't really care that he's a billionaire.
Musk, on the other hand, tries to use his power to screw with government services and publically attack minorities and so on.
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.
The major issue is the "private ownership of the means of production". While some argue it's a recent development, others (like me) argue it has been present since the dawn of civilization and, ignoring the "free market" and "voluntary transactions" part, one could argue both feudalism and socialism are capitalistic systems, with the latter often receiving the term "state capitalism", instead.
And then there's the issue of "wage workers". Workers who own their means of production (i.e. freelancers) are still often considered "capitalists" themselves, as under the umbrella of "small capitalists", even if they rely more on their labor than their ownership.
It completely ignores the decades of external hostility toward any nation that attempted to build a socialist economy. Almost every attempt has been met with near immediate intervention from captialist super powers, particularly the USA. Nixon activeley worked to cause the military coup in Chile, Cuba has faced the longest trade embargo in modern history (and yet still managed to outperform its peers in the region in healthcare and literacy). Its unscientific to attribute these struggles purely to internal failure when they are subject to deliberate economic warfare.
Secondly, your definitions are being stretched to fit your thesis. Scandinavia is not "socialist flavored" it IS a social democracy, with free markets. Claiming China's success is from captialism is ignoring that its economy relies entirely on state owned land, state owned and controlled banks, and state owned companies, and mandatory five year plans coming from the state.
If we classify any successful state-led initiative as "capitalist" and any blockaded, intervened upon state as "purely socialist" then the argument is an unfalsifiable truism.
the soviet union also pushed humans into space
cuba produces a ton of doctors who then go on to heal people too poor to train local doctors
in terms of, how does socialism benefit jeff bezos and elon musk and the actual capitalism of epsteins and the like using money as power mad exption from the law, i guess musk built space x on soviet rocket designs, but otherwise not a ton.
does it need to benefit the ultra wealthy capitalists to be good though?