[edblarney]

"Capitalist individualism will ultimately fail too."

Capitalism has already been around forever :)

It just wasn't until Adam Smith that we had a word for it, or could describe it.

Outside of Imperial power - which by the way always represented a tiny portion of state power (the King had a nice castle, and theoretically absolute power - but the taxes raised were pretty small part of GDP, also, if you didn't live directly near the king, he couldn't exactly bother you. Also remember up until Napoleon - if a King wanted to invade somewhere, he could hardly conscript, usually he had to pay armies of mercenaries).

So even in ancient times - regular trade was the basis for most economies.

[m-i-l]

>Capitalism has already been around forever :)

Much of Europe, for example, was feudalist until around the mid 17th century. To put it simply, the king owned all the land, and those who lived on it were divided into those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed. Under no reasonable definitions could this be considered capitalism - even Marx viewed feudalism as the order coming before capitalism.

[Gravityloss]

And most people likely thought that there couldn't be other forms of society. Divine rights of kings.

[aninhumer]

>Capitalism has already been around forever :)

Only if you define it in a way which is so loose as to be tautological.

There have been a wide variety of resource allocation mechanisms throughout history, and it wasn't until relatively recently that any of them could really be described as "Capitalism".

[Symmetry]

Not literally forever but you could describe ships bought by private money for private profit by merchants in ancient Rome as capitalism. Capitalism is, fundamentally, the private ownership of the means for production with the owners receiving the fruits of that production directly and the workers being compensated by that owner, and the capitalists using their excess profits to create more means of production. I'm not sure how you could define capitalism such that it includes everything we describe as capitalist in the modern world while excluding Roman merchants.

Until recently capitalism has been a small fraction of production but it's existed much longer.

[edblarney]

"There have been a wide variety of resource allocation mechanisms throughout history"

If you have currency, banking, credit, merchants raising capital, private property protections, rule of law, labour at some cost - towards projects ... then it's basically capitalism.

The Romans had all of that to lesser or greater degree.

There are no examples of centrally planned economies working out on any scale.

Communism is a completely dead idea, it's an effete academic concept only. That game is over.