[Banthum]

I've always found this idea that capitalism was "invented" to be so strange.

e.g. When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.

Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.

Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people. Because to admit now natural and organic it is would be to admit how much enforcement and violence their ideology really demands in order to obtain the real world.

[danharaj]

I didn't use the word invention, I used the word development. There was no connotation about naturalness in what I said. Neither did I make a moral judgment on the development of private property. So, why are you imposing on my words an argument that I wasn't making?

> e.g. When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.

Ok, if you want me to be more precise, private property relations, which are very different from feudal property relations. In fact, since property is a legal construct, this aspect of the development of capitalism could be called an invention, and the idea that capitalist forms of property are particularly ""natural and organic"" compared to other forms is quite suspect-- at least without any argument provided for it. As a foot note, one of the processes that developed private property was Enclosure [0] which was by no means nonviolent.

But I'm not going to try to be as precise and rigorous as a history textbook in Internet comments I compose in between compiles. Feel free to believe that capitalism is natural and organic, or read a history book. Idk.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

[dragonwriter]

> When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.

There is an extent to which it is true (well, the first part, not wage labor!), but it's a different set of property realtions than the ones which are the defining feature of capitalism.

> Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.

Feudalism is also a system by which value is extracted by property relationships; a different set than capitalism, and (while some quantity of wage labor may exist within feudalism) not one where wage labor plays a central role.

Capitalism replaced the system of property relations underlying feudalism with a different set.

> Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people.

Traditionally, that's not even how the socialist critics that first identified it viewed it; it wasn't “an invention created by bad people”, but the state resulting from a number of related changes to the model of property driven by a combination of opportunity created by physical and other social technologies and self-interested people seeking their own gain. (This isn't inherently bad, the same people saw socialism the same way, though they saw the class driving and benefiting the preservation of capitalism against further change as narrow and inherently narrowing with the continuance of capitalism.)

I'm not really sure, then, what people you are referring to, since neither capitalism's defenders nor it's main critics hold the view you are attacking.