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by Maybestring 2863 days ago
>Thus capitalism is freedom.

Capitalism is absolutely compatible with slavery. If you eat seafood, you almost certainly have eaten food harvested by a slave.

Not to mention the numerous historical examples.

2 comments

Capitalism is not compatible with forced labor. It may be compatible with slavery if you define slavery in a way that includes consensual labor. Systems that are partly capitalist may be compatible with forced labor, but in this case the part that allows the forced labor is not the capitalist part of the system and the blame should rest on the system not being capitalist enough.

For example, Resolution No. 9855 in Venezuela allows the government to force workers to move from their current jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days. That is forced labor. But it is not to be blamed on capitalism; in fact, it would have been prevented by capitalism.

Nonsense. Capitalism coexisted with the literal buying and selling of humans as property.

If you want to redefine those systems as not real capitalism, you should also redefine all of the "communist" systems as not real communism because they were nowhere close to the textbook definition of communism. Textbook communism is stateless, while all of those examples had a state.

My definition isn't (see above). But nothing is perfect. It's hard not to trade even with the enemy, whatever their practices might be. What are the alternatives that don't even lead to slavery? Communism certainly does, but capitalism does not (even if we do some trade with nations that use slave labor).

EDIT: And I should add that capitalism, along with Enlightenment values, has been the biggest force for freedom and prosperity yet.