| >Not to mention why two schools of thought which are on their own obsolete at this point matter here. They're alive enough for heterodox economists and philosophers of economics, and I think that's quite important, in the same way nobody would like Google Chrome to be the only browser. >What about live stock? What about seed stock? What about IP? What about machinery that was bought under market price? These are complications (especially with regard to IP), but in the long run, things like buying machinery under the market price tend to even out, and there is no change in the economy as a whole, in which the capitalist's gain is the same as the machine vendor's loss. It doesn't explain the creation of new value. >But if we redefine "capitalism" as "historic period" now, we might as well define it as a form of music and compare to Frank Zappa songs... My point is that it's not a redefinition, that's literally the way it's defined by mainstream economists and everyone concerned in its study. It is specifically historical, not merely a set of abstract principles. Marx thought the same about communism, for that matter. It has everything to do with economics - not only are trends and terms in economics defined and set by those looking to set a particular political narrative (accidentally or not), but political narratives are important. It's no less of a political narrative to say that ancient Roman society was "capitalist" to pull the favorite trick of the old political economists and indeed many of the neoclassicals - to convince us that capitalism really is a kind of human nature. You don't need a Marxist to claim otherwise, since there's lots of research on ancient society and their modes of production. I think that an abstract ahistorical definition of capitalism is even less tied to reality than the anthropologist's one. |