[sbmassey]

Capitalism's basic meaning is that the means of production are owned by private parties.

Putting them under government ownership instead doesn't seem like the solution to anything, unless you are very sure that the government will follow your ideological beliefs, not be corrupted by its newfound direct power over peoples lives, and not get taken over by populists.

[umvi]

> unless you are very sure that the government will follow your ideological beliefs

And even if you are very sure, you have to be sure the future government will follow your idealogical beliefs as well - people die; power changes hands; social movements and political fads come and go...

[miki123211]

We also need to remember that new inventions often emerge because there are lots of bad ideas and an extremely small number of good ones. Before the ideas are put into practice, it's hard to know which are which.

That's why we have so much innovation in capitalism, but we had so little in communism. Just like in evolution, we need hundreds of companies doing hundreds of pretty similar but slightly different things. 90 will fail, 9 will survive, one will become the next Google or Facebook.

The government is no better than us at predicting success, it may even be worse, but it usually prefers a small number of big and ambitious projects over lots of small ones. Instead of embracing failure and thinking what to do about it, it tries to prevent failure, no matter the cost.

[pathseeker]

>Putting them under government ownership instead doesn't seem like the solution to anything, unless you are very sure that the government will follow your ideological beliefs, not be corrupted by its newfound direct power over peoples lives, and not get taken over by populists.

Don't forget that you have to be sure the government has the perfect knowledge to price things correctly even it's otherwise a good government. This is actually the main reason that centralized planning is frowned upon by capitalists. Without competition to drive price discovery, the market ends up being super inefficient and people end up under-served or output resources don't collect enough input resources to sustain themselves.

[epistasis]

One problem with the term "capitalism" is that it means such different things to different people. For example, feudalism is not generally considered capitalism by those that are anti-capitalist, but feudalism was still private ownership of the means of production.

Or, in the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders railed against capitalism, whereas Elizabeth Warren embraces the term, and they both had very similar policies. They were talking in different ways to appeal to different crowds that have different definitions of capitalism. And it creates tribal responses for some supporters.

[sudosysgen]

Feudalism was not private ownership of the means of production.

Indeed, uner feudalism, the means of production were not commodified, and de facto the lord did not have the right of ownership to the land, because he was only allowed to use it in one very specific way. Therefore, lacking the right of exclusive control, feudal property does not fulfill the definiton of private property.

This is why feudalism is universally understood not to a form of capitalism.

[epistasis]

Well that's a very different definition than "private control of the means of production," however. People focus on different aspects of the myriad definitions of capitalism, and the term becomes meaningless unless some part of the conversation first defines what sort of definition or aspect of "capitalism" one is talking about. However, people often experience a tribally-motivated response to the word before the meanings can be focused on. I'd doesn't make the word "capitalism" useless but it does make it difficult to start a discussion with a general group of people when leading with the word rather than the specifics that one would like to address.

[sudosysgen]

I agree, we do need a very specific and structured definition of capitalism which analyzes it as a social and political system. Which has been done and achieved consensus almost two hundred years ago, but now it's become almost taboo to mention :)

But yes, confusion about these definitions is due to the fact that we haven't had a serious remise en question of the social order in the anglophone world since the end of WW2.

As for my definition of private control of the means of production, I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that if someone may not decide how to use something then they are not owners of such a thing, but merely hold a license to it. It's the same argument for why you can never own a copy of proprietary software, only own a license to it :)

[zingplex]

There are systems of production beyond capitalism and state capitalism. Workplace democracy for one.