[freeopinion]

Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought.

Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good.

Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good or bad. It just is. Everybody takes advantage of gravity all the time to do things like walking. Some people build clever systems that explicitly rely on gravity. The current state of gravity is not making the world better or worse than the state of gravity did a million years ago.

People are doing amazing things that seem to defy gravity. But they don't defy gravity. They still rely on principles of physics that include gravity. People who understand gravity can depend on it to make things like Burj Khalifa possible.

Any interaction between people involves economics. Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both). Capitalism focuses on the effects of acting in self interest. But people have to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. That decision is independent of capitalism. I think it is best not to confuse that decision with capitalism.

That might help better explain why I think capitalism is super awesome when informed by enlightened ideas of self interest. Your gripe doesn't seem to me to be against capitalism. Your argument seems to be that people have mistaken ideas about their own self interest.

[kelseyfrog]

> Capitalism is like gravity.

This is a very reified stance.

What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time.

Capitalism is a product of human choices. It exists as a set of human behaviors and legal protections. It is not a natural phenomenon like gravity because unlike gravity, it didn't exist until the 14th or 15th centuries[1]. Capitalism would not exist if legal protections(namely the legal construct of private property) ceased to exist. Laws, like many other products of human production, are dependent on humans for their existence.

1. Depending on whether you want to start with the Muscovy Company or the British East India company.

[freeopinion]

Some might say that Capitalism (with a capital C) was born in Wealth of Nations. IIUC, you argue it was birthed by Muscovy or BEI some centuries earlier.

I argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?

(Thank you for your comment. I know a discussion about capitalism is completely off-topic, and an explanation of reification is even more off-topic. But I've enjoyed you bringing it up and exploring the tangent.)

[kelseyfrog]

I debated distinguishing the behavior of Capitalism and when we actually started calling it Capitalism and went with the former.

Before we get too far into the weeds, I want to be very specific about Capitalism. I am referring it to be the ability to buy and sell portions of a company[the capacity to produce]. The conception of company as property. This didn't arise until the events mentioned. From what I gather, it's not a particularly contested definition.

Happy to correspond elsewhere! Contact available in my bio.

[komali2]

> argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?

What's the difference between capitalism and Capitalism? Are you just describing the act of exchanging resources as capitalism? The Soviet Union fed its workers (usually lol), was that exchange of resources "capitalism?"

This isn't a really accurate use of terms, and imo is an example of the hypernormalization of capitalism, or as the op said, reification. There's a tendency in people to believe that things that existed as recently as a day before they were born, have existed for essentially forever, and are as certain as gravity. In reality, capitalism, which is the private ownership of the means of production in service of accumulating capital, is as stated very young. We have about 25,000 years of human society operating without capitalism.

Trade is not capitalism, nor did the switch to agrarian society represent a capitalist choice. It's frankly a bog standard example of primitive communism. Fields were owned in common by a society, worked in common, reaped in common, consumed in common. Depending on the society, you might have elders, matriarchs, patriarchs etc that determined how resources would be allocated (e.g. successful hunters getting more, spiritual leaders getting more, assholes getting less), but those people weren't "owners" by our capitalist understanding. Nobody paid them rent.

Furthermore, one village trading with another e.g. ox for squash or whatever, isn't capitalism. Even if the ox were "privately owned," and exchanged for e.g. a dowry, the land on which the ox feeds is still owned in common, and such resources were still generally expected to be shared in emergency or for religious or cultural events. Depending on the society of course, but it's a pretty common thread throughout history - the gift economy, and primitive communism.

I think it's very important to keep clear on terms and our history, because dogmatism can cast our feet in concrete and prevent us from trying new, exciting things that are possibly more well suited for the times. One could argue that the global takeover by capitalism is evidence of its effectiveness in all aspects of organizing society, I would say it's more likely to be evidence at its effectiveness of spreading and consuming societies while regulating them just enough to prevent their collapse. Efficient? Hardly - look at the wealth disparity between Apple shareholders and the factory workers that throw themselves off buildings after making the phones that generate apple's fat profit margins. How is that efficient? Therefore I want to push back on this idea of capitalism as gravity to leave us room to explore new ideas.

[bit-anarchist]

And I would like to push back against the idea of "common ownership". Or "collective ownership" in general. How come we say that A, B and C collectively and simultaneously own a resource, but any of them may be alienated from it at any point, presuming a democratic arrangement? Ownership implies final authority, yet none of the individuals actually have it. Instead, it's like a 4th, "juridical", person, who represents the norms and laws binding the members, privately owns it in their stead.

Thus, I'd like to posit that there's no such thing as common ownership, but corporate ownership instead, a subset of private ownership, characteristic of capitalism.

[komali2]

Capitalist ownership is enshrined in law which is defined in rule (written clearly down), and is enforced via the State's monopoly on violence. All distribution of private property is outlined in contract. This includes the means of production.

When land is owned in common, the "private" ownership of a cow is less clear - after all, the cow doesn't eat without the land. The resource is thus available to be used for dowry by the individual during times of plenty, but during times of hardship, hey your cow was eating the grass of our land, we all need it, let's eat! Capitalism doesn't have this kind of fluidity. Hardship or no, private property is enforced through law, not vibes.

But regardless, focus less on the cows ("bro imagine you have two cows" is a bit of a meme outside the Chicago school of economics cult) and more on the land, which is the actual means of production here. That's the bit that's been owned in common basically universally for, as far as we can tell, the last two hundred thousand years. There's not been evidence otherwise and for eras we actually do have history for, it's absolutely the case that societies were organized along primitive communism. It's continued today in e.g. some indigenous Taiwanese tribes, possibly elsewhere as well.

Redefining a village as a corporation to fit your theory that capitalism is forever is another example of capitalist hypernormalization. It's simply not the case. Capitalism genuinely is a very new human invention, not a natural socioeconomic force emergent from human relations.

But, it sounds like you are really interested in this subject. If you want to read a much more cited and intelligent opposition to what you're proposing, I recommend Ellen Meiksins Wood "The Origin of Capitalism," historical analysis of capitalism emerging around specific property relations. Or Karl Polanyi "The Great Transformation" which discusses how though ancient markets existed, these are distinct from capitalist markets since they were more organized along kinship, religious, or redistributive lines.

[bit-anarchist]

Capitalist property (by which, I presume you refer to private property) may be documented through written law and may be executed by a state, but the same can be said about law in general and its execution, and that didn't begin with the state.

Not to nitpick too much, but even if the land is "owned in common", it is very much possible to to tell whose cow is which, either by memorizing their differences, tagging, branding, etc.

But I digress, even when the owner isn't clear, it's often clear who isn't. In your cow example, if one powerless individual tried to oppose the cow's sacrifice, for whatever reason, and was denied, they objectively aren't the cow's owner, even though no individual owner has been determined. Simultaneously, we see also a glimpse of alienation. This also applies to land, with the caveat that most land was just mostly unowned for most of history, save for civilizational centers.

It should also be mentioned that law was once (and can once again be) implemented through vibes.

Please note I never redefined the concept of a "village", simply explored possible cases. At best, I redefined the concept of a "corporation", given that the definition I'm using is "a group of people combined into or acting as one body under a normative arrangement, such as a formal contract, a constitution or a customs." I don't think this redefinition is unwarranted, given it contrasts the notion of a individual/physical person, while being state-agnostic. This notion also isn't particularly tied to capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the word at least) either. Given that all I did was accentuate that form of privation, I don't think this is a case of "capitalism hypernormalization", but a case of relationships being more broader than they look.

I will keep a note of those books, although I won't deny that I'm really late in my reading list.

[wolvesechoes]

> Capitalism is like gravity

We created capitalism, we didn't create gravity. Humans are conscious political actors and can decide how they want to organize their society.

> Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both).

Capitalism it social, material and symbolical structure, not some set of observations.

Sorry, but what you write is pure ideology. You naturalize something created socially and politically.