alt Hacker NewsThe term "capitalism" was literally only created for the purpose of writing criticisms of the (then) current system of markets/trading/taxing/investing.
Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.
Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.
The formalization of the process of buying shares in a company and receiving dividends/profits as a result is a bit newer, but the general concept of "I give you money, you use it to make something and sell it then give me money back" has been around for roughly the same amount of time as currency itself.
Anyways, my point is that there is a lot of things to criticize about our current world/economy, using the term "capitalism" while doing so is too vague to be useful in any way.
(Communism/socialism does have more of an actual definition, but very few people are aware of or use it, so it doesn't help all that much).
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> Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.
That's a market economy, which may or may not be capitalist. Markets have existed for thousands of years under various economic systems.
Agree on your other points though, 'capitalism' was coined to just describe and criticize the system they saw emerging, one of private ownership of the means of production, combined with wage workers who do not own their tools or the product of their labor, but instead sell their time.
But its hard to have discussions around because too many people conflate "market economy" == "capitalism" but you can have markets in a feudalist, socialist, communist, any other society, that doesn't inherently make them capitalist. But I still think its useful as a term, but only to specifically describe who owns the capital.
> Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.
.. feudalism?
Which, AFAIK, lasted much longer, and is just not the same thing?
Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.