But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.
Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism.
Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it.
Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort.
Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?
The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.
I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism.
At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing capital, which in turn engenders unlimited capacity to acquire more capital. Capital is unique among all those systems for that reason.
And as a matter of fact, there are many examples of non capitalist societies.
Really? Who else builds stuff?
The Chinese, famously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up
> The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system
Free commerce is not the same as capitalism. A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.
The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976?
By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.
The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism. The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s, resulting in larger wealth inequalities and more poverty.
Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyond your high-school years, as your account age suggests, this should be obvious.
Unsurprisingly, the most successful systems are those that have proven to be better at meeting human nature on its own terms. Hence the triumph of capitalism as it is practiced today, which for all its flaws has the advantage that you don't have threaten people at gunpoint to force them to engage in it.
All the reforms fit a capitalistic model, not just a free commerce model.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231586
And of course, Mao's communism was very anti-capitalistic.
Said the Christian in pre-Englightenment Europe: "Well, of course Christianity is the one true religion. After all, the whole civilized world is Christian."
However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.
An astute observation, if your knowledge of history begins and ends with the 20th century.
Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?
300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests.
Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?
Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?
https://www.africadatahub.org/blog/what-usaid-funding-of-afr...
https://www.ft.com/content/c10e4f2f-5564-42a4-8aa7-66c78ca1c...
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/kathy-hoch...
You are again straw manning an argument. I said nothing about giving people all resources with no work. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite: I want a society where people compete to provide labor in order to gain material advantage.
My argument against capitalism is that that competition should be fair: people should compete for resources with labor, and not against those who contribute no labor.
If someone wants to passively invest $3M into a new coffee shop and pay labor to work in it, banning it like you want to do will kill the economy and disadvantage the little guy.
When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?
Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.
Communist countries copied technology, their inventions are very few. Capitalist countries routinely exhibit rapid technological development.
It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. None of the progress came from communist countries.
Did you know that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to make money?
Did you know the Wright Bros invented the airplane in order to make money?
And so on and so forth.
I am getting a little tired of repeating myself, but you're evidently confused so I'll indulge you.
The opposition to capitalist as a monetary system does not imply the opposition to the profit motive. As I've said several times, and which you continue to ignore, the exchange of goods and services in the form of commerce requires the profit motive. Conflating my position with communism is a straw man.