Don'tcha love their 'logic'?

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Hello, I'm not sure what impressions you have of my family's land, but it was a house with a big yard. Several dozen fruit trees. A chicken coup. A big dog, too, before it was killed. The small scale agriculture was essential to surviving the lean times when the sugarcane factory was off-season. Sometimes the fruit was traded for other things needed.

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Then its not capitalism. (unless your family paid wages to someone to help grow food.)

People have a very overarching definition of capitalism. They have the Cliff Notes version: private ownership of the means of production and they think to themselves Hey! I built a computer once and sold it. That's capitalism! or "I own my house, I own myself. Those are means of production so THAT must be capitalism or Everybody works to get something. Some people want more. Some people try to figure out better ways of doing things. That's capitalism!

But to belabor a point: That's not capitalism. Capitalism has features which make it distinct, unique from other economies. Under manorialism, for instance, the land was owned by a lord. The peasants (who, by definition are landless... there is no such thing as a landowning peasant) worked the land, the lord "owned" the produce and "paid them" for their service by giving back some of the produce. How is this different from capitalism, in which the workers work on the lords "manor" (factory), the lord (owner) has possession of their output, and pays them a portion of what they've produced??

Well, under manorialism the peasants couldn't move from the land, the lord could not sell his holdings, and payment was made by goods, not money. So it's important to make distinctions between different economic forms: they're NOT all the same! Its complicated by the fact that the current system has other economic forms still embedded within it: The family, for example. We still have small business owners. We still have barter. Economic progress is like our technological "ages": fire, agriculture, stone, bronze, iron, steam. Just because we'd advanced to the steam age doesn't mean we gave up using stone or forging iron or growing grain.

FWIW- if it makes you feel better my economist acquaintance smacked me upside the head figuratively speaking and said: DUMMPKOPF! Feudalism is the political form! Manorialism is the economic form! and had a few other choice comments on my posts. So....

BTW- Just like the system in the EU, which we mistakenly call socialism, there is really no word that I know of to describe a system in which virtually everyone is their own boss and business-owner. Its not capitalism because capitalism is characterized by wage earners. Entreprenuerialism, maybe?

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So, Geezer, do you have anything TOPICAL to say??


Of course not.

You just hope to make the message go away by attacking the messenger. As usual.

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Hello,

So the defining moment of capitalism happens when I hire someone to work for me? Like, if a neighborhood boy was hired to tend to the chickens in the chicken coup?

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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"Like, if a neighborhood boy was hired to tend to the chickens in the chicken coup?"

Or to cut my lawn....

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Wulf - are you simple ? Not the lawn. The lawn is not a means of production.
(Looks like you failed reading comprehension 101 --- again.)

MAYBE the chicken coop. It depends. Let's expand it and modernize it a bit to see where it fits. I own a mega-chicken coop of 1 million chickens. I sell the eggs from which I hope to make a profit. I hire people to work my chicken coop. They do not share in the ownership or profit. That, I think, would be capitalism. Scale it back down. Is that the kind of chicken coop you were thinking of ?

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Silence is consent.

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Hello,

Well, does scale matter? I mean, at what point does it reach critical mass and become capitalism? How many chicken eggs must I sell, or chickens must I own, or workers must I hire?

For instance, if I get twenty eggs per day with the chicken-tenders aid, and sell them for twenty dollars, and pay the chicken-tender five dollars, is that capitalism?

And am I taking advantage of the chicken-tender in this scenario?

--Anthony


"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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So the defining moment of capitalism happens when I hire someone to work for me? Like, if a neighborhood boy was hired to tend to the chickens in the chicken coup?

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Yes, I think so. I'll look it up. This is a challenging question!

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Okay, so after some looking up, there appear to be competing definitions of capitalism. The one thing they all have is what is called "commodification". Everything- land, tools, and goods- became commodities which could be bought and sold. Most notably, LABOR is turned into a commodity, which can be bought and sold for money. Apparently, this step happened last.

So capitalism really comes about when there is widespread wage labor and a competitive labor market. One person (Polanyi) traces it back specifically to 1834 with England's welfare reform act, because up until then "labor" was still bound to "parishes" and parish-based welfare. After that, people could (and did) migrate widely in search of jobs, and competed in the labor market for work.

However- Tony, scale does matter. The assumption about capitalism is that MOST people are required by circumstance to work for a wage.

When most people think of "capitalism", they think of their "ideal capitalism": a system of primarily small business-holders and indepedent farmers. But if "most" people are self-sustaining, then its not capitalism. Maybe I'd call it entreprenuerialism for clarity.

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