According to the Oxford English Dictionary, capitalism is
An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state
Note that there is no mention of free markets. This is a notion completely independent of capitalism, in which large corporations usually do their best to dominate and distort markets.
As frequently happens, this definition tries to make something binary which is not. The phrase “rather than by the state” points out a common assumption that “the state” is the only alternative to “private”, while even their definition of socialism doesn’t mention the state; there are other ways that communities can own or regulate without a monolithic state.
A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Which brings us1 to another alternative, communism:
A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.
In this workbook, I will use the Oxford definition of capitalism without the “rather than by the state”, with a broad understanding of “trade and industry” which includes the means of production and transportation, among other things.
At this point I can already tell that “ownership” is another concept that needs clarification but I’ll leave that until a later workshop. It is certainly not a binary concept. Do you own a house if you have a 90% mortgage, or does the mortgage lender? In this case, ownership is divided, you each have different rights. In the context of the means of production, it is particularly complex. If owned by the community as a whole, who as which rights if there are different interests, such as those held by workers, customers and those in the neighbourhood affected by infrastructure, noise, emissions, traffic and so on?
I think this is bound up with the idea of decision-making: who has what input into it and how are the decisions made and changed? This has a strong link with the concept of democracy. Capitalism is the least democratic of these, which suggests that the supporters of capitalism who link it strongly with democracy because of its connection with countries called “democracies” are indulging in propaganda.
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Eventually, according to Marx 😃 ↩