In what way is the prosperity we enjoy today due to capitalism...

>Without manufactures and mechanisation, there could be no representative republics. With manufactures and mechanisation, absolute and feudal monarchies become shaky, unstable and weak
Can you recommend a book on this? I'm a brainlet and can't make the connection between one and the other.

>You are not claiming that capitalism has existed in medieval and ancient times, are you?
Capitalism is what happen when you can trade a thing you have for a thing you want. It predate writings.

If you are free to become an hermit, this is not forced labor.

Labor wages and labor market existed in ancient time and never stopped.

wrong

Jews practised usury since the beginning.

Does usury fit your definition of capitalism? Yes.
Does it predate steam engines? Yes.

The far left can't agree on the meaning of words.

For some, capitalism is when propriety exist.
For some, it's when you can trade.
For some, it's when there is money.
For some, it is about the ownership of the means of production.
Some weird ones even think it have something to do with fossil fuels.

The trade definition of capitalism make sense. Something is your propriety and you can get more by doing nothing productive.

On what? Historical materialism? You probably don't want Das Kapital...

Here's a wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure

Probably there are those cool videos on youtube too with drawing animation...

If you want to read on Marx, I'd recomment Karl Kautsky's works:

This
marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1906/ethics/index.htm
about History

This
marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1903/economic/index.htm
about economy.

How is the specialization of labor related to money? Do you even think before you speak?

Compare any capitalist nation to any non-capitalist nation.

You can define anything you want however you want.

Capitalism, however, has a universal meaning, and it totally isn't bartering.

Scientific research has been fueled by capitalistic greed and very much funded by either money seeking corporation or states looking to boost productivity in a certain field.

The difference is in feudal vs bourgeois property relations. First of all, capitalism did exist in the Middle Ages, Marx himself identifies the urban artisan class (blacksmiths, shoemakers, carpenters, etc.) as the first capitalists. However the vast majority of people were peasants, and the vast majority of the ruling elites were feudal nobles. The difference between a peasant and a worker is that a peasant doesn’t work for a wage, they are simply taxed a portion of their produce. The difference is that the lord doesn’t appropriate the wealth produced by the peasant on an hourly basis, rather it was typically a fixed amount after which the peasant could keep whatever he produced. Wages are also typically defined as being paid in money. More importantly a feudal lord isn’t a capitalist because he doesn’t exist to make money. He’s a landed elite who mostly concerns himself with governing his lands and not engaging in constant profit maximization, and isn’t particularly concerned with economic production beyond getting his taxes from peasants.

You sir, never investigate about economies in your life evidently, let me teach you the 101 of capitalism you ignorant scum.
Capitalism is when I buy a merchandise (raw materials) and then I buy workforce from other people adding value to this raw materials, and then I take away all they created through their labor becouse I bought as if it were a dead object. It is just like feudalism only you choose your master and you are force to do it not by politics but by the fact that to be competitive you would need to be able to afford a machinery that can produce at the same productive force than the huge companies had, which is, salary wise, imposible.

Yeah but all this means is that capitalism devoted a lot of resources to innovation. A non capitalist system can achieve the same results if it were to devote he same resources to this area, it just needs a mechanism that ensures that researchers get the tools they need.

In some way, moneylanding is an embryo of Capitalist relations. Likewise, some Greek philosophers working on scientific theories could be described as embryo of Communist relations.

But simply having traces of some mode of production doesn't mean a whole lot. All modern societies employ effective slavery as the means of punishment. It doesn't make us slavedriving societies.

Capitalism it is called when the capital rules of production dominates society, not if it just exist somewhere, Jews might lend money to a German Lord, but why should the Lord respect the rules of the market if he can dominate it through political power, they are not forced to respect capital, they can just take it by force.

Interestingly enough, all ingredients for capitalism, especially human economical behavior were in place long before the industrial revolution. Technology just speeds things up, but it doesn't change the way humans interact. Someone in the 18th century didn't just do conduct business differently from someone in the 17th century.

Nobody is saying that capitalism didn’t exist before steam engines. Read the first chapter of the communist manifesto. It was arguably the dominant mode of production in some parts of Europe by the 17th century if not earlier. This also means that industrialization, not capitalism, is responsible for the boost in quality of life, just as agriculture, not slavery, was responsible for the boost in productivity and living standards after the Neolithic period. It’s simply a question of turning sweat into gold, and how efficiently that can be done.

Yet, capitalism enabled industrialization.

Theoretically I see no reason why there couldn’t be agrarian capitalism or industrial feudalism, I think that the way it turned out was simply a result in the way the feudal and bourgeois classes evolved. As the privatization of the commons and increasing agricultural capacities displaced large numbers of rural people and drove them into the cities, it put them in close proximity to the bourgeoisie who, coincidentally, were just being exposed to technologies like the steam engine and assembly line, and now had a need for a large labour force.

In what sense? It certainly drove investment in new industry, but I would argue that capitalism isn’t a necessity to industrialize. The USSR industrialized extremely quickly without it.

>Theoretically
Yes, and practically industrialization developed exactly where there was early capitalism, rule of the law, free market economy and a (semi) bourgeois class of entrepreneurs.

So why didn’t Marx ask for a return to early feudalism before the burghers gained control and peasant revolts would put the nobles right

Because Marx didn’t think that agrarian capitalism or industrial feudalism were possible, and he thought that industrialization created the social conditions necessary for socialism.

The irony is the answer to that is obvious and you are the one who should think before you speak.

The USSR industrialized well over a hundred years after the industrial revolution happened and most of Europe was already firmly industrialized, not exactly a feat.
Industrialization didn't manifest out of thin air, but appeared in the places where a proto capitalism already set the right conditions.

>The USSR industrialized well over a hundred years after the industrial revolution happened and most of Europe was already firmly industrialized, not exactly a feat.

Because most of that time was under the Tsars, it was their fault that Russia failed to industrialize. Under Stalin they industrialized to the same extent as the west from a weak starting point in a couple of decades.

>Industrialization didn't manifest out of thin air, but appeared in the places where a proto capitalism already set the right conditions.

I know, that’s what I was saying about the rural-to-urban migration that created an available labour force for the growing bourgeoisie.

Profit motive has made it possible a) for industries to make what people want, not just what they need and b) to develop new industrial techniques to make those wants cheaper and cheaper to satisfy. By making infinite desire the crux of production, capitalism -- specifically consumerism -- has infinite potential to create jobs and wealth.

If production were governed by rationalism, and was required to produce exactly as much value as cost, no state or community would bear the expense of producing unnecessary things -- because they don't have much intrinsic practical value. As a result, just about nothing you like would exist -- just bread and burlap. If you like those, great.

As mentioned, USSr is a bad example, because they just adopted an already well proven system. "Inventing" Industrialization was something completely different.

By that logic there is nothing impressive about early capitalism because the society was sustained by agricultural practices developed under feudalism.

Early capitalists had to figure out how to build economical steam engines, mills, foundries and numerous other things from scratch.

The USSR simply had to imitate industrialized economies.

Fair enough, but I don’t think that makes the speed and scale of Soviet industrialization less impressive, at least not less so than when Germany or Japan or Deng’s China did it.

Because if you don't trade with money, you will most likely trade goods or work-force instead of money. Then you need to rely on the specific good you want to be exchangable for your good or work.
If I want a vest and only have a chicken, but the guy owning the vest doesn't want one, then i need to first exchange my chicken for something the guy with the vest wants, like a fish. But therefore, the guy who has the fish needs to be intereted in my chicken and so on.
Money on the other hands gives me and the other person the possibility to get whatever we want. If the guy with the vest knows, he can buy fish with the money I give him, then he will take my money. It's a stand in and makes interactions much easier.

Yes, but thats a totally different question.

This is where you are wrong.

The landlord didn't gave the land to peasants against a portion of their crops.
They rent the land to a farmer (from the french word ferme, indicating that the price being paid was fixed) and the farmer hire daily workers to help him with the tasks.

Now I can talk about mills or bridges if you want. What about the silk industry in the south of France?

Peasants were serfs m8, they were tied to the land by oaths of fealty to the lord, they weren’t renting the land.

>Now I can talk about mills or bridges if you want. What about the silk industry in the south of France?

These were the early capitalists that predate industrialization, as described by Marx in the Communist Manifesto.

>the technological advancements that could have developed under any other system?
But they couldn't have happened under any other system. Capitalism has ushered in a golden age of science, with techology advancing at unparalelled speed. We went from not having radios to tablets being commercially available in only a century, whereas it took hundreds of years for feudalism just to go from fallow agriculture to crop rotations. One of the main reasons communism collapsed is because they couldn't keep up with capitalist technology. Communists used Nazi tech to get to space before anyone else, yet only twelve years later capitalism had not only matched them, but managed to send a manned landing craft to the moon, orders of magnitude farther than the commies ever could. That is the power of capitalism.

This is why you can't ban money. People want to use it, not just evil capitalists but everyone. They want to use it because of how practical it is. You can ban IoweU banknotes, you can even ban facial value but people will just trade with rare metals like in the old time.

Only in eastern Europe. Serfdorm was very localized and you can't extrapolate it to western Europe, or Anatolia, or India or China.

>Communists used Nazi tech to get to space before anyone else, yet only twelve years later capitalism had not only matched them, but managed to send a manned landing craft to the moon,
They hired Nazis because they couldn't build a functioning rocket. It does not change the fact that the only two technological advancement of the Soviet Union were cheap tanks and Nazi rockets.

How do you think innovation happens? If a company wants to make a better computer, they put a bunch of computer engineers in a lab, give them funding and say get to work. There is no magic elixir, it’s simply a question of desire to innovate and committing resources to innovation, and the only thing that could be argued is that markets are a good mechanism for ensuring resources are devoted to innovation. Where the Soviet Union actually committed earnestly to technology they were able to more or less keep pace with the west, as shown by their military technology. In fact one of the reasons for the poor state of consumer tech in the USSR was the fact that when a discovery was deemed to have military application it was classified and kept from the public.

The US used captured Nazi scientists too.

Marks said that capitalism will always be bad for science because only the science that can be sold will be researched, this is why in old propaganda you can see communism using the best technologies in a "near" future.

However, it just happen than everything useful is marketable and we don't need what is not useful. If you add some tax to fund public search like ITER and the CERN, capitalist societies are the absolute best powerhouse for science.

>However, it just happen than everything useful is marketable and we don't need what is not useful.

Marketable yes, profitable no. Do you honestly think that private space exploration would have happened without the government paving the way first? No company will invest in a new, untested technology, the potential commercial implications of which were unknown, they only pick up on tech that comes out of universities or government research.

Yeah, but we can't do anything with the shiny saturn V. All the money invested by both capitalist and communist governments were for nothing.

Both the military and the communication/TV companies need satellites so investment in rockets would have been made anyway. The race to nuke deliver... to the moon only made things faster.

Look at that, since the government stopped pumping money no new rocket was developed but that's because we had what we need. We can't start the teraformation of Mars or Venus with our current tech, so why should we invest in rockets in the first place? The money should go on research for form of life able to change entire biomes.

>*compares Cuba with Haiti*

Cuba is real communism then?

>Both the military and the communication/TV companies need satellites so investment in rockets would have been made anyway.

In order for this to happen then corporations would have had to be willing to invest massive amounts of money in technologies they weren’t even sure would yield a profit, which wouldn’t have happened. It was only because the government proved the feasibility of space travel and satellite technologies at its own expense without seeking profits. There can also be cases where an established industry attempts to impede a technology that threatens to make it obsolete, as in the case of green energy technology and the oil industry. There’s also the issue of new antibiotics, a field which has stagnated (putting modern medicine at risk) precisely because the returns on investing in new drugs aren’t high enough to promote interest by corporations.

No

Cuba has its flaws but it is certainly the best application of socialism to date imo. It’s also proof that even if socialism is less effective at generating growth, it’s more effective at turning that growth into development and quality of life. That’s why Cuba and Panama have roughly the same HDI despite Panama having a much higher GDP per capita.

In a free market an expert can accumulate capital and invest in R&D to develop improved 4"15' grade B ratchet sprockets without having to go cap in hand to a bureaucrat.

Most investors, like the bureaucrats, have no idea what a ratchet sprocket is, however they know it is a good business with a good chance of getting results, ie. profit, whereas no such mechanism exists in a planned economy. It is all political and more about appearances than results.

If a politician says "go to space" or "make a fighter jet with these specs", it is pretty cut and dry whether they succeed or not. However they cannot achieve this level of oversight for the innumerable small tasks needed in an industrial economy. Could they make their ratchet sprockets more efficient? Maybe, but do you mean 4"15' or 4"16'? What grade? What need to be improved? Reliability? Price? How much is it worth investing? Would the returns justify the investment? Why bother when all we need to do is to meet quotas and nothing more?

Then, even if the military wouldn't do it in the first place, corporations would have lobbied their way to space by making the government paying for making rockets for the official reason that 'it is hard'.

It's not like capitalism need a state anyway, so can we agree capitalism use the state when needed to fund public research?

>Cuba has its flaws but it is certainly the best application of socialism to date imo.
So, a hell where you can't disagree, all medias are controlled, you are told what to do and you have to be happy with it. Great.

Panama have money because they have the canal, and a lot of that money must go to the canal. This is not a good reference.

>So, a hell where you can't disagree, all medias are controlled, you are told what to do and you have to be happy with it. Great.
I know this cause Fox News told me!

It took me 6 seconds to check it. Look at the map.
theonlinecitizen.com/2017/04/26/singapore-increased-by-three-ranks-to-151st-place-for-world-press-freedom-index/

Are you going to argue that reporters sans frontières stand for the oppression of the working man?

>Are you going to argue that reporters sans frontières stand for the oppression of the working man?

Yes

This is what happen when you argue with commies.

Why must right wingers' best tactic in arguement is their complete inability to properly understand/use terms?

Why must left wingers' only argue about the meaning of words like capitalism/socialism/anarchism and communism and don't understand their greatest flaw is their complete inability to properly understand/use terms?

>get the definition of capitalism utterly wrong
>N-no you
Sad!

>implying liberal media is not a tool of the capitalist bourgeois

>liberal media
>Reporters without borders

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders

I am not that surprised to find out that Cuba is suffering from siege mentality since it is justified.