Bret Devereaux

I think the issue here is a definition of capitalism which is both usefully broad and narrow. Often, given how it is defined and the ills attributed to it, 'capitalism' ends up meaning 'economies with scarcity' which is all of them. Or economies with money - most post c. 500 B.C.

*most of them, post c. 500 B.C. I think we might better define it as 'economies where capital is distributed by market mechanisms rather than political violence' - those being, as near I can tell, the only two options - but then, obviously, I have a preference for the former.

Your definition still, I think, begs a huge number of questions and elides a huge amount of historical contingency! Capitalism isn't coterminous or synonymous with the exchange of goods in a money economy.

I mean, does it? One of the standard definitions of capitalism is "a system based on private (read: not state) ownership of capital, operated for profit." For agrarian/post-agrarian societies, "have no capital" is not an option. So the question is "how is capital distributed."

It seems to me there are fundamentally three options: 1) privately owned and thus distributed by individual interactions (which we call 'markets' - seriously, that's all markets are), 2) state-owned and thus distributed through political power, or...

3) Collectively owned by the community. The last system has *never* been scaled up above very small group sizes, despite repeated attempts. The reasons for those issues have been studied exhaustively and don't bear repeating. I don't see a fourth potential distribution system.

There are, of course, hybrid systems - but the three core systems remain the basis of them; for large societies, that drops to just two. I think you can talk about *our current form* of capitalism as deeply contingent...

...but capitalism *generally* - private ownership, profit motives, market interactions, that's a system that springs up independently in multiple non-connected sophisticated cultures.