You could also have subsistence economies where the level of output simply isn't high enough to sustain a merchant class at all: i.e. there's no regulation of the mercantile impulse, it just isn't a physical possibility.
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You can get kinship-structured economies, where merchants exist and are basically free in their actions, but their returns are effectively socialized by kin/clan/tribe networks.
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These forms obviously aren't all mutually exclusive and they aren't a formal categorization; just a discussion of what alternatives to capitalism *actually look like*.
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Virtually all of these systems have been practiced throughout history. Even today, elements of traditional/moral economies and kinship economies persist. Workers' councils are probably the rarest, but the Guilds, Spanish syndicalism, and licensure boards are certainly proxies.
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Much as subsistence economies continue to persist in the modern world (even in rich countries!), so too you can find capitalism wherever you look in history. You can find merchants accumulating capital, leveraging, hiring workers, exchanging goods at a distance, making contracts
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In various times and places the extent to which society was *primarily characterized* by capitalist exchange varied greatly. Certainly the present epoch is *more* characterized by capitalism than any previous time in history.
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What has capitalism displaced then, in becoming more dominant as a social form in which economic production and exchange occurs? Primarily subsistence! Because capitalism was *better* at producing lots of goods and services!
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But in the process of smashing subsistence economies to tiny bits, the ascendance of capitalist modes of exchange and production certainly shrunk the space for kinship, traditional, moral, cooperative, and in some cases command economies.
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I say "in some cases" command, because it's certainly true that in some cases the rise of capitalist modes of production and command modes went together: the Merchant and the State went hand-in-hand.
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But the extent to which that is true, again, varies greatly across time and place. All of that to say.... yes, capitalism existed BC. Was it the dominant economic experience? Nah. That was subsistence and starvation.
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Yes, but ... Isn't it precisely the socio-cultural dominance of what you're calling "capitalism" that defines Capitalism, at least colloquially? It's not capitalism if it's not on top.
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