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Top-level
Capitalism as an economic system is the private ownership of the means of production and relies on the extraction of surplus value from the labor of others. A capitalist is a person who, within a capitalist society, has capital and owns or controls the means of production. Any owner, controlling partner, or executive in a major corporation in the US I feel should fit the definition of a capitalist. They own capital and control the means of production. 8 comments
 @finner Just as to amass wealth in a Leninist society you don't need to be a Lenenist. You don't need to be a capitalist in a capitalist society to amass wealth. You can work to be 'successful' (or at least wealthy) within a system without actually caring much for that system. Often the best way to get wealthy is actually to subvert the system, use game theory to exploit the weaknesses of the system. Both in capitalist, socialist and communist societies do people do this. @Schouten_B I'm not sure we're going to get much further in this discussion. We seem to have some differing interpretations and definitions we're going by. I'm not an economist and probably not incredibly well read I suppose, but as far as the things I have read and the way my understanding of the definitions of these things, they don't seem to be jiving with yours. @finner Yeah. You're probably right. I'd personally go with the definitions of the proponents of different systems. I.e. when I think if socialism I think of the kind of idealistic utopian system Marx envisioned. Not the nightmares than Lenin, Mao and Castro created. Similarly when I think of capitalism, I think of the idealized versions envisioned by Adam Smith or Acemoglu and Robinson. It helps understand why some people believe in one specific system above others. @finner I myself am more of a pragmatist. Whatever, experiment with stuff from different systems and come up with a Frankenstein-system that actually works. The idealized systems aren't resilient in terms of game theory (as the US, China, Russia, Cuba, etc. have shown) anyway. Europe is a lot better at that than North America generally. Probably because far fewer of us identify strongly with a specific economic system. (Maybe because of the strif around them leading up to WWII) I'm not aware of capitalism requiring that the participants in capitalism shouldn't form a monopoly or need to maintain free markets. In order for capitalism to be sustainable for a long period of time, it requires an external force, like a government, to regulate it to keep it from destroying itself. In a capitalist economic system, the point of capital is to be used to amass more capital. @finner No. It could be hard to find an economist that holds that definition of capitalism. The wiki page actually has a pretty reasonable definition. @finner (but as with socialism or communism, this all isn't set in stone.. You could come up with all kinds of weird systems that by some definition would fit the mold of capitalism, socialism or communism. But for the sake of simplicity let's define capitalism as the system that most free marker countries attempt to practice, I.e. the wikipedia definition that considers monopolies bad for capitalism 🙂) |
Gregory's Server
@finner No. That is not what a capitalist is. And if it were it wouldn't me limited to a capitalist economic model. You can have capital in any economic model.
But a capitalist is a supporter of the capitalist economic model. A poor person can be a capitalist, and a CEO of a Fortune 500 company can be a communist just fine.
Also only the first part of your definition of capitalism is correct. 'Extracting value from the labour of others', is not accurate.