I’d say it’s the principle of prioritizing society over the individual. That means that some individuals are going to be expected to do things that they would not choose to do because it’s for the good of society in general. And while some individuals might begrudgingly agree to this, other individuals will have to be compelled to perform their assigned role.
I would tend to disagree. I feel the key tenet of capitalism is investment. It’s the idea that you can use a portion of wealth to create a means of producing an amount of wealth that’s greater than the amount you started with.
Organizing wealth is useful. As you correctly note, it allows a group of people to achieve something that they couldn’t have done individually. But I don’t feel it’s necessary; a single individual can invest his own personally owned wealth without any partners.
Little Nemo,
What you are describing may be a good thing, but it is not Capitalism - although individual investment as we understand it today has been radically shaped by Capitalism. Individual investing is very, very old and long predates formal economic systems. However, there are distinct limitations to that form of ownership. It’s not that one is better or worse, but than it has functional boundaries to it. Even the wealthiest individuals on the planet are dwarfed by the wealth of associations of investors.
It’s sort of bad that we call Capitalism an -“ism” at all, since it’s a poor name. There’s no foundational theory to the thing; it’s the result of trial and error.
Yes but no matter the political leaning of the mayors, they were still living under the laws and Constitution of the (decidedly non-Communist) United States. They couldn’t enact true communism.
I am referring more to a nation that has Communist party governance from the top-down; nations like Cuba or the old USSR.
I stand by what I wrote. The idea of investing wasn’t generally recognized as a means of creating wealth prior to the development of capitalist theory. The common belief was that there was a fixed amount of wealth in the world and becoming wealthy just meant taking a larger share of it. Economics was seen as a zero-sum game (although the term didn’t exist yet) in which one person becoming richer meant somebody else was poorer. If you were earning interest from an investment, it was a form of usury and you were committing a crime or even a sin.
Capitalism said this wasn’t true. It was possible to create new wealth. So two people could both gain in an economic transaction and both of them could end up richer than they had started. This freed economics from the taint of immorality; people who became rich were no longer seen as stealing wealth from others.
British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore put it this way, communism is the random destruction of classes of people now, to construct the perfect socialist utopia later.
Your statement is factually untrue regardless of whether you stand by it or not. The “idea” goes back to at the very least five centuries before Adam Smith. And arguably several thousand years.
That is… not correct. This is an utter misunderstanding of what Medieval economics was like. And also, it didn’t necessarily apply throughout Christendom and certainly not beyond it. I’m not even sure where to begin explaining how wrong this is.
There is no such thing as a discrete “Capitalist” theory - no, not even Adam Smith. Second, that’s not what he said. Third, you seem to be trying to describe Mercantilism but you are misunderstanding the reasons for it. (Mercantilism also isn’t really well described as an “ism”, as it wasn’t ever really set down as a formal theory, but that’s a whole 'nother topic.)
I’m not trying to sound angry, but your statements here, to be blunt, bear only a passing relationship with the history of economic thought.
So I think the answer to the OP’s question is a resounding no.
Chile never had the chance to actually be oppressive as U.S. agents tore it down before it could develop a history.
Nicaragua at least allowed free elections and the Sandinistas stepped down when they lost the election.
I am not holding either of these countries up as good places to live, but they tend to argue against the “communism=oppression” theme advanced by a number of people.
(Ironically, as a person who watched the arguments over communism in the 1960s and the Reagan-era “fall of communism” of the 1980s, I have been very interested in the current promotion of socialism and communism among many young folks as capitalism has been put forth as the root of all current social problems in the U.S.)
In turn, I will say that your definition of capitalism being the pooling of money is one that I have never heard used in any discussion of economics.
I am as confused a few other folks about this claim, because it isn’t consistent with any definition, current or historical, of the word “capitalism” that I have ever heard before or can find to have existed historically.
I doubt it. Every communist regime I’ve heard of has been a dictatorship.
Under those limitations, no. But what about countries where a Communist is democratically elected? 1970s Greece and Italy may have qualified. And while both are economic tire fires, neither strikes me as remarkably oppressive.
That happens in our current capitalist system, also.
People are expected to take jobs that they wouldn’t choose to do, because they have to earn money in order to purchase necessities. Some individuals willingly agree to this, some agree begrudgingly, others have to be compelled by fear of winding up homeless.
This compulsion isn’t exerted directly by the government (though the government sets the laws under which the system operates); but it’s still compulsion. And while some individuals have a good deal of choice as to which jobs to take, others don’t.
It’s even to a large extent presented as being “for the good of society”, in that many people say that the compulsion is necessary because otherwise work necessary for the good of society won’t get done.
Utah was successfully communitarian for it’s first 50 years. Citizens contributed all of their possessions to the state and were given land, a home and equipment sufficient to their needs. Communities were centrally planned and employment was guaranteed by the government.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Utah was denied statehood for two reasons: politically it was a democratic theocracy and economically it was communitarian. The society of Utah was politically and economically incompatible with that of the United States. The citizens dropped both in order to gain statehood.
But they didnt have a Communist form of government.
Cite? And of course, since Utah was part of the USA, and land grants had to be under US law. in fact the President appointed the Governor.
And no, it was denied as Polygamy was legal.
Cite - Book: “Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900”
Polygamy was a side issue that got a lot of press. Statehood had been denied long before some religious folks got excited about polygamy.
We have differing definitions of what constitutes compulsion.
Well, just a mention of a book doesnt really cut it here as a cite.
and as for the author: *"Leonard James Arrington (July 2, 1917 – February 11, 1999) was an American author, academic and the founder of the Mormon History Association. He is known as the “Dean of Mormon History”[5] and “the Father of Mormon History”[6] because of his many influential contributions to the field. Since 1842, he was the first non-general authority Church Historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), from 1972 to 1982, and was director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History from 1982 until 1986.
Arrington grew up in a large family in Idaho, where he and his family were members of the LDS Church. *
That being said, yes, the saints practiced a sort of commitern economy, but only among those loyal to the LDS church and Young, who was a dictator. It can be argued he wasnt a oppressive dictator, but dictator he was. If you were a Gentile or Jack-mormon, you werent part of the deal.
And you may say it was a side issue, but it is *the *issue every cite i can find mentioned.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/utahs-very-interesting-path-to-statehood
Most significant was lawmakers’ and others’ hostility toward the church’s practice of polygamy, which the Republican Party had denounced as one of the “twin relics of barbarism” along with slavery. (The church opposed slavery.)
1890-1896, Manifesto to Statehood
*“Utah begins to look like it has importance to the nation.” – Sarah Barringer Gordon, historian
In 1890, after the Supreme Court upheld the Edmund-Tucker Act securing the government’s right to seize the church’s property, Mormon president Wilford Woodruff announced in a document known as “The Manifesto” that the church would renounce the practice of polygamy.
Utah was admitted to the United States on January 4, 1896, and that year sent its first two senators and one representative to Congress, all members of the Republican Party.
“Statehood is an extraordinary achievement, but it’s born of the fact that the LDS people realized they had to change to conform with the mandates that were coming out of Washington D.C., of what the voice of the public was demanding from Utah.”*
*When another movement for Utah’s admission into the union was mounted in 1876 its sponsors essentially disregarded recent warnings from visiting federal executive and legislative leaders that statehood was not possible so long as plural marriage continued to be condoned and practiced in Utah. …However, the statehood attempt ran into a Congress far less willing to cooperate with the Utah admission scheme unless Mormon leaders were willing to commit themselves more specifically against polygamy. Since church authorities refused such concessions at the time, this elaborate attempt at statehood met the same fate as its predecessors. Another casualty, in the long run, was the generally cordial relationship that had existed for many years between the church and the Democrats.
Because of the widespread opposition to Mormonism and polygamy, church leaders recognized the need for public-relations work with the nation’s press–the most important opinion-molding institution of the day. *