Will there ever be a time without capitalism and what would it look like?

Question is, what’s a “free market”?

Is it one in which each company is free to grow, crushing others in the process, until it either owns the society, comes up against one of a very few temporarily equally-strong very large company/ies doing the same thing, or collapses under its own weight?

Is it one in which multiple companies, each of a suitable size to accomplish producing the particular things it’s producing, are free to compete with each other on the quality and price of their goods; but none of them is allowed to grow large enough to prevent continued competition from others (with some turnover expected so that companies producing crap can go out of business and be replaced by better ones)?

Is it one in which corporations may locate anywhere, but the workforce is constrained by borders; with the result that companies take their production wherever the wages are lowest and the employment (and/or environmental) laws laxest?

Many people pushing a “free market” seem to mean #1 and #3, but to object to #2.

That does not prove your point at all. It simply says pure and simple barter economies- have never been described. Sine more or less money show up around the time of recorded history, no one described much mushh before money.

And generally, a Book as a cite is not the best. Something we can all check to see if the quote is out of context.

Certainly a gift system works among a close knit group of people- a family, an extended family etc- but to cal that “an economy” is stretching that word out of shape… But how about once the village gets big enuf to have an economy? or when you start trading with other villages? Maybe they have flint, and you have ochre. You have to trade. Thats when barter steps in, that when you have a real economy, instead of just a family group.

Honestly guys, I keep coming back to this thread in hopes it rises to the level of Hayek vs Keynes, but it keeps getting stuck at sesterces vs wampum.

Wampum wasn’t exactly money; or very like money at all, before the Europeans got into it.

Before contact with white settlers, the Indians used wampum primarily for ceremonial purposes, as a record of an important agreement or treaty, as an object of tribute given by subject tribes, or for gift exchange (q.v.). Its value derived from its ceremonial importance and the skill involved in making it. In the early 17th century wampum came to be used as money in trade between whites and Indians because of a shortage of European currency.

Contrary to misconceptions, wampum was not “indian money.” Wampum clearly had value as a trade item between the various Native peoples before European contact. But it was later on after European settlement of America that wampum began to be used like currency.

This is the one I see as the goal.

That one, at our current population and technological levels, probably requires considerable governmental intervention; and an ongoing argument as to how large is too large, in particular because that size is going to vary a good deal depending on what’s being produced. And probably on other factors – but in any case the same size can’t be set for every type of business. (If you’re talking farm acreage, it can’t even be the same in different parts of the country – just for one example.)

I’m in favor of it, too. But it would be neither easy nor simple to implement, starting from where we are now.

I’m also in significant part just trying to point out that many of the “free trade” people don’t actually want “free trade.” They want “the sort of corporation I’m thinking of to be free to do whatever it wants wherever it wants, including push all the indies out of business. But keep those borders closed to individual humans!”

I agree there’s a lot of details that would need to be worked on. But I’m not proposing a specific legislative package; I’m just setting a goal. Once there’s a consensus on the goal we’re seeking, we can work on the details for best achieving it.

I think that’s a worthy goal until Goldman Sachs buys up all the loans or controlling stake in those individual companies, wraps them up into some sort of exotic financial instrument and then sells them off to Blackrock who then packages it up with a bunch of other shit for some hedge fund to short.

That IMHO is the problem modern late stage capitalism. Actual “work” is so abstracted from the actual creation of value that most people don’t really know what work is anymore.

I’m not sure what point you’re going for here.

You seem to be saying the problem is corporations have too much power. And I’m saying we should regulate corporations to prevent them from having too much power.

If I haven’t misunderstood your post, what do you see as the disagreement between our positions?

I think maybe I’m saying that the financial system has too much power.

Preventing the financialization of capitalism is the hard part. But that’s the necessary part.

Why?

What’s wrong with capitalism? Its a Good Thing.

Without it, we wouldnt have advanced civilization.

Now sure, like any Good Thing, it can go too far.

What, exactly, do you think me point to Slithy Tove was?

You want to get into debate about academic subjects, you’re going to get books as cites. Sorry it’s not some Honours thesis free on the internet.

I would point out that pdf copies of all of Debt can be found online with the most cursory search, but I’m not going to actually link to one here.

Perhaps someone who’s seemingly unfamiliar with island exchange rings and potlatch shouldn’t be so quick to comment about anthropological studies of economic activity.

In this context, barter is no more synonymous with trade than profit is synonymous with capitalism. Trade was by means of debt exchange, not the “3 flints for one ochre right now” that is barter. We know this because the first writing starts with debt records, not tables of commodity exchange equivalents.

Read the book, it’s a very good primer on the topic. With lots and lots of references to other academic works, for the cite-eager.

“Barter comes later, first there was gift economy and reciprocal exchange network and social chains of debt.”

I don’t feel we can view capitalism as a good thing or a bad thing. I feel it’s morally neutral.

Capitalism is like science. It’s a process used to achieve results. But those results can be good or bad.

when the actress Sarah Bernhardt was the toast of Paris right before the 2nd french empire fell she was quoted as saying " The only problem I have with the communards is they dont want to build everything to the same level they want to tear it all down to the mud"

No. My point was that the barter->specie->abstract chain he envisioned for money was a Just So story.

That anthropologists believe barter economies come after exchange networks was why that was a Just-So story, and why the AdamSmithian chain he envisioned wasn’t current thinking. It wasn’t my main point. It was me repeating current anthropological understanding.

What the role of barter, debt and money were in early economies is a matter for much current debate in anthropology. What the earliest trade systems were like, on the other hand, is not.

In any case, you haven’t provided any anthropological academic cites for why the current understanding of the evolution of trade, as noted anthropologist Graeber summarized, is wrong, so I’m not going to reply to you in this thread any more, as long as you seem only interested in abusing definitions of what barter is, and not arguing the main point of what the current anthropological understanding is.

This would only be the case if the immoral origins of something don’t count towards its later morality.

I don’t think we should attribute the immorality of the results to the process used to obtain them. If the results are immoral, we should assign the blame to the people who sought out those results.

So, selling of stolen goods, that’s morally neutral?