@BobCollins just so you understand, this is not the argument that I'm having right now.

Leftist discourse generally just uses the word capitalism to mean unfettered, unchecked capitalism. They tend to skip a lot of steps... which is kind of my point.

@BobCollins @TechConnectify Why does it fly in the face of actual history?

Capitalism being an improvement over past systems doesn't mean there are no valid critiques of it. The failures of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist states don't mean that other alternatives to capitalism wouldn't be better than capitalism such as economic democracy

@BobCollins @TechConnectify
You are correct... in that aspect at least.

Often people define capitalism as markets and trade (human activities that long predate capitalism) but even Adam Smith doesn't think this. If you *do* define it that way, many leftists will agree that capitalism is fine. HOWEVER, most if not all the major far left theorists (Marx, Kropotkin, Foucault, Bichler&Nitzan, etc) focus on the capitalist as a class and how they essentially undemocratically plan the economy on their own terms to their own liking through institutions like the chamber of commerce and wallstreet, while those in charge of businesses directly have no democratic checks their on power.

Under this understanding, the enlightenment dream of liberty for all cannot be achieved unless there is some degree of worker control over the direction of their firm. What exactly this means very quite a bit between theorists and tendencies, but this has been for about 180 years what being a leftist meant.

@AlexanderKingsbury @jame @TechConnectify
Ok so I know you're going for an easy gotcha, but I'm going to take the time to respond anyway. The reason why nobody can give you a good answer to that is essentially because your way of phrasing the question comes from a philosophical tradition that is very different from the one that the term "Capitalism" comes from.

I'd guess that your background is probably in the anglo-saxon tradition where usually you will go at a problem by precisely defining every term and then going through them step by step, like a logical puzzle. In that kind of tradition, a discussion ends up looking like a game of chess, where each player lays out their deductions one after the other until one of them gains the upper hand and demonstrates why their definitions and logical connections are better able to explain reality than the ones of the other person.

The tradition that terms like Capitalism come from is nothing like this. Many of the early leftist authors were author-activists. Their reason for writing was because they couldn't bear the political and economic situation in their countries and the violent abuse they saw people suffer at the hands of bosses and the police. So the term Capitalism arose to try to find a framework in which to make sense of why suddenly all of the serfs were being forced to move to the cities and thefactories, why the Kings were losing power to the men who owned the factories, why what used to be taken care of by custom and tradition was suddenly more and more integrated into the market, etc. etc. It was a change that was obviously happening at the time they were writing about it, not just a theoretical term tothrow into a discussion for clout. They developed the term to claim that all of those things are connected, and they attempted to explain in what way they are connected. And in many ways that is still what leftist theory is trying to do now.

So then what we talk about when we talk about Capitalism are the consequences of this broad historical shift in how society is structured. And that manifests in myriad ways, but the point is that something definitely is up. And so if you ask "how do you define capitalism" there's really no cut-and-dry answer to that. Because we're not just talking about something that can be circumscribed within a simple 5 point checklist. Which, granted, makes us horrible at discussions, haha. I hoped that helped somewhat.