#TIL about capitalism and cows.
#Cattle originally were your portable property - livestock, equipment, furniture.
Your #caput (head) was the count of all your cattle. That’s why we say “head of cattle” instead of “number of cattle”.
Someone who gathered property (like cows) grew his caput. The word caput became #Capitale for #wealth. This person became a #capitalist.
By the time America came along #Capitalism was a #governance system.
I also re-learned the word chattle comes from cattle.
Interesting how slavery was seen in the same light as livestock.
Now, in modern #capitalistsocieties we have #wageslavery. You must have, create, or steal capital to exist. Our democracy added social security to save and redistribute a small fraction.
#Schools can be seen as factories producing #skilledworkers as future chattle to the capitalist society. To be #free a capitalist must #increase his wealth by gathering chattle.
The Wikipedia article also points out that the word "capitalism" was coined in the mid 1800's by *critics* of the newly emergent system which concentrated capital in very few hands.
Yet there are many who, either naively or disingenuously, push the ridiculous and utterly false idea that capitalism just means "voluntary trade" and has existed since humans first traded berries for fish 🙄
Some of them will hilariously insist that capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty, yet at the same time complain that what we have now is not "real capitalism" because we don't have "free markets" 🤣
(Having used the capitalism hashtag, you might even get a reply from one of those trolls who haunts that hashtag to push this malicious agenda on anyone who posts things critical of capitalism).
Some truths about "free market":
A mathematician on the "free market" economic model:
https://mastodon.social/@magitweeter/111653879323307502
On the imposition of markets and the demolition of society:
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110182089285428195
Series of threads on free market fundamentalism:
https://jorts.horse/@AnarchoNinaWrites/114564796126964706
https://jorts.horse/@AnarchoNinaWrites/114564947637045341
https://jorts.horse/@AnarchoNinaWrites/114565140103048443
We live in what Karl Polanyi called a "market society," in which commercial market exchanges have almost completely supplanted non-market exchange. Gone are the great pillars of pre-capitalist economies: domestic household production, reciprocity, and redistribution. In their place are buying and selling. To access virtually any resource, including basic sustenance, we must first sell (usually ourselves). 1/15
PC
RD