Funny how you claim that debates concerning capitalism indiscriminately conflate economics and politics and then proceed to do the very same thing for communism

Funny how you claim that debates concerning capitalism indiscriminately conflate economics and politics and then proceed to do the very same thing for communism. If I plug the term "communism" into Google I get the following definition: “a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.“ Nowhere in that definition do I see anything about the political dictatorship of the proles. That's a whole other thing. I think it is far more useful to think of communism opposing the central notion of private property rights in capitalism. (Most?) communists retain the notion of personal property rights but I'm not sure how the distinction is cashed out in practice. > And there is not a single Western state with purely capitalist economy Straw man? Nobody sensible is really arguing that Western economies are purely capitalist. Everybody sensible will acknowledge that they are mixed. > I would really like to see which one of the central characteristics of Capitalism - private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, price system, competitive markets I imagine that it is the _capital accumulation_ part, aka wealth inequality – article says that “And a solid 55% of Americans of all ages believe that capitalism is fundamentally unfair.” – ergo it's presumably the (unequal) capital accumulation part that people object to. Or to put it in Piketty terms, we're worried about r > g getting so out of hand that it's causing unnecessary social hardship and division.