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You can resolve this paradox by making a distinction between the whole & its parts. Capitalism is not a monolith - it's a system where many competing firms and

You can resolve this paradox by making a distinction between the whole & its parts. Capitalism is not a monolith - it's a system where many competing firms and ecosystems vie to become the dominant producer. Some of them inevitably grow faster than others and take over the ecosystem. At that point capitalism is redefined to mean "the winner", and all the losers wither and die off. Then some small variation within the new definition of capitalism takes off, grows faster than its competitors, eventually replaces them, and redefines capitalism as itself. As a result, "capitalism" is always growing, but it doesn't mean the same things, and most of the things that it previously meant end up dying and being lost to history. You can see this cycle actually happening if you look at history from the medieval rennaissance until today. "Capitalism" initially meant the decoupling of farm labor from manorial estates that owned the land; in the wake of Black Death, there was a surplus of land and a shortage of labor, and so peasant farmers were able to choose from the estates that were most productive and gave them the best life. That spurred competition among estates to improve farming mechanisms, which increased food productivity, which allowed some laborers to specialize into guilds. Capitalism was then redefined as the private ownership of the tools used for this specialized labor, which competed to produce the best quality goods at the lowest prices. The surplus generated by this then allowed the conquest of the New World, of Africa, and of Asia, which opened a big new resource source and ushered in the era of mercantilism. Those raw resource sources then created demand for more efficient ways than the guild system, which led to the invention of industrial capitalism. "Industry" initially referred to one specific industry, textiles; as mass-production techniques were applied to more and more areas of the economy, "industry" eventually became synonymous with "capitalism", and people forgot that mercantile traders used to be the dominant corporations on earth, or that there was a time when everyone was either a farmer or landlord. Now software is eating the world, while software in 1975 was a tiny industry that most people thought of as a hobby or loss-leader. Along the way there've been plenty of losers that were destroyed. If you were one of those peasant farmers who weren't among the most efficient, you are now dead. If you were a cobbler, or a tailor, or a baker, or a smith, or a weaver, you lost your specialty when industrialization came around. If you were a Luddite, sucks to be you. If you were a Native American, you're probably now dead too. If you were a plantation owner in the American South, you lost most of your holdings after the Civil War. If you're a factory worker in America, you're probably jobless. Someday software engineers will be the dinosaurs of the future. But all of these groups are just written out of the narrative: capitalism is defined in terms of the winners, and the losers drop out of history. Capitalism will expand forever, but it won't look like the version of capitalism we have today.

andrekandre 7y ago
but if at some point where scarcity is eliminated (a la star trek) and most production is not centered around capital accumulation, or working for the owner of capital, how could we still call that capitalism? or is the argument that it is more of a colloquial term and people have used it to mean whatever they want/need it to mean?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Capital becomes "whatever gives you an advantage". I think it's a pretty good bet that people will continue to seek out advantages even if all material scarcity is eliminated. (Arguably, we're there already: there's been enough material goods to feed and shelter the whole world since the 1950s, and it's only the continued game-playing of elites that creates scarcity.) If you've ever observed, say, fandom, or PTA meetings, or programming language debates, or HN comment threads, or any other situation where the stakes are incredibly low but passions are incredibly high, you'll see evidence of humanity's ability to create status games where none existed before. "Capital" in the sense we usually mean it - factory machinery and the financing to buy it - wasn't really a thing in agrarian capitalism or mercantile capitalism. And we're witnessing this redefinition in real-time as "data" becomes a form of capital despite not really being worth anything before the age of computers.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >"Capital" in the sense we usually mean it - factory machinery and the financing to buy it - wasn't really a thing in agrarian capitalism or mercantile capitalism. This issue of capitalism changing its form, and capital not being same in one period as another, is only caused by your own interpretation and definition of "capitalism" which doesn't seem to be accepted by anyone else. In political economy and political philosophy circles, capital is defined as a social relation, not a thing. The things it does refer to concretize the relation, but they are not the relation itself. The idea that capital is "whatever gives one an advantage" seems so general that it cannot be sensibly used to talk about the concrete historical birth of capitalism and its expansion. A more accurate view, keeping with history, is that capital tends to subsume things, so now we talk about "human capital" or "information capital".

andrekandre 7y ago

but if at some point where scarcity is eliminated (a la star trek) and most production is not centered around capital accumulation, or working for the owner of capital, how could we still call that capitalism? or is the argument that it is more of a colloquial term and people have used it to mean whatever they want/need it to mean?

nostrademons 7y ago
Capital becomes "whatever gives you an advantage". I think it's a pretty good bet that people will continue to seek out advantages even if all material scarcity is eliminated. (Arguably, we're there already: there's been enough material goods to feed and shelter the whole world since the 1950s, and it's only the continued game-playing of elites that creates scarcity.) If you've ever observed, say, fandom, or PTA meetings, or programming language debates, or HN comment threads, or any other situation where the stakes are incredibly low but passions are incredibly high, you'll see evidence of humanity's ability to create status games where none existed before. "Capital" in the sense we usually mean it - factory machinery and the financing to buy it - wasn't really a thing in agrarian capitalism or mercantile capitalism. And we're witnessing this redefinition in real-time as "data" becomes a form of capital despite not really being worth anything before the age of computers.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >"Capital" in the sense we usually mean it - factory machinery and the financing to buy it - wasn't really a thing in agrarian capitalism or mercantile capitalism. This issue of capitalism changing its form, and capital not being same in one period as another, is only caused by your own interpretation and definition of "capitalism" which doesn't seem to be accepted by anyone else. In political economy and political philosophy circles, capital is defined as a social relation, not a thing. The things it does refer to concretize the relation, but they are not the relation itself. The idea that capital is "whatever gives one an advantage" seems so general that it cannot be sensibly used to talk about the concrete historical birth of capitalism and its expansion. A more accurate view, keeping with history, is that capital tends to subsume things, so now we talk about "human capital" or "information capital".