> Capitalism is the private ownership of productive capacity and the use of it for private profit. That's a peculiar and recent invention. As someone who's bee

> Capitalism is the private ownership of productive capacity and the use of it for private profit. That's a peculiar and recent invention. As someone who's been using the property-based definition, I do think this one is more accurate. However, that would imply cavemen agreeing to scratch each others back would be practicing Capitalism (which I think they are). More generally, that suggests that once two agents have the capacity for peaceful exchange of productive capacity, then Capitalism can occur. Capitalism is impossible in the world of reptiles, since they can't communicate or even internally model an exchange. Any service they provide to others, like defending their eggs, has to be hard-coded (i.e., forced upon them by nature). The pure capitalists will argue that the alternatives to it are varying degrees of the use of force, to compel agents to either provide or not provide productive capacity beyond their internal desire. Whether that's necessary for a stable system is a different topic, but may be a function of the capacity we have to act as rational agents and how much we're still dominated by hard-coded instructions.