If you want actual examples, almost all societies before 1800 we’re not capitalist. Feudal society wasn’t capitalist, neither was Roman society. Hunter gather society by most accounts was a form of primitive communism, and that is the vast majority of human history.
You’re going to need a narrow definition of company for that definition to not be very broad, as Wikipedia defines company as:
A company is a legal entity representing an association of legal persons with a shared objective, such as generating profit or benefiting society.
So basically a company can be any group of people, separated from the state but still recognized by it. So is a commune a company then? If everything was controlled by communes would that be capitalist?
It’s better to use a more specific definition, again from wikipedia:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.[1][2] This socioeconomic system has developed historically in several stages, and is defined by a number of constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth.
While all of these existed in Roman civilization, concentrated in the big cities such as Rome, the majority of the economy was slaves and peasants working the land to feed themselves while being forced to give a portion to landlords as rent and to the government as taxes, much like most agricultural civilizations. This sort of economy does not revolve around profit ie. Buying something, paying someone to improve it, and selling it for more on an open market so you can buy more and sell that and on and on… That is possible in Rome and there are capitalists, but that’s not the main mode of production in the economy so the economy isn’t capitalist. Just like there are communes in the US but the US isn’t communist.
I don’t need that narrow definition, as the definition I’m using is “…private individuals OR companies”, so no companies are required.
Are companies necessary with capitalism? Not per the definition. They CAN be a part of it.
There were TONS of “profit-motivated” Romans throughout their economy. I think that the definition you used from Wikipedia means that Rome was capitalist, as private property, profit motive, competitive markets, commodification, and wage labor were all a part of Roman civilization, and not a small part.
Centurions could own land and were paid a wage, etc. All existed under Rome.
Thanks for your answer, I am very familiar with Rome and at least I know where you’re coming from. In spite of your initial comment, I’ve read quite a bit about pre-1800s civilization. Perhaps more than you regarding Rome, as revealed by your response.
Ok, then by your definition is communism capitalism then, communism being defined as a system where the workers own the means of production? So a commune, or group of workers, can own businesses and property, and individuals can too if they are an “owner operator” and the only worker for a business, basically being a commune of 1. Because if you’re defining communism as capitalist then that word has lost all meaning.
You’re definition of capitalism seems to be any system that has property, when all systems of human organization have some idea of property, even communism. The way the systems differ is what things can or can’t be property and who / what can own them and for what ends.
For Rome I think you’re making a category error that’s really common in this debate: you’re pointing to the existence of markets, private property, wage payments, and profit-seeking individuals, and then concluding that Rome was capitalist. But the presence of those elements is not the same thing as capitalism as a dominant mode of production.
First, we have to be careful about the sources. What we call “Roman history” was written by literate urban elites—senators, landowners, military officers—about politics, war, and elite economic activity. Naturally, we have documentation about the commercial and financial dealings of those elites. What we largely don’t have are accounts of the daily economic life of the overwhelming majority: subsistence farmers, tenant laborers, and especially slaves.
There were exponentially more people in the Roman world living lives closer to Spartacus than to Pompey, but we know far more about Pompey because people like him were doing the writing. That skews the picture. The economy as experienced by most Romans—agricultural, coercive, local, and oriented around subsistence and tribute—is comparatively underrepresented in elite literary sources.
Second, capitalism isn’t defined by the mere presence of wage labor or profit motive. It’s defined by a system in which production is primarily organized around capital accumulation: owners invest capital, hire wage labor to produce commodities for market exchange, and systematically reinvest profits to expand production. That logic becomes dominant in early modern Europe and fully systemic by the Industrial Revolution.
In Rome, the overwhelming majority of economic output was agricultural. Large estates (latifundia) were worked primarily by slaves. That’s not wage labor organized for profit in a competitive market; it’s coerced labor organized for surplus extraction. The landowner isn’t engaging in capital accumulation through productivity-enhancing investment in hired labor; he is extracting surplus directly through ownership of land and people. That’s a fundamentally different social relation.
Even your centurion example highlights this distinction. Yes, he receives a wage—but he isn’t a wage worker in a capitalist enterprise producing commodities for sale in a market. He is paid by the state to perform military service. States have paid soldiers for thousands of years; that alone does not make a society capitalist.
If that centurion owns land worked by slaves, that also doesn’t make him a capitalist. Owning productive property is not identical to being a capitalist. In a capitalist system, land or capital is typically invested to generate profit through market competition and reinvestment. In Rome, elite landownership was about status and surplus extraction. Slaves were compelled by force to produce agricultural output. The surplus was appropriated directly by the owner. That’s closer to a slave mode of production than to capitalism.
Finally, scale matters. In modern capitalism, the dominant share of production comes from wage labor employed by firms operating for profit in competitive markets. In Rome, the dominant share of production came from agriculture structured around slavery, tenancy, and tribute. Commercial and financial activity certainly existed—but it did not define or structure the system as a whole.
So yes, Rome had markets, private property, profit-seeking individuals, and wage payments. Many premodern societies did. What it did not have was a social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor was the dominant organizing principle of the economy. That’s the key distinction.
Sure, but you don’t need a ‘social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor is the dominant organizing principle of the economy’ to be capitalist per YOUR provided definition.
Not really when it comes to the idea of capitalism. You aren’t going to get a definition of capitalism because the idea of capitalism was developed by critics of it analyzing it from a dialectical basis, and dialectics, in the hegelian sense, reject static concrete definitions.
Capitalism is a system so complex and with so many aspects that you aren’t able to pin it down to a simple couple sentence definition. It’s like trying to define the Roman empire, the Roman empire is all at once:
It’s people
It’s territorial claims
It’s written laws
It’s beuracracy
The emperor
The senate
The army
The roads
Etc.
And all the different relationships between those things and all the different rules both written and unwritten governing those relationships. Thus you can’t just give a simple definition of the Roman empire and actually capture what it was. This is why people operating outside of a hegelian worldview struggle to define these complex systems like the Roman empire and capitalism. You can see this further down in the wikipedia article under definition:
There is no universally agreed upon definition of capitalism; it is unclear whether or not capitalism characterizes an entire society, a specific type of social order, or crucial components or elements of a society.[29] Societies officially founded in opposition to capitalism, such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R), and the People’s Republic of China, have sometimes been argued to actually exhibit characteristics of capitalism, despite the denouncement from their claimed communist ideology.[30] Nancy Fraser describes usage of the term “capitalism” by many authors as “mainly rhetorical, functioning less as an actual concept than as a gesture toward the need for a concept”.[31] Scholars who are uncritical of capitalism rarely actually use the term “capitalism”.[32] Some doubt that the term “capitalism” possesses valid scientific dignity,[29] and it is generally not discussed in mainstream economics,[31] with economist Daron Acemoglu suggesting that the term “capitalism” should be abandoned entirely.[33] Consequently, understanding of the concept of capitalism tends to be heavily influenced by opponents of capitalism and by the followers and critics of Karl Marx.
If you still want your concrete definition at that then like it says you should look to the critics of capitalism for its “definition”, and it’s chief critic Marx took three whole volumes to explain what capitalism was and how it operated: das kapital. That’s because he was explaining it in a hegelian dialectical approach, taking into account all the forces, tendencies, contradictions and structures of it, and not a definitive sense.
Tell me you don’t have a clue without telling me you don’t have a clue
If you want actual examples, almost all societies before 1800 we’re not capitalist. Feudal society wasn’t capitalist, neither was Roman society. Hunter gather society by most accounts was a form of primitive communism, and that is the vast majority of human history.
Rome wasn’t capitalist?
What definition of capitalism are you using? They seemed very capitalist to me.
(I am using standard simple definition of “an economic system where private individuals or companies own and control businesses and property”)
You’re going to need a narrow definition of company for that definition to not be very broad, as Wikipedia defines company as:
So basically a company can be any group of people, separated from the state but still recognized by it. So is a commune a company then? If everything was controlled by communes would that be capitalist?
It’s better to use a more specific definition, again from wikipedia:
While all of these existed in Roman civilization, concentrated in the big cities such as Rome, the majority of the economy was slaves and peasants working the land to feed themselves while being forced to give a portion to landlords as rent and to the government as taxes, much like most agricultural civilizations. This sort of economy does not revolve around profit ie. Buying something, paying someone to improve it, and selling it for more on an open market so you can buy more and sell that and on and on… That is possible in Rome and there are capitalists, but that’s not the main mode of production in the economy so the economy isn’t capitalist. Just like there are communes in the US but the US isn’t communist.
I don’t need that narrow definition, as the definition I’m using is “…private individuals OR companies”, so no companies are required.
Are companies necessary with capitalism? Not per the definition. They CAN be a part of it.
There were TONS of “profit-motivated” Romans throughout their economy. I think that the definition you used from Wikipedia means that Rome was capitalist, as private property, profit motive, competitive markets, commodification, and wage labor were all a part of Roman civilization, and not a small part.
Centurions could own land and were paid a wage, etc. All existed under Rome.
Thanks for your answer, I am very familiar with Rome and at least I know where you’re coming from. In spite of your initial comment, I’ve read quite a bit about pre-1800s civilization. Perhaps more than you regarding Rome, as revealed by your response.
Ok, then by your definition is communism capitalism then, communism being defined as a system where the workers own the means of production? So a commune, or group of workers, can own businesses and property, and individuals can too if they are an “owner operator” and the only worker for a business, basically being a commune of 1. Because if you’re defining communism as capitalist then that word has lost all meaning.
You’re definition of capitalism seems to be any system that has property, when all systems of human organization have some idea of property, even communism. The way the systems differ is what things can or can’t be property and who / what can own them and for what ends.
For Rome I think you’re making a category error that’s really common in this debate: you’re pointing to the existence of markets, private property, wage payments, and profit-seeking individuals, and then concluding that Rome was capitalist. But the presence of those elements is not the same thing as capitalism as a dominant mode of production.
First, we have to be careful about the sources. What we call “Roman history” was written by literate urban elites—senators, landowners, military officers—about politics, war, and elite economic activity. Naturally, we have documentation about the commercial and financial dealings of those elites. What we largely don’t have are accounts of the daily economic life of the overwhelming majority: subsistence farmers, tenant laborers, and especially slaves.
There were exponentially more people in the Roman world living lives closer to Spartacus than to Pompey, but we know far more about Pompey because people like him were doing the writing. That skews the picture. The economy as experienced by most Romans—agricultural, coercive, local, and oriented around subsistence and tribute—is comparatively underrepresented in elite literary sources.
Second, capitalism isn’t defined by the mere presence of wage labor or profit motive. It’s defined by a system in which production is primarily organized around capital accumulation: owners invest capital, hire wage labor to produce commodities for market exchange, and systematically reinvest profits to expand production. That logic becomes dominant in early modern Europe and fully systemic by the Industrial Revolution.
In Rome, the overwhelming majority of economic output was agricultural. Large estates (latifundia) were worked primarily by slaves. That’s not wage labor organized for profit in a competitive market; it’s coerced labor organized for surplus extraction. The landowner isn’t engaging in capital accumulation through productivity-enhancing investment in hired labor; he is extracting surplus directly through ownership of land and people. That’s a fundamentally different social relation.
Even your centurion example highlights this distinction. Yes, he receives a wage—but he isn’t a wage worker in a capitalist enterprise producing commodities for sale in a market. He is paid by the state to perform military service. States have paid soldiers for thousands of years; that alone does not make a society capitalist.
If that centurion owns land worked by slaves, that also doesn’t make him a capitalist. Owning productive property is not identical to being a capitalist. In a capitalist system, land or capital is typically invested to generate profit through market competition and reinvestment. In Rome, elite landownership was about status and surplus extraction. Slaves were compelled by force to produce agricultural output. The surplus was appropriated directly by the owner. That’s closer to a slave mode of production than to capitalism.
Finally, scale matters. In modern capitalism, the dominant share of production comes from wage labor employed by firms operating for profit in competitive markets. In Rome, the dominant share of production came from agriculture structured around slavery, tenancy, and tribute. Commercial and financial activity certainly existed—but it did not define or structure the system as a whole.
So yes, Rome had markets, private property, profit-seeking individuals, and wage payments. Many premodern societies did. What it did not have was a social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor was the dominant organizing principle of the economy. That’s the key distinction.
Sure, but you don’t need a ‘social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor is the dominant organizing principle of the economy’ to be capitalist per YOUR provided definition.
Let it go, friend. Definitions matter.
Not really when it comes to the idea of capitalism. You aren’t going to get a definition of capitalism because the idea of capitalism was developed by critics of it analyzing it from a dialectical basis, and dialectics, in the hegelian sense, reject static concrete definitions.
Capitalism is a system so complex and with so many aspects that you aren’t able to pin it down to a simple couple sentence definition. It’s like trying to define the Roman empire, the Roman empire is all at once:
And all the different relationships between those things and all the different rules both written and unwritten governing those relationships. Thus you can’t just give a simple definition of the Roman empire and actually capture what it was. This is why people operating outside of a hegelian worldview struggle to define these complex systems like the Roman empire and capitalism. You can see this further down in the wikipedia article under definition:
If you still want your concrete definition at that then like it says you should look to the critics of capitalism for its “definition”, and it’s chief critic Marx took three whole volumes to explain what capitalism was and how it operated: das kapital. That’s because he was explaining it in a hegelian dialectical approach, taking into account all the forces, tendencies, contradictions and structures of it, and not a definitive sense.