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.
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.