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Old 06-17-2007, 07:55 AM   #4 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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Quote:
But America is NOT capitalist.
um.....there are two ways you could mean this. one would be to hold, arbitrarily, that the states are "socialist" and from a kind a zany position far enough to the right you would probably point to the new deal and other such as "evidence"....or you could be serious, in which case you could imagine that the word capitalism refers only to one type of organization, probably some hayek fantasia of "perfect competition" in the context of "free markets" which are problematic as a historical phase because they have never existed. but at least the claim you make would be reasonable.
so you'd probably have to argue that "capitalism" (which i put in quotes to indicate that i am using the word in your sense here) would have existed, if at all, for a few weeks in the nineteenth century somewhere...

before stock was created (expansion of the role of the evil state through the formation of stock markets) and the monopoly capitalismit enabled: so before 1870.
so by extension, capitalism would maybe not inclde heavy industry because that form of production required more capital than the imaginary individual entrepreneur could muster and so were a driver behind the creation of stock markets--so heavy industry would constitute a sector-level distortion of capitalism, so that couldn't count either.
so before railroad-relation production came to be dominant, and before its military-related forms took shape: so before the american civil war...
i assume that agrarian forms of production could not be dominant for "capitalism" to have been in place, so that excludes the pre-civil war south...
and most of the us north before the civil war as well.
so in northern cities before the civil war, but not too much before because you'd have mixed economies in which some sectors would be capitalist and others not organized on those lines (standardized production--which is capitalist organization of production--is not the same as craft-based production organization---capitalism is a bureaucratically organized form of production...)---so "capitalism" may have existed during the 1830s-1840s, in a couple economic sectors within a couple of east coast urban spaces....maybe textiles in new england.
the only other place you find this "capitalism" is in books about political economy. it flourished in books as the ideal-typical model for a much more complex, messier and shifting mode of production...

but in the actual world where the term capitalism is used to designate a series of discrete types of organization of a mode of production based on particular patterns of ownership and organization internally, particular types of markets and relations to markets, etc., the claim that the united states is not capitalist would be understood as simply goofy.
and no-one--at all--anywhere--who understood ANYTHING about democratic socialism would see in it in the united states.

so in the world that other people know about who are not also entrenched in some extreme right libertarian worldview, the word capitalism is abstract enough to designate a series of dominant forms of organization.

so when you say:

Quote:
But America is NOT capitalist.
you dont say anything.
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