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the op uses a category without defining it.
at a semantic level, things could be easy were we in a less degenerate political environment i suppose---using the single malt example, you'd not need to know anything about what that meant to know that whatever a malt was in this particular bottle there's one of them and on the basis of that the distinction which enables blend to make sense rests and from there the condition of possibility of parsing the notion of a blended scotch. in other words, you're wrong to think that a blend would make sense without reference to something else which was not a blend.
captialism is a more complicated idea than is scotch in any event.
what is it exactly? i think it's an entire social system, but a sequence of social systems that have in common the same division between capital and production---holders of capital are discrete from the organization of production, so there's a separation. stock-holding say. people like to call all forms of economic activity capitalism, but that's just because they don't know what the word means but have been told that they like the word so it comes to mean types of economic activity that i like. americans like to imagine that they free-think their way into imagining capitalism has always been around.
are small-scale businesses capitalist? is barter capitalist?
is capitalism one thing? is it many?
what are we talking about when we say "capitalism"---anything in particular? everything?
it may well be that there are lots of types of economic activity which aren't capitalist in any strict sense that you or i interact with every day that we don't much think about because we assume all forms of economic activity are capitalist. there may be lots of types of hierarchy, lots of ways of thinking and doing. we may use capitalism in a loose, general way as a means to disempower ourselves.
so maybe capitalism is a matter of scale and organization---but its also necessarily connected to ways of thinking about and ordering information, transmitting it, using it. it's linked to ways of defining the world around economic activities, and defining the world socially. it's linked to a way of thinking about what education is. it's linked to ideologies, which are linked to how education operates, which is linked to reproduction of labor pools which is linked to a project of continually validating the existing order while at the same time loosening up enough of the causal linkages that enable that validation so that a degree of innovation can creep in but not so much of that particularly not if that innovation involves basic conceptual operations. like any social system, capitalism is about itself, about maintaining itself. were these features not capitalist, the firm model at its conceptual center wouldn't be functional.
so riddle me then what is this capitalism thing that we talk about?
alot of this could go back to what art outlines above.
i'm not sure about a state of nature scenario though because typically states of nature are models built around assumptions which are debatable to the extent that they're features of the political world of the writer projected onto the written. questions about states of nature often end up being about which features are built in and which are not (hobbes builds in material scarcity as a precondition so everything goes one way; locke does not so everything goes another...it's like that).
early in the morning.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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