Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others.
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Economic_elements [2] - http://isreview.org/issue/84/debts-role-history