Only 9 percent of Americans younger than 30 have a “very positive” view of capitalism, according to a new CBS/YouGov poll.
That shows a stark generation between Generation Z and older generations.
The data arrives amid a surge in democratic socialist victories across the U.S. — and not just in progressive corners of the country. Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon (D) on Tuesday beat out the more moderate Alex Vindman (D) in the Democratic Senate primary in Florida, a state known for its sunshine, not socialism.
Well, there are like five different things that people use “capitalism” to mean.
For instance, doctrinaire right-libertarians will insist that “capitalism” means the same thing as “a free market in goods and labor” even though the core institutions of capitalism — stock markets — were developed to finance colonial monopolies that used slavery. (Monopolies = unfree trade; slavery = unfree labor.) Capital markets don’t care about your freedom; they work just fine without freedom of anything but capital itself.
Meanwhile, doctrinaire communists will insist that “capitalism” is a historical stage followed by workers’ revolution creating socialism and eventually communism — despite actually-existing “workers’ revolutions” instead producing a new sort of monarchy and feudalism, in which power is held by a single dictator and his powerful supporters.
There are other uses. For instance, a lot of pop-progressives use “capitalism” to mean something like “the vale of tears, the fallen world, this age of brass and clay, the Kali Yuga” — the human condition! Anyone who thinks scarcity, poverty, or hierarchy are the fault of capitalism is ignorant of history; these troubles are much older than capitalism! Anything that Jesus or Buddha had to deal with, isn’t capitalism.
During the Cold War, “capitalism” sometimes simply meant “the geopolitical interest of the United States and Western Europe; as against those of the Soviet Union and Communist China”, and secondarily “access by American and Western European businesses to the materials, labor, and markets of ‘developing’ countries, typically without the people in those countries enjoying the freedoms that Americans and Western Europeans themselves enjoy.”
And of course, the only correct definition of “capitalism” is mine, namely “an economic system under which ventures seek funding by selling equity (partial ownership), principally through regulated public markets (i.e. the stock market).” It’s not about freedom and it’s not about America; capitalism is about shareholder value.
Stock markets are not fundamental to capitalism and that is most certainly not “the only correct definition,” given it’s not even a correct definition. The only element fundamental to capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and that can exist and has existed without stock markets. A capitalist economy is one in which private owners make a claim to a farm, factory, or any other means by which commodities are produced or service is rendered, employ wage laborers to produce commodities or provide a service (using tools, equipment, or even just a space that is privately owned), and collect the value of their labor in the form of profit while returning a small fraction to the workers in the form of wages. Stocks just divide ownership of the means of production into shares that can be bought and sold at prices tied to the speculative value of the corporation.
Nah, there was private ownership of the means of production in Ea-nāṣir’s day, but capitalism didn’t come around until a few centuries ago.