Some people seem to use the word
"capitalism" and the word "market" or "free market"
as synonymous. This is a mistake.
It's not a question of interpretation.
That that's just wrong and let me
explain. Capitalism is a system of
producing things: goods and services. So
we distinguish it, for example, from
feudalism and slavery which are
alternative ways of organizing
production. You know, in slavery there's a
master and a slave and they have a
relationship that produces goods and
services. In feudalism there's a lord and
a serf and they have a different
relationship. For example, in slavery a
person can be the property of another
person. The slave is the property of the
master. In feudalism it's not like that.
The serf is not the property of the lord.
The lord can't buy and sell serfs the
way a master can buy and sell slaves. And
capitalism is different from both of them
because we organize that into the employeer employee.
And the employer can't
buy and sell employees. And the employee, unlike a serf, doesn't go with the land, or is stuck
to that a particular employer. He's free, or she's free. to go, etc.
So these are different ways of
organizing production. "Market" is
something else. A market is a system of
distribution, that's what do we do with the
product after its produced. How do we
distribute the shirts from the maker of
shirts to everybody who wears one? How do
we distribute the product of the farmer
to everybody who needs to eat a meal, etc.
And the market does that by what we
call a "quid pro quo" exchange. I take
shirts, if that's what I produce, and I go
to a market and I bargain. I'll give you
two shirts you give me a bushel of
potatoes, or two bushels. That's the
way it's done. So a market is a
system of distribution. To show you the
ignorance of equating that with
capitalism let me remind you, you
probably
know but let me remind you, that markets
have coexisted with slavery, feudalism,
and capitalism. They're not peculiar to
capitalism. For example, in slavery
there's a market in, you guessed it, slaves.
You buy and sell slaves.
That's what masters did. So of course
there was a market where slaves were
distributed from whoever brought them
from Africa, against their will, to
whoever bought them when they arrived
here, from whoever had brought them over,
etc. Okay, here's another way that
markets are not the same as capitalism.
In every socialist country that we've
had so far (Russia, China, Eastern Europe,
Cuba, Vietnam, whichever one you want to
pick) there were ,throughout their history,
markets. Lots of stuff was distributed by
means of market exchanges. If you study
any of those economies the notion that
actually existing socialism was not
market is just ignorance.
