Apparently, Elon Musk's Girlfriend is a Communist

I appreciate your eloquence in making this point.

What's the difference? Because ancient Rome and Greece had many of the same kinds of things that we have today: Shops, restaurants, factories, long-distance trading networks, and the like.

Why? You're talking about free labor.

Are you sure? Because a whole lot of slave owners seemed to be pretty wealthy.

I mean, slavery did last a very long time. One would think that if you were right, it'd have gone away on its own. Yet that's not at all what happened. The US might have been the only country to have gone to war over the idea of getting rid of slavery, other nations were more than happy to cough up money to slave owners to compensate them for the loss of their chattel. Seems to me that if slavery was something that lost money, there'd be no reason to compensate the owners of freed slaves. After all, by freeing the slaves, you're reducing the economic burden upon the slave owners. Unless, of course, it was hugely profitable to own other human beings.

That's sort of like claiming Stalin wasn't as bad as a certain wallpaper hanger. While Stalin might not have been as efficient as that particular wallpaper hanger, he did manage to kill more people. It just took him a bit longer, and he wasn't quite as obvious as the other guy was.

The word “Capitalism” may not have been the word in which ancient cultures referred to their economic system, but they did engage in an economic system in which capital, goods, and services are ll linked with currency and exchange.

Romans did have a currency. They traded that currency for goods and services. Cleaning, cooking, maintaining, child-rearing, are all services provided by the slave in Ancient Rome.

As, the slave owner already owned a house, had to buy and cook food anyway, there wasn’t any excess cost associated with the slave. The slave owner benefitted from the labor of the slave. It wasn’t chattel slavery like existed in the US, but a couple thousand years had passed. So, we can only assume the writers of Ancient Rome were being honest in their description of the use of slaves, but that doesn’t mean their economic system wasn’t based on the exchange of money for goods and services.

And a totally different economic system underpinning it. The dole (in Rome), the feast and favor economy/culture (hard to separate them) among farmers, government control of pretty much everything (nominally always, in practice whenever politics or religion got involved or you really screwed up, and occasionally to remind people that yes, they ARE in control), and economic expansion pretty strictly by conquest rather than by savings and investment in, well, capital. It was pretty different.

Profit is hardly the only motive out there. Why did so many non-slaveowners take up arms in defense of slavery otherwise? Also, that's kind of an empirical question, and the answer is that yeah, plantation owners did better under sharecropping than slavery. You're underestimating the amount of racism involved. By 1890, former plantation owners had more than made up for their losses from emancipation. Sometime between 1870 and 1880 if you exclude the counties along Sherman's march.

As slavery exists, the gain outweighs the expense.

Yes, it's almost as if slavery is more of a social construct than a sound financial strategy. But that dead horse ain't gonna beat itself.

Now, you’re doing it. An economic system is not the same thing as a government system. It’s been more that 70 years. Can we get over the red scare? FFS.

Social? So, they kept slaves to play Twister and Monopoly?

So why did Native Americans enslave each other long before Europeans showed up?

Well, not Monopoly. That would've just been mean.

I don’t know. Why do you suppose?

Oh, wait. Maybe, that was due more to a loosely confederated governmental system which allowed for the conquered to be taken captive by the conquerors and that is just the way they rolled.

Counting coup (?) is very different from slavery.

What?

Well, maybe I misunderstood, but I inferred earlier that you were suggesting pre columbian Native Americans weren't capitalists.

What the hell does counting coup mean?

It means purposefully touching your enemy harmlessly (more or less) during battle instead of injuring or killing them and getting away with it. It means you're a total badass.

Oh, ffs. I get it.

Point me to a source on this. Because a whole lot of America's economic growth in the mid-to-late 20th Century was due to the fact that large parts of Europe were conquered. (Granted, there's a difference between Rome expanding their empire and the US moving in to fill the vacuum left after a World War wiped out huge swaths of European industry.)

You are including the fact that the US government paid reparations to the slave owners after the war, in your calculations, right? Also the fact that the US was basically operating on SlaveryLite after that? Not a whole lotta difference between sharecropping and company towns, where even though people were ostensibly paid for their labor, the bulk of their income was sucked up by the people who were paying them for their labor, through things like exorbitant rents, and company script that was only redeemable at company-owned stores. So, even if you were being paid, on paper, a decent wage, the only way you could spend that money was in places that charged higher prices than places that took official US currency.

My bad. I was just trying to paint a picture of a society that didn’t/doesn’t exchange goods and services for currency. Cavemen and Native Americans were two that I came up with off the top of my head. And, honestly, I don’t even know if Native Americans had a currency. If they did, I’ve never seen or heard anything about it. Not like arrowheads or Celtic currencies found in Europe.

Having a currency does not capitalism make. And no, for the most part, no they were NOT linked by currency. For your median ancient world resident, you'd see currency a few times a year, or less if you didn't sell in the city. They were linked by exchange yes, mostly barter but also formal feasts - you were expected to fête all your neighbors with all, or nearly all your surplus for the year, that which wasn't taxed, that is. In the cities it was more common, but the vast majority of people lived on farms. There was little capital (in the technical sense - stuff that helps one make more stuff), too. Most of what there was was controlled by the government: large millstones, granaries (these often owned outright), ovens, and such. If you were a bad miller, you could be evicted from your mill and it leased to someone else. Savings meant fallowing the right fields at the right time, not holding onto money or lending it out as available.

Wampum and cowries come to mind. Still wouldn't call it capitalism.

Because we opened up markets. Not because we went in and took all their resources.

In Washington, DC alone, and it was during the war (1862). Sharecropping arose in part because before the war most plantation wealth was in land and slaves, so they didn't have money to pay the former slaves outright (and certainly didn't want to sell their land -- not that any former slave could afford to buy it). But no, I did not account for that. I don't know if the census included DC as part of the South for that purpose.

The point was whether profit motive was driving slavery, and since SlaveryLite increased profits for those most benefiting under slavery, the answer is clearly no.

That was still an economy based on exchange of currency. Just because most people could live and eat and shelter without needing currency - because they could grow their own food and build their own house, doesn’t mean that the economy wasn’t based on an exchange of currency for goods or services.

That is a form of capitalism. A system in which goods and services are exchanged for currency.

I completely different economic system would not exchange goods and services for currency. A different economic system would be exchanging goods and services for goods and services.

Most ... middle class households in modern first world countries, have a different economic system on a far smaller scale. Everyone contributes to the running of the household (cooking, cleaning, maintaining) and everyone shares in the spoils.

Sigh, okay. Sure.

What was the point again?

No, they were bartering. Most farms were not self-sufficient.

That isn't even remotely the definition of capitalism. A prerequisite (probably), but not remotely sufficient.

That's largely what the ancient world economy was, for like 99% of the population. Barter, favors, and feasts.

Families aren't capitalist. News at 11.

Forget it, Jake. It's Jeneetown.

I'm not sure this is true.

Social status is inextricably linked to one's financial success in our world and what we view as commodities worth hinging our systems on have on many occasions been those which derive their perceived value from status. See gold.

The western world may well have officially banned slavery but do you honestly believe it went away? Do you really imagine our lifestyles for the past few centuries have not relied on it?

We may have rebranded it, outsourced it to other nations, privatised prison systems to accommodate it, but however the cookie crumbles we've still been enjoying it's benefits.

Well, based on what I've read private ownership of human beings has generally gone away in the West, and is not an extremely prevalent practice in other parts of the world. Forced labor, on the other hand, continues in various forms worldwide and some of it could be termed 'slavery' without any debate from anyone. But are jail inmates slaves? Some might say so, others not. Are the people making iPhones for ridiculously low wages in China slaves? Again, debatable. But all in all, I remain unconvinced that our capitalist system is dependent upon and inextricably linked to slave labor. Unless you include exploitation of the poor as slavery, I don't think the numbers support that statement.

Is capitalism linked to exploitation of the poor/working class/anyone without significant capital? Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Like I said, capitalism is unethical and harmful enough without slavery being key to its success in the world.

I've not claimed capitalism is dependent upon slavery, nor that it is inherently evil, merely that to suppose one ended the other is to be very willing to rely on the letter of the definition rather than the spirit.

If what we see in the modern world is not slavery it is distinct only in terms of precise wordings. It's a legalistic distinction that carries little meaning for those at the business end.

If one cannot self determine, has no meaningful choices or exist within a societal framework which intentionally or otherwise creates conditions whereby your life is effectively mapped out as a means to other's ends then to my mind you are something very akin to a slave.

In either case I stand by my point that insistence on the status quo as an end state has always been part and parcel of conservatism, yet change has always occurred.

The current system is merely the place we happen to be at right now, it is not fixed, immutable, crystallised or beyond practical reproach. Even over the past few years we've seen crypto currencies changing the financial landscapes in ways whose long term impact cannot be addressed. We've seen changes to the way stock markets operate, banks are regulated, the list goes on.

Whether those changes are individually positive remains to be seen but grey are part of a larger ongoing process of flux which began thousands of year's ago and only ever looks static when viewed in a snapshot.

Then why does nearly everyone in Cuba have a side-hustle if they want to eat every day?