The fundamental basis of Capitalism is perhaps not, as Wikipedia would suggest, private ownership. Possession of slaves, precious metal, or land alone does not guarantee Capitalism, nor does the ever more pretentious slogan Laissez Faire, which in my view conveniently replaced reason with the superficial phenomenon of some political idealism. In the various forms that Capitalism has taken over the centuries, the system empirically simply did not promise any fairer resource distribution than, say, Slavery. Here we offer an overly simplistic view of the system as such: i) that capitalism exists as a deep structure, which on the formal level can manifest through any ideology without contradictions, e.g. capitalism can exist within a Communist political system ii) that capitalism works on the basic assumption that 1 + 1 > 2.
View i) is rather simple: One can be a law enforcer and an anarchist at the same time without being Schizophrenic, the former an apparent, social role and the latter a deep, personal role. Whether or not this individual is PERCEIVED as an integral whole, is totally another problem.
View ii) is something that we can learn a lot from. Capitalism came into existence because, and only because, two people working together produces more than them working individually combined. Such works may take the form in labour, capital, knowledge or any other sources of production, so today to sooth out such discrepancies we use money to unify most cooperations. Note that, however, this view does not say anything about how the products will be distributed at the end, and importantly, this view is an "assumption", meaning that a lot of the times people working together does not generate greater results but they continue on the cooperative contract, sometimes due to the lack of alternatives, sometimes commitments, sometimes negligence to such inefficiency, under the same assumption; this still actively contributes to the formation of the Capitalist system.
An inevitable result of this second view is that Capitalism cannot be anything but expansionary. Since if one stops adding the 1 + 1 + 1 +... together, it is not simply keeping the system stationary, but negating the system all together. Think about the financial crisis, last year, when banks stopped lending money to companies and to each other, nobody considered this a healthy stop, a rest, but a crisis, because when the addition stops, (ownership is still ownership, laissez faire is still laissez faire) the system ceased to work, and hence governments must intervene. Now a simple English word for this forever expansionary tendency is "Greed", or more accurately, "Desire", an expectation of outcome as a result of greed.
t.b.c.
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