Capitalism began a few centuries ago. It is not just a free market. It is a system of cyclical reinvestment for profit.Capitalism is indeed only a modern phenomenon. Capitalism is the saving up of large amounts of money to be used on investments that earn money to be used for further investment. Large investment sums are "capital," so this is what "capitalism" means. It is indeed only a few hundred years old, since it's only been in the modern era, since the Dutch Republic at about the time of the Tulip Mania, that people have institutionalized the concept of investing and then reinvesting profits for the sake of creating progress.In the ancient and medieval world, yes, investments were made, but not as part of a system of cyclical reinvestment. They were just one off things, like funding a construction project. There was no systematic reinvestment of profits defining the whole economy.During the Roman Republic, the latifundia system was established: giant, near factory level farms worked by huge gangs of slaves taken from Rome's victories in wars, like the Punic Wars but others as well. The latifundia system was established to earn ongoing profits for their Patrician and Equestrian investors, so the latifundia were capitalist enterprises indeed, but Rome never carried this concept over into a system of ever-repeating private investment into ever-new economic sectors, like occurred after capitalism emerged again in the Dutch Republic and then the ethos of endless reinvestment into new sectors emerged as well.And this is they capitalism proper is a modern phenomenon. Capitalist enterprises before the Early Modern Period were just one-offs, where some wealthy investor or investor set up an enterprise to turn a profit and then didn't proceed to reinvest and reinvest and reinvest again in new projects of all kinds in a society-wide institution of perpetual reinvestment to generate perpetual new profits and the technological and social progress that occur
>>524353123with the development of constant new economic sectors and industries. Before modern capitalism -- institutionalized private reinvestment -- it was nearly always states that undertook large projects, and not for profits, but for strategic and public reasons. And there is, of course, the interweaving and in fact interdependence between capitalism and imperialism, where seeking ever-new profit sectors for existing or potential enterprises frequently requires foreign conquests or other means of dominating foreign societies. Also, without the fattening up of Western Europe's coffers via imperialism and capitalism, the Industrial Revolution likely could not have been funded, because affording so many unprecedented-in-history productive infrastructure projects, like building thousands of factories and mines, requires a very wealthy society to begin with, such that had three centuries of colonial expansion and about a century and a half of capitalist profit-making not preceded the early industrialization of Britain in the latter 1700s, industrialization likely would not even have happened.The neocolonial theorists are not wrong when they say Western wealth was made possible by the extraction of wealth from colonized peoples. Where they err is in their assumption that imperialism is wrong; it is not only inevitable when the conditions are right, like when a far more developed society meets a primitive society, but it is good as well, because colonization is how concentrated development diffuses from a high civilization to a primitive culture or backward civilization.
>>524353123*And this is why capitalism proper is a modern phenomenon.
K keep me posted
there's no reason to use loaded ideological terminology to describe it. the word capitalism is reddit coded
>>524353123https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07R-q4aF144
>>524355235It's the accepted term for the phenomenon.
>>524353123>saving up of large amounts of money to be used on investmentsBut nowadays you don't have to save up you just have to have friends and family in banking and they can print up that money to give you.
>>524356383Yes, and it's always been this way.To invest capital, you need capital (investment money).To get capitalism, you either 1) inherit it, 2) get it from investors who like your idea, or 3) save it up yourself.Early capitalists were often merchants, not nobles.
