Was there capitalism in the ancient world?

Read a book, nigger.

Kek. Holla Forums gets exposed for having no actual knowledge of the subject yet again.

Yes, it's human nature. You can't have civilization without an economy.

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mises has already shown how free market and economic calculation is impossible under a system without private property.

you read a fucking book you economic iliterare

Literally witchcraft

I know man. I can't believe these fucking babies sit around pooping their diapers and telling each other an ideology that killed 100 million people is somehow going to save the world. As if the world even needs saving.

There wasn't. Capitalism is relatively recent, it started when Mercantilism began to fall. Capitalism doesn't mean using coins.

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Tell me about the """natural""" rate of interest, and how Mises's axioms aren't subject to empirical justification despite being synthetic aposteriori?

^This faggot was >>1214600 who deleted his post after getting embarrassed by .

This is wrong. There is no point where Capitalism asserts itself as "existing", as pointed out by others Capitalist-esque societies or at the very least simple commodity exchanging societies have existed ( take or example commerce in Sumer). The enclosure movement and game laws are seen as when the Calitalist mode of production became the dominating one

Read a book nigger.

Something that predates capitalism, dipshit.

Marx provides no history on the origins of capitalism. The word "capitalism" is nothing more than an informal derivation of "capitalist" which was a epithet applied to individual actors by pre-Marx socialists. Nowhere is "capitalist" defined as a participant in a formal system. It's merely an informal slur.

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Marx's best guess is that "capitalism" emerged from the overthrow of feudalism, but he never provided any factual evidence.
Marxists assertions that a capitalist will fail without state power comes from a eurocentrist perspective.

Is that why Marx says that merchant capital is an early form f capital? Answer me friend, what is signatory of capitalism. Is it capital - the self expansion of value?

Yes.
However it wasn't the dominating mode of production. Socialism, likewise, has almost always existed too, just not as a dominating mode of production.

This is unbelivably moronic. The entire last part of Capital Volume 1 is dedicated to providing empirical support of "primitive accumulation". This is the minimum amount of accumulation that needs to be *accumulated* for Capitalism to become the dominate mode of production. He asserts nothing he provides primary sources. He starts with the enclosure movement, moves to the game laws (which forced the sustenance farmers just moved off their land into wage slavery. These laws were odious. Being unemployed could land you in 100's of whips at best, and being sold into slavery at the worst. Exemplary of this is how informal clan leaders gave permission to the state to confiscate clan land, where it was then centralized in the hands of a few words). Capitalism as a term originates with Adam Smith and Ricardo, it's not an informal slur. You find mentions of "capital" as early as the 16th century. Mature Marx did some work on how capitalist modes of production have actually existed since ancient times.

How about you actually read Marx.

Yes.

The Roman Empire can effectively be considered a proto-capitalist economy with chattel slavery. The Silk Road was the earliest "world economy" predating both globalism and mercantile-colonialism by a millennia.

Interestingly, the Roman period is also noted with a shift toward wealth inequality across the Mediterranean world until the decline and collapse.

academia.edu/5279248/Bintliff_J._2013_._The_Hellenistic_to_Roman_Mediterranean_A_proto-capitalist_revolution_Economic_Archaeology._T._Kerig_and_A._Zimmermann._Bonn_Rudolf_Habelt_285-292

books.google.com/books?id=zwtIAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA254

lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/EconomicHistory/Papers14-15/Jongman.pdf

This part is more like folklore than a dispassionate summary.

Those are things that happened in 19th century England, and were templates for progressives who protested against Native American fishing rights.

I tried to search for "capitalism" in Adam Smith's and David Ricardo's books and I haven't found it.

Not an argument.

Also you are lying, capital emerged as a term earlier than I thought. In the 12th and 13t centuries. Similarly, David Ricardo refers to the "capitalist" many times in his Principles of Political Economey.

The black act is from the 18th century.
Yawn. You are boring and moronic.

As long as there have been jews there have been capitalists.

Also. Any system which contains usury is capitalism.

No. Capitalism isn't about markets and it isn't about merchant or lender capitalists. The system of capitalism is marked by the emergence and dominance of the industrial capitalist production arrangement.

You're spooked, capitalism is orthogonal to steam engines and industrial machinery. What kept the ancients from developing industrial machinery while practicing capitalism was the wide spread and low cost exploitation of slavery, which prevented the first steps of technological industrialization ftom being cost effective

sounds pretty capitalist to me

You're misinformed. "Industrial capitalist" doesn't refer to industry, it refers to the arrangement where a capitalist invests in means of production and wages and then sells the resulting commodity for a higher price.

That's exactly what happened in ancient times. Feudalism was a Charlemagne invention

The negotiatores did precisely this, in addition to practicing usury. They invested in production facilities, built warehouses to store their goods, and built commercial networks on a mass scale, all the while employing hundreds or thousands of freedmen + slaves. They made enormous sums doing so. They created trade networks stretching all the way to India and Southeast Asia… where we still dig up Roman glass and pottery.

No, ancient world had Slave Society that is arguably much worse than modern capitalism.

Humans are just another commodity to a willing bourgy.

This is a eurocentrist view of trade. You don't need complete top-to-bottom control to sell merchandise for a profit.
You can buy cardamom from an Indian market then transport it 5000 miles away to sell in England for a higher price. The buyer has no choice but to pay the inflated price since he's unwilling to make the same excursion. You can do the same for Chinese silk or a translated Arabic scroll of ancient Greek philosophy.

underrated post

I would say no.

Remember that capitalists with their "much free market" aren't the ones who define capitalism. Marx was pretty much the only one who identified capitalism as it worked in material practice.

We must remember, capitalism is a *mode of production*, the way a society decided how goods would be produced. One major characteristic of this would be the process of M-C-M, in which a capitalist fronts *dead, accumulated labor* to buy commodities (or the pieces which make up commodities in raw materials) in order to sell said commodities and totally disregard its use values. In the ancient world people mostly (let's take the Crassus who died at Carrhae) became wealthy through land accumulation which in turn was conquered or otherwise procured. Their wealth wasn't labor rolled into commodities which were in turn sold again. So no, capitalism never made an appearance.

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it wasn't the dominant factor of society

nope early capitalism began in the 1600s

Wrong. refer to
and

The Romans named a class of citizen that converted accumulated labor into commodities and resold them on the world market, disregarding its use value for profit. They built ancient factories, employed freemen with wages, and issued lines of credit.

Yes, certain individuals like Crassus did gain wealth through accumulating giant speculative estates called latifunda (a name still used for similar schemes into modern Latin America), but this is no different to how capitalists speculate on land to this day, with the sole exception of chattel slavery.

The major difference between the Roman economy and our world is the lack of a major consumer class to drive demand and production of consumer goods. Even so, the material remains of the Roman era suggest an abundance of certain consumer goods like glass and basic jewelry for the lower classes so some low level of consumerism is likely.

Free urban workers in the early Roman Empire were paid for their work
and were able to change their economic activities. Hereditary barriers were nonexistent, and Roman guilds do not appear to have been restrictive (see
chapter 5). Workers in large enterprises, like mines and galleys, were paid
wages, as in more modern labor markets. Workers engaged in more skilled and
complex tasks received more elaborate compensation, probably for long units
of time than those doing wage labor, again as in more modern labor markets,
even though explicit long-term contracts were not yet established. The force of competition under those circumstances probably brought wages and labor productivity into the same ballpark (Frank 1933–40, V, 248–
52; Meiggs 1973, 314)

Some of the work in the early Roman Empire was done for wages and
some under the duress of slavery. The early Roman Empire even had salaried long-
term free workers in Egypt. Craftsmen sold their wares in cities and also supplied them to rural and urban patrons in return for long-term economic and social support. Similarly, people who worked for, or supplied, senators and equestrians often worked for long-term rewards and advancement. The episodic nature of monumental building in Rome, accomplished largely by free laborers, gives evidence of a mobile labor force that could be diverted from one
activity to another. Free workers, freedmen, and slaves worked in all kinds of activities; contemporaries saw the ranges of jobs and of freedom as separate—even orthogonal. In particular, rural slaves hardly comprised an undifferentiated gang of laborers; lists of rural slave jobs are as varied as the known range of urban or household “slave” jobs. Some rural laborers received piece rates and others, daily wages. Cicero, anticipating Marx, conflated legal and economic relations by equating wages and servitude (Rathbone 1991, 91–147, 166; Brunt 1980; Cicero, deOfficiis, XXI, 1.150–51).

The Roman Empire was as closest to capitalism (maybe excepting Song China) as the ancient world would ever get.

piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Temin2013.pdf

not really i wish i could have a cute slave girl

Thank you, your post was informative. And you're right, while I was writing my post I struggled with the same concepts you laid out. I know they operated pottery factories and wealthy upperclass Romans would fund many types of business expositions from mining to moving of chattel slavery.

And where we agree is that the Roman Empire was the *closest* the ancients ever came to capitalism.

No. Ancient civilizations's economies didn't emphasize private ownership even though that element existed in them. Protocapitalism showed up during the high medieval period in Venice when trade boomed (because of the conquests in the middle east and interactions with other nations). At the end of feudalism you can see the guilds not being able to meet market demands, so they gave way to a new class of citizens who employed other citizens on a larger scale. And so this protocapitalism eventually grew into imperialism. I guess protocapitalism have always existed in some shape up untill the high medieval ages. Fuck the police

read a book about ancient Rome dumb curry.

I'm citing the communist manifesto, you absolute idiot.

wut?

read an actual book like The Capital instead of that trite propaganda garbage. Maybe you'll realize that there was capitalism in the ancient world, contrarly to the middle age

It's just called "human trafficking" now.

Do you seriously think that the presence of proto-capital in a society makes capitalism that society's mode of production? You may as well say that socialism exists, because there are co-ops in the world.

All of my what
I can't even

2nd

There was capital, not capitalism. The first time a class appears that actually turns capital into a self-reproductive is in feudalism, however, as the bourgeoisie class arises. Through organizatio, this bourgeoisie manages to organize revolutions which ultimately replace rule by the sword (feudalism) to rule by capital (capitalism). This process is bridged by a sword-capital hybrid: mercantilism, in which the bourgeoisie directly instrumentalizes its need for profit via colonialism, using its nation state's feudal house as coercive agent around the world.

As the primary economic motor of society mediated by exchange, yes.

The early empire as in the Julio-Claudian dynasty? Are talking about during the plagues and civil wars that caused a Mediterranean-wide labor shortage? Of course there were migratory waged laborers during a prolonged labor shortage.

Only for citizens. Bear in mind that the Antonine Constitution was not proclaimed until AD 212.

Are you high? There was no prolonged labor shortage in the early Roman Empire. Their labor practices continued from the late Republic.