You've likely either learned to hate capitalism out of living under it, or been propagandized into loving it because the alternatives are supposedly much worse. Both are results of some misdirection, but it doesn't follow that early capitalism scholars were part of it.

The theory is that capitalists hire workers to make products or render services, and sell those products or services at a profit in competitive markets. Since in free competitive markets, prices are driven to the cost of production (labor and materials), profits in such markets arise out of efficiencies that must be constantly pursued: as the efficiencies get integrated in the dominant form of production, prices and profits go down, and new efficiencies need to be pursued.

Capitalists hate capitalism for good reason. Margins in free competitive markets are thin and voatile. Capitalism demands parties to work extremely hard to stay afloat.

Now, don't get me wrong. Capitalists exploit workers. That's not cool. If you're a worker like me, whose labor is exploited by a capitalist, you have plenty of reason to dislike this arrangement.

But odds are that you aren't, even if you're propagandized every day into believing that you are.

Most businesses are capitalist and we live under capitalism, right?

The bakery by the corner, your favorite family restaurant, the grocery store in the neighborhood, the still-surviving small bookshop are all capitalist businesses. Their owners work there along with a few hired workers. The bad news for them is that, for such competitive and traditional lines of business, coming up with new efficiencies is pretty hard, so after paying suppliers, meager wages and taxes, whatever remains for them to bring home for their own survival is probably less than the value produced by their own labor. They're little different from proles themselves, and there are plenty of much larger businesses looking for a cut of their pie. Reinvesting to expand the capital? Some day, they hope.

Under capitalism, their tireless labor in a precarious pursuit of capitalist success, never getting past bare survival because of fierce competition and regulations that prevent monopolies, is a carrot that serves society, or so the theory goes.

In practice, when we think of capitalism, we think of the comparatively few businesses that reached Big Capital status: the past winners in the lottery that, in their ample visibility, make the carrot seem even sweeter.

Capitalists hate capitalism because when one or a few parties control a market, that's the opposite of the competition that's supposed to keep capitalism in service of society. Monopolies and monopsonies control markets in ways that make capitalism fail. It's seems contradictory that such market control is taken as the highest achievement for a capitalist. When they succeed, capitalism fails.

I may have found solution to this conundrum. When they achieve such positions of market control, they cease to operate under capitalism: they gain power to set prices, and so they can become primarily rent extractors, a practice that preexisted capitalism by centuries under the name feudalism. Oligopolies and oligopsonies often cooperate to set prices as well, despite regulations that should prevent that. That's not capitalism!

In Feudal Business Value Extraction I argued (taking heed of Yanis Varoufakis' teachings) that most of the largest businesses today are rent extractors, that is, they're primarily feudal, despite some capitalist practices.

Heck, even stockholders, often held as prime examples of capitalism at work, are purely rent extractors. Whether the businesses they extract dividend rents from are capitalist or feudal, stockholding is a feudal lord activity. Banks are paid interest rents without participating in production.

In other words, the dominant economic forces don't operate under capitalism: they extract value not (so much?) from their workers, but from capitalists, from proletarians and from each other.

They've grown so immense that they've outgrown governments, and they control their regulators. They (still?) hire so many workers that odds are you work for one of them, rather than for a capitalist business. You should understand that, to aim your dislike at the right target.

Now, AFAICT, after a short period in which capitalistic activity prevailed over feudal practices in the 1800s, the latter adopted capitalist practices of reinvestment for growth and, by the turn of that century, they'd already got back to the top spots in the Western if not global economies. Some call that the imperialistic stage of capitalism. I think of that as "Feudalism Strikes Back!"

IMHO, that's when a chimera of feudalism and capitalism became the dominant economic system: rent extraction with reinvestment for growth.

Why do we call that capitalism?

That's the only reality that very nearly everyone alive today has ever known. We've been taught to call that capitalism, even though it's almost entirely different from the system studied and described by early scholars of capitalism. We've been propagandized into thinking they're essentially the same.

Sure, worker exploitation and oppression are still present, and that is enough for it to suck, but we can't even count on the benefits to society expected of capitalism any more: they're not available under this chimera dominated by rent extraction by feudal lords who drive prices and corruption up and block competition and progress.

But since we've learned to mislabel this chimera as capitalism, we've learned to hate (or been propagandized into loving) this chimera as if it were capitalism.

Someone has been hard at work to confuse us, to make us think that the great things written about capitalism, not all of which were necessarily wrong, apply to the current system.

We should know better.

So blong,