this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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What's your best, longest-lived example of a society without capitalism? Do you have any?
By capitalism, I mean
"private individuals or companies that own and control businesses and property", the simplest definition of capitalism
Capitalism was literally invented in the last few hundred years.
Sure, but before that was feudalism, or similar systems where the state owned the means of production with no competition besides foreign powers and sometimes the church. Capitalism doesn't give much power to workers, but it's definitely more than serfdom.
any socialist society will be inherently disadvantaged by the fact that the global hegemon, the USA, is hellbent on destroying them. so, given that, maybe the soviet union? china? they certainly aren't perfect, soviet union especially, but any future socialist project can (and should) learn from their successes and mistakes
You have mercantilism and other forms of private business without capitalism. A yeoman making something and selling it isn't capitalism.
Your definition is intentionally bad because you do in fact have to separate capitalism from just the very generic concept of private enterprise.
By that definition, Roman Empire? Which lasted pretty damn long, by similar methods. Imperialism. A government that has at least a veneer of responsibility to the populace.
I mean there's big differences, but more similarities imo.
Collective ownership is very common (no pun intended) global and throughout history
That's not the simplest definition because it's not the definition of capitalism at all. You can have property ownership without capitalism.
I'm pretty sure what most people are referring to here is unfettered capitalism. It's not an on/off switch, you can have certain aspects of one thing combined with the other.
Tell me you've never studied history pre-1800 without telling me you've never studied history pre-1800.
Tell me you don't have a clue without telling me you don't have a clue
If you want actual examples, almost all societies before 1800 we're not capitalist. Feudal society wasn't capitalist, neither was Roman society. Hunter gather society by most accounts was a form of primitive communism, and that is the vast majority of human history.
Rome wasn't capitalist?
What definition of capitalism are you using? They seemed very capitalist to me.
(I am using standard simple definition of "an economic system where private individuals or companies own and control businesses and property")
You're going to need a narrow definition of company for that definition to not be very broad, as Wikipedia defines company as:
So basically a company can be any group of people, separated from the state but still recognized by it. So is a commune a company then? If everything was controlled by communes would that be capitalist?
It's better to use a more specific definition, again from wikipedia:
While all of these existed in Roman civilization, concentrated in the big cities such as Rome, the majority of the economy was slaves and peasants working the land to feed themselves while being forced to give a portion to landlords as rent and to the government as taxes, much like most agricultural civilizations. This sort of economy does not revolve around profit ie. Buying something, paying someone to improve it, and selling it for more on an open market so you can buy more and sell that and on and on... That is possible in Rome and there are capitalists, but that's not the main mode of production in the economy so the economy isn't capitalist. Just like there are communes in the US but the US isn't communist.
I don't need that narrow definition, as the definition I'm using is "...private individuals OR companies", so no companies are required.
Are companies necessary with capitalism? Not per the definition. They CAN be a part of it.
There were TONS of "profit-motivated" Romans throughout their economy. I think that the definition you used from Wikipedia means that Rome was capitalist, as private property, profit motive, competitive markets, commodification, and wage labor were all a part of Roman civilization, and not a small part.
Centurions could own land and were paid a wage, etc. All existed under Rome.
Thanks for your answer, I am very familiar with Rome and at least I know where you're coming from. In spite of your initial comment, I've read quite a bit about pre-1800s civilization. Perhaps more than you regarding Rome, as revealed by your response.
Ok, then by your definition is communism capitalism then, communism being defined as a system where the workers own the means of production? So a commune, or group of workers, can own businesses and property, and individuals can too if they are an "owner operator" and the only worker for a business, basically being a commune of 1. Because if you're defining communism as capitalist then that word has lost all meaning.
You're definition of capitalism seems to be any system that has property, when all systems of human organization have some idea of property, even communism. The way the systems differ is what things can or can't be property and who / what can own them and for what ends.
For Rome I think you’re making a category error that’s really common in this debate: you’re pointing to the existence of markets, private property, wage payments, and profit-seeking individuals, and then concluding that Rome was capitalist. But the presence of those elements is not the same thing as capitalism as a dominant mode of production.
First, we have to be careful about the sources. What we call “Roman history” was written by literate urban elites—senators, landowners, military officers—about politics, war, and elite economic activity. Naturally, we have documentation about the commercial and financial dealings of those elites. What we largely don’t have are accounts of the daily economic life of the overwhelming majority: subsistence farmers, tenant laborers, and especially slaves.
There were exponentially more people in the Roman world living lives closer to Spartacus than to Pompey, but we know far more about Pompey because people like him were doing the writing. That skews the picture. The economy as experienced by most Romans—agricultural, coercive, local, and oriented around subsistence and tribute—is comparatively underrepresented in elite literary sources.
Second, capitalism isn’t defined by the mere presence of wage labor or profit motive. It’s defined by a system in which production is primarily organized around capital accumulation: owners invest capital, hire wage labor to produce commodities for market exchange, and systematically reinvest profits to expand production. That logic becomes dominant in early modern Europe and fully systemic by the Industrial Revolution.
In Rome, the overwhelming majority of economic output was agricultural. Large estates (latifundia) were worked primarily by slaves. That’s not wage labor organized for profit in a competitive market; it’s coerced labor organized for surplus extraction. The landowner isn’t engaging in capital accumulation through productivity-enhancing investment in hired labor; he is extracting surplus directly through ownership of land and people. That’s a fundamentally different social relation.
Even your centurion example highlights this distinction. Yes, he receives a wage—but he isn’t a wage worker in a capitalist enterprise producing commodities for sale in a market. He is paid by the state to perform military service. States have paid soldiers for thousands of years; that alone does not make a society capitalist.
If that centurion owns land worked by slaves, that also doesn’t make him a capitalist. Owning productive property is not identical to being a capitalist. In a capitalist system, land or capital is typically invested to generate profit through market competition and reinvestment. In Rome, elite landownership was about status and surplus extraction. Slaves were compelled by force to produce agricultural output. The surplus was appropriated directly by the owner. That’s closer to a slave mode of production than to capitalism.
Finally, scale matters. In modern capitalism, the dominant share of production comes from wage labor employed by firms operating for profit in competitive markets. In Rome, the dominant share of production came from agriculture structured around slavery, tenancy, and tribute. Commercial and financial activity certainly existed—but it did not define or structure the system as a whole.
So yes, Rome had markets, private property, profit-seeking individuals, and wage payments. Many premodern societies did. What it did not have was a social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor was the dominant organizing principle of the economy. That’s the key distinction.
Sure, but you don't need a 'social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor is the dominant organizing principle of the economy' to be capitalist per YOUR provided definition.
Let it go, friend. Definitions matter.
Not really when it comes to the idea of capitalism. You aren't going to get a definition of capitalism because the idea of capitalism was developed by critics of it analyzing it from a dialectical basis, and dialectics, in the hegelian sense, reject static concrete definitions.
Capitalism is a system so complex and with so many aspects that you aren't able to pin it down to a simple couple sentence definition. It's like trying to define the Roman empire, the Roman empire is all at once:
And all the different relationships between those things and all the different rules both written and unwritten governing those relationships. Thus you can't just give a simple definition of the Roman empire and actually capture what it was. This is why people operating outside of a hegelian worldview struggle to define these complex systems like the Roman empire and capitalism. You can see this further down in the wikipedia article under definition:
If you still want your concrete definition at that then like it says you should look to the critics of capitalism for its "definition", and it's chief critic Marx took three whole volumes to explain what capitalism was and how it operated: das kapital. That's because he was explaining it in a hegelian dialectical approach, taking into account all the forces, tendencies, contradictions and structures of it, and not a definitive sense.
No one ever does.
We need regulated capitalism. I don't mind working for money. Most lemmys would like to smoke weed all day and not do shit. World dont work like that kids.
Capitalism with regulation and taxation of billionaires. Welfare state for the sick and elderly. Why is this so hard? We don't need communism.
Cooperatives are the best answer. Capitalists will argue they should outcompete traditional firms in the market. If they're supposed to be better they'd win, right? But the thing is they're only better for most people.. and not the few richest that benefit the most from the current capitalist system. And everyone's too damn brainwashed to understand private ownership of the means of production is the root cause of so many problems. But let's just regulate capitalism.
If cooperatives goal is to provide for its members and community while a traditional firms goal is profit maximization, regulation fixes nothing.