In this thread: many apes who demonstrate they have no idea what capitalism is.
Unfortunately this is false. They’ve tested this and monkeys establish captilasm extremely fast when they come to understand currency as a concept.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503550
They would exchange the currency, steal it, gamble with it, purchase with it, and even do some prostitution for it.
Edit: To people responding that this isnt capitalism, it actually is, in this case the privatized controller of wealth were the researchers distributing “payment” to the monkeys at a fixed rate, as well as having experiments where the monkeys had to pull levers before they would receive rewards either to themselves or later, altruistically to other monkeys.
You would know that if you took the time to read up on the study before responding…
That’s not capitalism, that’s just a market.
It’s only capitalism when one monkey owns the means of production and starts paying another money a wage while taking the wealth they produce.
It would be really interesting if the scientists gave all of the monkeys a huge supply of walnuts, and one of the monkeys a tool to open walnuts. Would the monkey share the tool when it was finished opening walnuts? Charge the other monkeys to use the tool? Would the other monkeys beat the shit out of them and share it?
I always thought capitalism was defined by the existence of stock markets, but I could easily be mistaken! So, everything you said, plus the ability to gamble on three performance of businesses.
Capitalism is just the idea that capital is privately owned and the economy is loosely organized around that concept.
From the IMF
In a capitalist economy, capital assets—such as factories, mines, and railroads—can be privately owned and controlled, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and prices allocate capital and labor between competing uses
If you compare this to something like socialism which says that capital assets should be held by the society at large. There is no one guy that can own a mine but the mine is owned by society at large.
Capitalism often likes to wear the clothes of “free markets” because most people like the idea of freedom. Not a lot of people are super keen on the idea that “some rich guy should be allowed to own all the railroads if he wants” (unless you are a rich guy that owns a bunch of railroads) so capitalists like to conflate capitalism and the free market as though they are one inseparable idea.
Other economic systems can also have free markets with collective ownership. Worker cooperatives, for example, exist within capitalist economies.
The existence of a stock market is not actually needed for capitalism. The people that own the means of production don’t necessarily need to set up a system where people can purchase a share of their companies. It might be an emergent property of capitalism, if people don’t want to start their own profit generating enterprises but want to share in the gains of a profit generating enterprise they would be willing buyers. People with profit generating enterprises might be willing sellers if they think they could over time generate more profit by raising capital from the stock buyers. But if you didn’t have a stock market and private individuals controlled the capital assets of your society, by definition you’d still be capitalist since that’s the defining characteristic.
As an example you could outlaw all financial instruments in America and as long as I can still own a factory and sell my goods for a profit, it would still be capitalism.
I think economic systems are fascinating. We often colloquially conflate various things that tend to happen together but really aren’t related at all. Of course if I hold the capital assets I would want you to associate capitalism with the positive aspects of a free market and sorta ignore the part where I get to own the capital asset and charge everyone else to have access to it.
Orangs do that. One Orang is collecting food and giving to to another Orang building a bed from leaves.
Why? Because the first Orang is better at collecting food and the second at building beds.
I vaguely remember reading about monkeys teaming up and beating others to death if they hoard too much ‘wealth’. If that’s actually true the meme is still kind of true.
There’s no real way to hoard “wealth” as a monkey. Fruit rots. There’s no way to invest in such a society, since they don’t understand the concept of growing food. That’s why they live in family groups to control territory.
Humans lived similarly for hundreds of thousands of years. Calling the basic exchange of tokens “capitalism” isn’t accurate. It’s like calling a tribal society “communism” because people take care of their relatives for free. It’s not accurate.
When I woke up today I never would if guessed that today is the day I would wind up accidentally learning that monkey prostitutes are a thing.
If it helps, that’s not monkeys inventing capitalism, it’s monkeys responding to a system of currency that was enforced on them by scientists. That’s a very different thing.
Essentially what they’ve discovered is an example of the logic of capitalism reproducing itself within those it subjugates.
Actually all higher primates do capitalism. Bonobos pay with food for sex, Chipanzees pay with support for a higher rank, Orangs pay with food for other orangs making them a bad out of leaves. I suggest to read Barterverse: Galactic Economics 1: Happy Existence
