Well when you privatise force you get things like gangs, mafia, kangaroo courts, vigilantism, no? Basically whatever you see in shitty countries or areas where governmental law and order has little to no sway - people still manage to find ways to protect property without a state, and in doing so enable the possibility of privately owning means of production. Sure it doesn’t look much like the Capitalism we have in the West and it would have severe trouble getting anywhere near as advanced or as out of control as it has done here, but part of my point was that it can still be Capitalism at its definitional core.
Personally I think it’s important to simplify these concepts down to their essence, because you can get much more specific and then build up with qualifiers like “free market Minarchist state Capitalism” to be absolutely clear what you mean when you use these terms that have colloquially deformed into such a mess that we can’t really use them with any useful degree of meaning, which just ends up in arguments over endless equivocation fallacies.
I also like how force is highlighted when you reduce these concepts, when Capitalism is so often sold as a system free of force. Its foundation of private property is literally forcing others to abide by your terms and conditions when it comes to your property - ergo the more you have, the more power you have and the more finite the resources you control, the less power others have relative to you. This is where “voluntary” trading is revealed to be weighted more in favour of whomever has the most Capital because they control that which offers the most and can hold out for a better deal for themselves, which the less powerful party must then resort to “consenting” to. The person in charge of the means of producing the most valuable things values what they have less than the person who doesn’t own them because they have them on tap, yet the owner does value the larger amount of money than it costs to run their means of production, which the non-owning parties must sacrifice due to valuing more what they need but don’t control - thus the owner has even more share to invest in more capital and it’s easy to see how they whole thing spirals into gross inequality (as long as the capitalist’s investments keep up with what’s valuable). The in-built control mechanism - market competition - actually degrades in its effectiveness the more the system rewards the winners because they gain increasingly more power to control the market, pricing out competition or buying them out. We see today the most reliably important resources entirely owned by the same company even if it maintains the brands it bought or made up to create the illusion that there is no monopoly. It’s actually more stable a system in its infancy, or in poorer, more scarce and volatile economic climates, because the winners aren’t able to win for long enough before power shifts to others. This is why, of course, Capitalism is highly praised for bringing undeveloped nations out of poverty where “perfect competition” can actually be approximated. We see the economic invasion of the system trying to take over as much of the globe as possible, lessening poverty in the poorest areas whilst not coincidentally increasing the opporunity for Capitalists to profit from even more people. The whole goal is to escape perfect competition and to tend towards monopoly, which is the whole issue that capitalist proponents have with the state. At this point, government has to prop up these monopolies whenever their obese size causes them to faulter, because the ripple effects of such massive organisations no longer being able to run costs everyone way more. The whole Ponzi scheme essentially ends up holding society to ransom and government have to back more right wing governments where they don’t yet exist so that the feeding can continue, and complete collapse can be staved off for just a little longer.
This is why, beyond a certain point, Capitalism gets sick from eating itself and dies as soon as it stops growing.
The appeal is to those who lack theory of mind and/or care for the future, which luckily enough for Capitalists proliferates in conditions of poverty and social degeneration that it pushes civilisations back into after it so generously lifted them out to begin with. So as soon as its inherent disease starts showing in its latter stages, bad nutrition and upbringing and nostaligia to conserve past glory is so well cultivated that it’s extremely difficult to communicate that it needs to stop.
I’d rather be in this version that stuck in the impoverished conditions where it works, but I’m just waiting for enough people to cotton on to what happens when Capitalism starts working “too well”.
I’m interested in what happens when private property in the workplace becomes meaningless due to renewable energies and automation. Like anything of value that can be shared on the internet, securing private property can become more costly than the property is worth. This is another way in which Capitalism drives its own undoing, and I just hope I don’t get too much older before it finishes the job.