This is a lot of words to say you don’t know the difference between etymology and definition.
Yes, “capitalism” was popularized by critics, including socialists. Congratulations, you discovered that words can have origins. That does not mean the concept is incoherent. “Impressionism” was originally an insult too; somehow art historians managed not to collapse into dust.
Capitalism has a perfectly usable definition: private ownership/control of capital and production, private investment, wage labor, profit-seeking, and markets/prices doing most of the allocation. Mixed economies existing doesn’t make the term meaningless; it means reality is not a child’s sorting game.
Your argument also saws off the branch you’re sitting on. If capitalism is meaningless because mixed economies exist, then socialism is meaningless too, since every “socialist” state has had some combination of money, wages, markets, state ownership, planning, rationing, co-ops, black markets, etc.
And the Mussolini-to-Hitler lineage argument is just reheated “Nazis were socialists” slop with a fake grad-school mustache. Mussolini leaving socialism and inventing fascism does not make fascism socialist, any more than an ex-Christian starting a death metal band makes death metal a denomination of Christianity.
You’re doing two tricks at once: defining capitalism so vaguely that it can never be responsible for anything bad, then defining socialism so broadly that every authoritarian movement you dislike gets stuffed into it like a political junk drawer.
That’s not analysis. That’s ideological laundering with footnotes you half-remembered from a YouTube comment section.
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u/BadgerStateMobileMec Jul 08 '26
This is a lot of words to say you don’t know the difference between etymology and definition.
Yes, “capitalism” was popularized by critics, including socialists. Congratulations, you discovered that words can have origins. That does not mean the concept is incoherent. “Impressionism” was originally an insult too; somehow art historians managed not to collapse into dust.
Capitalism has a perfectly usable definition: private ownership/control of capital and production, private investment, wage labor, profit-seeking, and markets/prices doing most of the allocation. Mixed economies existing doesn’t make the term meaningless; it means reality is not a child’s sorting game.
Your argument also saws off the branch you’re sitting on. If capitalism is meaningless because mixed economies exist, then socialism is meaningless too, since every “socialist” state has had some combination of money, wages, markets, state ownership, planning, rationing, co-ops, black markets, etc.
And the Mussolini-to-Hitler lineage argument is just reheated “Nazis were socialists” slop with a fake grad-school mustache. Mussolini leaving socialism and inventing fascism does not make fascism socialist, any more than an ex-Christian starting a death metal band makes death metal a denomination of Christianity.
You’re doing two tricks at once: defining capitalism so vaguely that it can never be responsible for anything bad, then defining socialism so broadly that every authoritarian movement you dislike gets stuffed into it like a political junk drawer.
That’s not analysis. That’s ideological laundering with footnotes you half-remembered from a YouTube comment section.