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What is capitalism? The term “capitalism” gets thrown around an awful lot, both by those who take it to represent one of humanity’s great innovations, and those who take it to represent a system of oppression. But what is capitalism, such that it might be a scourge or savior? Or, to take a closely related question, what does the term “capitalism” mean?[1]

I. Defining Messy Terms

First, a disclaimer. “Capitalism” is an extremely loaded and messy term. Not only do different people use it in different, irreconcilable ways, but the same individual will also often use it in different, irreconcilable ways in different contexts. When we get terms like this, coming up with a definition or analysis of them becomes difficult and in many cases pointless—we are arguing about which way to use a messy, imprecise term, is the right way to use it, and often there’s not much to gain by settling it one way or the other.[2] And if there isn’t much to gain by settling on a precise definition of “capitalism”, then there’s not much to gain by trying to give a precise answer to the question “What is capitalism?”, since a satisfying answer to that question would require us to settle on a definition for the term “capitalism”.[3]

Nevertheless, I think we can clear up a lot of confusion by asking these questions about capitalism and “capitalism”. For example, even if there isn’t much point in settling on some usage of the term “capitalism” as the correct way to use it, that doesn’t mean that all uses are equally appropriate. If some usages are simply misguided—as if I were to use “capitalism” to mean “democracy”, for example—then we at least learn something about what capitalism is not. But furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, we can investigate common usages of “capitalism” and gain a more precise understanding of what people mean when they use this broad, messy term. If all goes well, then we will be more careful to say exactly what we mean when we use the word “capitalism”, or we might just avoid that term altogether, and exchange it for more precise ones (at least when we need to be precise).

II. Capitalism and State Intervention in the Economy

So let’s begin to address our main question: “What is capitalism?” A Google search yields the following definition: “an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”[4] Wikipedia gives a similar though slightly different answer: “Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.”[5] Both hit on one of the main points of contrast between capitalism and other systems, namely, that capitalism is marked by the predominance of private markets and the absence of government intervention in economic matters. But Google’s definition, unlike Wikipedia’s, says that capitalism is a political system in addition to an economic one, and it uses the phrase “trade and industry are controlled by private owners” rather than the more precise “private ownership of the means of production”. The differences might seem minor, but as we will see, they will turn out to be pretty important in our efforts to understand capitalism.
 
The proposed definitions get us off to a good start, but already we have some serious questions which suggest that there is considerable room for improvement and refinement. First, is capitalism a political system, as the Google definition would have us believe? It seems strange to consider it as such, since nothing else in the definitions say much about political organization. The Google definition does give us (and the Wiki version implies) a constraint on political systems—namely, that economic activity is a private matter, not a state one. But this is consistent with all kinds of ways of organizing government. For example, we know that there can be capitalist democracies, but we can just as well have capitalist monarchies, provided the monarch stays out of economic matters—they can stick to the political and legal matters for instance. Now, there are arguments out there that capitalism tends to lead to more democratic forms of government, but there’s no reason that, in principle, they must.
 
Capitalism, then, is an economic system, not a political one. But there is another constraint that capitalism places on the state that helps to differentiate it from other economic systems. This constraint is evident in both definitions: the state must provide the legal basis for private ownership of the means of production (i.e. capital—the things, other than labor and money, that are needed for economic production like land, buildings, equipment, machinery, etc.).[6] A communist economy does not place this constraint on states since all of the means of production will be owned by the state itself.
 
Next, we have to deal with a major source of vagueness in both definitions: just how much does an economy have to be “based on” private ownership of the means of production, or to what extent do trade and industry have to be “controlled by” private owners to be capitalist? Or to take the flip side of the question, how much can a state interfere in economic matters and still maintain a capitalist economy? If we require that the state stay out of the economy completely, then the United States obviously lacks a capitalist system. After all, the United States government subsidizes health care, delivers the mail, manages national parks, and regulates all manner of industries. Nevertheless, on pretty much anyone’s definition of “capitalism”, the United States is to be considered a capitalist economy.
 
Being capitalist, then, is a matter of degree, depending (in part) on the extent to which the government is involved in economic activity. When we say that the United States has a capitalist economy, we mean that it is pretty darn capitalist, though it would be possible for it to be even more capitalist. This vague transition between capitalism and other economic systems is evident when considering which countries various sources take to be “socialist”. Sometimes countries like Denmark and even Canada are included, but sometimes they are simply called “mixed economies”, with “socialist” being reserved for countries like China or North Korea. The sensible thing to say here, I think, is that the United States is, in many ways, more capitalist than these “mixed” countries, and whether they are capitalist or not is a vague, and ultimately unimportant question which has no non-arbitrary solution. Indeed, this vagueness in being capitalist is one of the reasons that a precise answer to the question “What is capitalism?” is ultimately doomed.
 
But let’s move on to another unclarity packed into the definitions we’ve been considering. We know that in a capitalist economy, the state is meant to stay out of economic matters. But this isn’t very precise—there are lots of ways to be “involved in” economic matters, and some of them even seem to be required by capitalism. For example, if capitalism requires the state to provide a legal basis for property rights, then it requires an incredibly important involvement in the economy—providing the legal basis of that economy. Without any legal interpretation and protection of property rights, there will be no legal distinction between a fair and just transfer of goods and stealing, for example, and there would be no legal mechanisms for the protection of fair transfers and the prevention or deterrence of stealing. Even if capitalism doesn’t—as a matter of conceptual necessity—require this sort of legal foundation, its successful operation probably does. At minimum, this kind of state involvement, clearly, is pervasive in capitalist economies, and does not make an economy any less capitalist.
 
The definitions from Google and Wikipedia actually provide two different kinds of criteria for state intervention which would make an economy more or less capitalist. Let’s start with the Wikipedia definition, which says that “Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production…”. It’s not entirely clear what “based on” means here, but a reasonable guess would be that by this definition, an economy is capitalist to the degree that the means of production are privately owned, and non-capitalist to the degree that they are state-owned. Suppose a government enforces a state monopoly on some industry—health insurance, for instance. In that case, the only provider of health insurance will be the state, and so the state will own all of the means of production for that industry. Having such a state monopoly would make a country considerably less capitalist. A much more minor intervention would be a case where the state provides a service, say health insurance, but does not have a monopoly on that industry. In the context of health insurance, this would be what is called a “public option”, where the state insurance provider would compete against private providers in the health insurance marketplace.
 
The criterion for being capitalist suggested by the Google definition is a bit different. That definition maintains that in a capitalist economy, “a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners”. “Control” suggests a different kind of intervention from ownership of the means of production. It’s true that if the state owns the means of production in a industry, it will control it,[7] but there are ways to control an industry without owning it. Suppose, for example, a government sets the prices for all products and services in an economy. This sort of intervention is a hallmark of communist economies, but does not require that the government actually own any of the means of production. Instead, it controls an industry by severely limiting what private owners can do with their property. This sort of intervention is, of course, an instance of what we call “regulation”. This gets at the idea that generally, capitalism is meant to imply not just the existence of an expansive private market, but also that the private market is “free” in some sense or other. At minimum, this usually requires that the state not excessively regulate those markets. In general, then, we can say that the more the government regulates an economy, the less capitalist it is.
 
I think that we can add a further criterion of being capitalist that neither definition adequately specifies. Both definitions rely on an implicit notion of an economic domain. The Google definition concerns “industry and trade”. But which industries, and what sorts of trade? The Wikipedia definition concerns “the means of production”. But what sorts of production? For instance, we think of making cars and shoes or stock brokering as being paradigmatically economic activities. We tend to think of policing and the operation of the legal system (excepting lawyering of course) as being paradigmatically government activities. And then there are in-between cases like operating transportation systems, schooling, and package delivery. But there’s no reason why these couldn’t all be economic activities.[8] We could have private policing, a private judicial system, and so on. Indeed, it is an interesting question as to just what government functions could, in principle, be privatized.[9] And as the case of childhood schooling suggests, the boundaries of the private, economic sphere are currently in flux. The more that goods and services can be or must be obtained via the state, the less capitalist it is. Another way to put it is that the further the private economic sphere expands, the more capitalist the economy is.[10]
 
Thus far then, we have no definition of capitalism, but we have identified some markers of capitalist systems concerning the relationship between economic matters and the state. In particular, an economic system is capitalist to the degree that the means of production are owned privately rather than by the state, to the degree that private markets are absent of state regulation, and to the degree that transfers, generally, fall within the private economic domain, and not the domain of the government. Very often, when people talk about capitalism, they are speaking in broad terms about this relationship between the state and the economy, though they very often have only one or some of these markers in mind.

III. Ownership and Redistribution of Wealth
 
Nothing we have said so far touches on the distribution of wealth in a society. And to some extent, this is appropriate—capitalism does not necessitate any particular kind of distribution of wealth. True, it’s typical of capitalist societies to have a great deal of inequality, but they need not in principle. After all, capitalism does not rule out gift-giving, and so if the rich chose, they could just give their wealth to everyone else in such a way that the distribution ended up being pretty equal. The resulting society would be no less capitalist.
 
However, even if having a particular distribution of wealth is not indicative of being more or less capitalist, having more or less redistribution of wealth typically is taken to be so indicative. For instance, it is very common for people to think of socialist or communist societies as essentially involving robust redistribution of wealth—where this redistribution is mandated by the state (and not just the result of individuals giving charitable donations, for instance).
 
State redistribution of wealth constitutes a kind of state intervention, but the intervention is not so much an intervention in economic activities as the markers from the previous section were concerned with (though this point will be qualified below). Rather, it is a state intervention on the ownership of wealth.
 
Typically, if wealth is going to be redistributed in a society (say, by a tax), it does not constitute a limitation on what you can do with the wealth that you own, but rather, it places a limitation on the proportion of the wealth that you generate that you are able to keep for yourself. In the extreme case, all wealth generated is taken by the state and redistributed in some fashion.[11] In the case where the society is politically democratic in some way, we might say that the wealth generated by the society is collectively owned, because collectively, “the people” can decide what to do with it, not individuals. Now, typically, once the generated wealth is redistributed it is no longer state owned. At that point, whatever redistributed wealth individuals end up with is theirs to do with as they please. Thus, there is still private ownership of wealth, it’s just that individuals do not get to keep the wealth they generate. In the most extreme case, the state redistribute wealth to you by giving you food, shelter, and other various goods and services without your being able to choose from them and instead of just giving you cash. In that case, even if the state allows you to choose the kinds of economic activities you want to engage in, and even if it allows you to do so in whatever way you’d like, there would basically be no private ownership of wealth.
 
Now, I’ve separated out the issue of wealth redistribution from regulation and state-run industry by saying that it’s not an intervention on economic activity. But that’s not quite right—it’s just a different sort of intervention. Consider a sales tax. For exchanges where a sales tax applies, the state is, effectively, a third party to the exchange that takes a portion of the value of the exchange. Thus, if there is a sales tax on certain goods, then legally, you may not enter into economic agreements without the state as a third party. This is, therefore, a kind of intervention in and limitation on the kinds of economic activities you can engage in, though again, it is of a different sort. It does not otherwise replace restrictions on prices, the other (non-state) parties in the exchange, the nature of what is exchanged, etc. In the extreme case where all generated wealth goes to the state, the individuals in that society act as sort of “economic deputies” of the state, serving as representatives for the state (which takes all of the wealth generated from the exchange) in economic exchanges.
 
As should be clear, the extent to which a particular society is redistributionist comes in degrees, and so we can say that the more redistributionist a society is, the less capitalist it is. In the U.S., for instance, there is an income tax, a sales tax, and all manner of other kinds of taxes. Thus, once again, it is nothing like a “pure” capitalist society. It has all manner of redistributionist tax policies, but compared to many other, less capitalist societies, they are minor.
 
In any case, we have another marker of capitalist systems: A system is more capitalist to the extent that it does not redistribute wealth, i.e. to the extent that individuals are able to privately own the wealth that they generate.
 
IV. Modes of Ownership and Economic Hierarchy
 
But there’s more work to be done. What we have so far fails to distinguish capitalist systems from other, paradigmatically non-capitalist systems. Consider, for example, the political and economic system known as “anarcho-syndicalism”. As with all forms of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism requires the absence of the state, or at least a greatly diminished state, unlike any modern government that we are familiar with.[12] In an anarcho-syndicalist system, there might not be enough of a state to effect much economic intervention, and so given what we have said so far, such a system could count as being very capitalist. But anarcho-syndicalist systems are typically taken to contrast with capitalist ones, so we are going to need to make more refinements.
 
The further ambiguity in the definitions we have considered so far has to do with ambiguities in the idea of private ownership. The definitions specify that in a capitalist system, economic activity is to be guided by private owners, as opposed to a state owner. But there are different sorts of private ownership, and only some of them are distinctive of capitalism. In particular, capitalist private ownership is marked by a hierarchical distinction between private owners and employees. Decision-making, ultimately, rests with the owner or owners (where these might be stockholders if a company issues stock) of an enterprise, and they exert control over the activities of employees. Economic institutions, ultimately, tend to have this top-down, hierarchical structure.
 
In an anarcho-syndicalist system, however, this employer-employee distinction would be absent. Instead, economic institutions would involve some form of worker-ownership, as is exemplified by cooperatives. In these arrangements, the decision-making power rests, ultimately, with the workers, since there is no distinction between worker and owner.[13] The idea, basically, is to remove sources of coercive power, both political and economic, by extending democracy into the economic sphere as well as the political.
 
This distinction between hierarchical and non-hierarchical economic institutions is extremely important in understanding the boundaries of capitalism and non-capitalist systems, and also certain criticisms of capitalism. It is a distinction that is often overlooked, however. Take, for instance, the work of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, two of the most influential proponents of capitalism. They take capitalism to contrast primarily with communism, and so tend to equate capitalism with the predominance of a decentralized, free, and private (i.e. non-state) market.[14] Consequently, they focus on arguing for the benefits of markets and market solutions over state ones. They also only consider objections to capitalism which are objections to markets, and which are meant to be arguments in favor of state intervention.
 
This tendency to take criticisms of capitalism as being criticisms of markets—and thus implicit endorsement of state intervention—pervades discussions of capitalism today. Sometimes they should be taken this way, and there are plenty of good arguments for preferring state solutions to market solutions in some cases. But this is not true of all such criticisms. Take, for instance, the complaint that capitalism alienates and dehumanizes workers. Why does capitalism do this? In part because economic institutions in capitalist societies tend to be hierarchical. Workers have little autonomy over their own work, and they simply do as they are told by the owners or managers (who ultimately do as they are told by the owners).[15] They also lack control over their working conditions, their hours, their compensation, and so on. The tendency is for defenders of capitalism to respond to this by replying (not unreasonably) that first, it’s no better to have the state boss you around than to have a private owner boss you around, and second, we all know that market economies are far more efficient than centralized, state-run economies, and everyone benefits from economic efficiency.
 
But even if these claims were true, the response misses the mark. First, worker autonomy does not require state ownership, but rather worker ownership. Second, capitalism is not the only economic system which can utilize markets. Nothing about having a system which is predominantly composed by worker-owned business suggests that prices need to be set by the government rather than by market forces, for instance.[16] Worker ownership is compatible with having private, decentralized markets of the sort that Friedman and Hayek argued so strongly in favor of.[17] Indeed, their arguments, properly understood, should predominantly be conceived of as arguments against communism (and state intervention in the economy more generally), rather than arguments for capitalism. To equate arguments against communism with arguments in favor of capitalism is to wrongly assume that there is only one dimension along which economic systems can differ.
 
As a result of overlooking the distinction between different kinds of non-state ownership, I think people who take themselves to be arguing about capitalism are very often talking past each other, using “capitalism” to mean different things altogether. Once we recognize the distinction, we might have another marker of capitalism: an economic system is capitalist partly to the extent that it is dominated by hierarchical, non-state-controlled economic institutions (as exemplified by the owner-employee relationship), and it is less capitalist to the extent that it is dominated by other kinds of economic institutions (e.g. state-run or worker-owned).
 
Now, would the United States cease to be capitalist if all business were worker-owned? I don’t know, and again, I see no non-arbitrary way of settling the question. It would continue to be a non-state, market economy, and so could bear really strong marks of capitalism. Given that it’s fairly uncommon to recognize the distinction between different sorts of private ownership (especially by people who take themselves to be proponents of capitalism), I could imagine some saying that it wouldn’t even be any less capitalist than it currently is. In the end, it’s a fight over what we want to mean by “capitalism”, and so it isn’t particularly important which way we go, so long as we are clear which way that is. But I think this final marker of capitalism I’ve proposed is useful to help distinguish it from other kinds of systems that traditionally have been considered non-(or even anti-)capitalist.
 
V. Psychological and Cultural Asides: Profit-Seeking and Consumerism
 
There is one last criticism I want to make of some common definitions and uses of “capitalism”—namely, that they pack in psychological or cultural details that should probably be kept separate. For example, both our Google and Wikipedia definitions include the caveat that the aim of economic institutions in capitalism is profit-seeking. Profit-seeking, of course, has a very strong association with capitalism. Proponents of capitalism will argue that in a capitalist system, profit-seeking is a good thing, appealing to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. Hayek argued that part of what makes capitalism so great is that it turns profit-seeking behavior into a benefit for everyone. And of course, everyone is familiar with the idea that because capitalism involves competitive markets, businesses must seek to maximize profit if they want to survive.[18]
 
So why do I object to thinking of capitalism as being—as a matter of definition—dominated by private businesses whose main aim is to seek profits? First, because I think that it is best to think of “capitalism” as a name for a particular kind of economic system, and economic systems are not described in psychological terms, but economic ones. It would be like defining what it is to be the president of the United States partly in terms of the fact that the president tends to feel very powerful—even if that is the typical effect of being president, that’s not part of what it is to be a president. To be president is to occupy a particular political-legal role, and that role ought to be described in political-legal terminology.
 
Furthermore, nothing about capitalism necessitates anything about individuals’ economic motives. Obviously, there are non-profit organizations in the United States, but even for plenty of for-profit organizations, there’s no reason to think that the motive of the owners is always to maximize profit. Even if that is the most common motive, the motives could often be entirely different—to maximize the public good (maybe even by maximizing profit), to provide jobs for people, to experience the thrill of owning a business, to experience what it’s like to have a failing business, to impress their friends, whatever. Psychological motivations are about as varied as people are, and there’s no reason to think there’s any kind of necessary connection between capitalism and individual profit-seeking. To put it more bluntly, if all of the business owners and shareholders, tomorrow, stopped caring about profit and starting caring about something else (whatever that might be), I don’t think many would think that our economic system is any less capitalist. It might be that our capitalist economic system is riddled with many more failing businesses than it used to be, but it would not be less capitalist. If nothing else, for the sake of clarity, I think it is useful to keep the psychological and economic distinct in our terminology since, in general, the more you pack into a term, the messier and more difficult to use it becomes.
 
Along similar lines, one will hear critics of capitalism using “capitalism” to refer to the prevalence of greed, materialism, and consumer culture. Greed, like being motivated by profit-seeking, is a psychological phenomenon, and so should be kept separate for similar reasons. Materialism and consumer culture, however, refer to cultural phenomena—a propensity to value material goods over other kinds of goods (emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, etc.), and to be obsessed with the acquisition of consumer goods. As was the case with profit-seeking, even if capitalism tends to lead to or reinforce these cultural phenomena, they still are cultural phenomena, and so not strictly economic phenomena. Once again, this is not to deny that there is a very strong connection between capitalism and profit-seeking or consumerism. It might even be that to survive, capitalist economies require consumerism and profit-seeking, but this doesn’t mean that these phenomena are part of what a capitalist system is. For example, democracy might require informed and motivated citizens to survive in the long term, but democracies can still fail to have informed citizens—these are just the bad, failing (and maybe short-lived) democracies. Thus, it would not make sense to include, in a definition of “democracy”, that it is composed of informed citizens. Similarly, even if capitalism encourages selfish, bad behavior, and consumerist values, and even if it requires those things to flourish, it doesn’t mean that they are partly what make an economic system a capitalist one.
 
And of course, it’s not as though capitalism is the only system which might promote these things. There’s nothing incoherent about a fully state-run economy whose aim is profit-seeking, and whose associated culture is consumerist. Likewise for an economic system which is dominated by non-hierarchical, worker-owned institutions. In short, capitalism does not have a monopoly on bad, selfish, greedy behavior, or frivolous values. And once again, for the sake of terminological clarity, I think it would be better to keep all of these add-ons separate.
 
VI. Conclusion
 
As promised, I have not given not given any definition of “capitalism”, and so I have not given any precise answer to the question “What is capitalism?” I have pointed to what I think are reasonable “markers” of a capitalist system, such that an economic system which exhibits these markers to a greater degree than systems which exhibit them less. Some markers might matter more than others, and some might be negotiable, depending on how we decide we want to use the word “capitalism”. In the end, the value of asking the question “What is capitalism?” is that we can be much clearer about what “capitalism” probably shouldn’t mean, and that hopefully, we are more sensitive to finer distinctions concerning capitalism than we were before asking the question. If that’s the case, then we can better understand what others might mean when they use the word “capitalism”, and what, more specifically, we mean when we use the word as well.

Notes

[1]Disclaimer for the reader: this article makes extensive use of what’s called the “use/mention” distinction. For those who are not familiar, the idea is that when you use the word “frog”, for example, you are talking about frogs, but when you merely mention the word “frog”, you are talking about the word “frog”. The distinction is marked by using quotation marks when merely mentioning a word. So for example: “Frog” is about frogs, and ““Frog”” is about the word “Frog”. The convention of using quotation marks obviously isn’t perfect, since quotation marks are put to other uses, but context should make clear which interpretation I intend.
[2]Other salient examples are “liberal”, “conservative”, and “neoliberal”.
[3]In my view, there are good arguments to be made within the context of philosophy of language and linguistics to defend the view that these kinds of questions are bad questions (because they falsely presuppose that there is some privileged, “correct” use of these messy terms). However, for my purposes here, it’s enough to point out that there’s very little practical value in answering the questions, even if there were a way to determine an answer.
[4]Interestingly, it lists “communism” as an antonym. The contrast between capitalism and communism is common enough, obviously, but the idea of an economic-political system having an “opposite” strikes me as being a bit puzzling. For all their differences, capitalism and communism have an awful lot in common (both are economic systems, both presuppose a state, etc.). I think what this demonstrates is just that antonyms are strange, context-dependent, and somewhat arbitrary.
[5]See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism.
[6]For discussion of this function of the government in a capitalist society, see Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962, Ch. 2).
[7]Although the mere existence of public options would not seem to imply any kind of state control of industry—or at least, it only implies a weak sort of control.
[8]Similar remarks go for private work like childcare and other sorts of care-work that are not commodified and so typically not considered “economic.”
[9]For instance, if the judicial and legislative branches could be privatized, maybe capitalism doesn’t actually presuppose a state, since a non-state entity could determine how property laws are to be understood. For relevant discussion, see Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974, Ch. 2).
[10]Probably the first criterion concerning ownership of the means of production can be subsumed under this one, but I think it is more illustrative to keep them separate.
[11]Note that while it’s sometimes reflexive to think of redistribution of wealth as entailing that wealth is redistributed from the wealthy to the poor, this certainly need not be the case.
[12]Anarchism, as a position in political philosophy does not imply chaos, or even disorder, but rather an absence of coercive power. In that regard, it has much in common with what we tend to call “libertarianism”, and indeed, it is a kind of of libertarianism (understood in the philosophical sense). For a quick and accessible introduction to anarcho-syndicalism, see Noam Chomsky’s (2009) Chomsky on Anarchism, “The Relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalism”. See also Emma Goldman’s (1910) Anarchism and Other Essays.
[13]For extensive discussion of models of worker-owned business, see Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld’s (1992) When Workers Decide and also “Alternative Models of Ownership-Report to UK Labour Party”, published in 2017, which can be found at https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Alternative-Models-of-Ownership.pdf.
[14]See, for example, Friedman’s (1962) Capitalism and Freedom and Hayek’s (1988) The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
[15]This is argued for forcefully in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ (1932), The Manifesto of The Communist Party.
[16]The economist Richard Wolff is someone who needs to be understood with the distinction between modes of private ownership in mind. He is a self-proclaimed Marxist, and a vocal critic of capitalism, but does not endorse a centralized, state-run economy, but rather non-hierarchical economic forms.
[17]Incidentally, this point suggests that it is, indeed, strange and probably incorrect to think of “communism” as being an antonym of “capitalism”.
[18]Milton Friedman also argued, famously, that businesses should only seek to maximize profits in his “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (1970).
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