Is capitalism a contingent social invention, imposed upon human societies through deliberate policy and institutional design? Or is it, more fundamentally, the systemic outcome of a particular kind of exchange dynamic — markets — that, once generalized, inevitably spiral into the complex global system we recognize today?
This is a critically important question for if we are going to attempt, as activists, to resolve the dire environmental and social problems we link to economic behavior in general, we must understand the absolute root of that behavior. In my personal work, as expressed in my book, The New Human Rights Movement and in the ongoing community development project called Integral Collective, it has been routinely expressed that what we call capitalism is inexplicably linked to the endogenous dynamics of market trade.
The pushback I have received has been relatively surprising, given what I feel is the obvious nature of this causal observation. That not only includes proponents of market capitalism as we see in the libertarian schools of “free market” thought, which codify very rigid definitions, but also in the progressive community that seeks to override capitalism.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peterjoseph.substack.com/p/capitalism-as-the-emergent-attractor