I'm answering several paragraphs at once, because here the point of contention really comes down to - to paraphrase - "But really, didn't we have capitalism before that?"
> They had complex regionals supply chains, trade, even infrastructure like sanitation systems. [...] Society is heterogenous and by such weird measure everyone who didn't engage in subsistence lived in hypercapitalism for thousands of years [...] Many people in the past relied on subsitence farming, but they lived alongside people that didn't and this certainly affected them and vice versa. [...] My point is that many things people attribute as properties of hypercapitalism are not really that special. If food production technologies wouldn't be so advanced and we still had to rely to 80% of people working in semi-substistence farming (SSF) would this really make our world less "hypercapitalistic" by any measure people use for this label? (
Not quite, because - as we already defined, you need three things for capitalism: (1) private ownership of the means of production (2) labor market (3) commodity market. For most of time time until back to the dawn of apes, we didn't really have a labor market. This is only something that arose out of the fatalities of the black death that ravaged Europe and killed almost a third of the population. [0] This was the beginning of the end for feudalism in much of Europe, since for the first time, people had a reason to travel for better work, since suddenly - due to to lack of people - wages were rising and landlords were competing for sharecroppers to crop their fields.
This is the new phenomenon. The mobile labor market. This is why we never had capitalism before that time. As I said; I'm willing to make an exception for the Roman manufacturies, since there you had some kind of labor market-ish. A teensy-tiny one.
But other than that, a labor market really never existed. People were born in their villages, they grew old and they died that. If you were a weaver, you wove your weaving and then sold it. There was no labor market, you owned your loom and did your own thing and starved trying to do it.
After the upheavals of the Black Death, many feudal realms introduced (or reinstated or reinforced) laws forbidding the movement of people without special permission. In Germany, England and France this only started to change after the 1750. For Russia it took over a hundred years longer to get there.
So, before that time, there really was no labor market. And without labor market, no capitalism.
> Right, but after Early Middle Ages many states had many similar things. There were many so-called "Medieval renessainces" in Europe.
I'm not sure how these would fit in here. The Medieval Renaissances were cultural and artistic in nature. Nowhere during Carolingian time can you find a Manufactury like you would have seen during the Roman times, with hundreds of workers living on or nearby the Manufactury grounds in Insulae operated by the manufactory owner or with branded corporations setting up manufacturing subsidies. No kidding, they did that. [1]
> But that's not really true. Many services you receive are not capitalistic on surface: the roads, the healthcare in most countries, education. [...] And I don't see how I can say that modern society is hypercapitalistic when not only governments tax the corporations but the whole international community creates regulation and controls these companies in a way that would benefit the states.
This is not about how powerful one single corporation or one single government is. It is about the system that they both operate in. Because as it is, both governments and corporations are participants in a game of Hypercapitalism.
> They had complex regionals supply chains, trade, even infrastructure like sanitation systems. [...] Society is heterogenous and by such weird measure everyone who didn't engage in subsistence lived in hypercapitalism for thousands of years [...] Many people in the past relied on subsitence farming, but they lived alongside people that didn't and this certainly affected them and vice versa. [...] My point is that many things people attribute as properties of hypercapitalism are not really that special. If food production technologies wouldn't be so advanced and we still had to rely to 80% of people working in semi-substistence farming (SSF) would this really make our world less "hypercapitalistic" by any measure people use for this label? (
Not quite, because - as we already defined, you need three things for capitalism: (1) private ownership of the means of production (2) labor market (3) commodity market. For most of time time until back to the dawn of apes, we didn't really have a labor market. This is only something that arose out of the fatalities of the black death that ravaged Europe and killed almost a third of the population. [0] This was the beginning of the end for feudalism in much of Europe, since for the first time, people had a reason to travel for better work, since suddenly - due to to lack of people - wages were rising and landlords were competing for sharecroppers to crop their fields.
This is the new phenomenon. The mobile labor market. This is why we never had capitalism before that time. As I said; I'm willing to make an exception for the Roman manufacturies, since there you had some kind of labor market-ish. A teensy-tiny one.
But other than that, a labor market really never existed. People were born in their villages, they grew old and they died that. If you were a weaver, you wove your weaving and then sold it. There was no labor market, you owned your loom and did your own thing and starved trying to do it.
After the upheavals of the Black Death, many feudal realms introduced (or reinstated or reinforced) laws forbidding the movement of people without special permission. In Germany, England and France this only started to change after the 1750. For Russia it took over a hundred years longer to get there.
So, before that time, there really was no labor market. And without labor market, no capitalism.
> Right, but after Early Middle Ages many states had many similar things. There were many so-called "Medieval renessainces" in Europe.
I'm not sure how these would fit in here. The Medieval Renaissances were cultural and artistic in nature. Nowhere during Carolingian time can you find a Manufactury like you would have seen during the Roman times, with hundreds of workers living on or nearby the Manufactury grounds in Insulae operated by the manufactory owner or with branded corporations setting up manufacturing subsidies. No kidding, they did that. [1]
> But that's not really true. Many services you receive are not capitalistic on surface: the roads, the healthcare in most countries, education. [...] And I don't see how I can say that modern society is hypercapitalistic when not only governments tax the corporations but the whole international community creates regulation and controls these companies in a way that would benefit the states.
This is not about how powerful one single corporation or one single government is. It is about the system that they both operate in. Because as it is, both governments and corporations are participants in a game of Hypercapitalism.
[0] https://www.euroformhealthcare.biz/bubonic-plague/economic-e...
[1] https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/italian-terra-sigillata-a-...