It's common to define "capitalism" as 'whatever the US happens to be doing right now", but you should know better. A lot of elements of capitalism were present in Assyrian times; on the other hand, basic elements of capitalism like the corporation and the stock market are far more recent. US Capitalism worked differently in the 1820s, the 1870s, the 1950s, and the 2020s. Capitalism is not the same in the US, in France, in India, in Brazil, etc.Torco wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2026 2:11 pmsoo... low corporate profits are a sign of capitalism, the system where the operating principle is maximizing corporate profits?zompist wrote: ↑Wed Mar 18, 2026 4:39 am I think left vs right explains almost none of the current situation. There are some tankies who think that China and even Russia are still communist. Well, no, they're not, they're capitalist, just with a strong authoritarian state. Arguably the Chinese are "the most prominent capitalists in the world"; it's one of the few places in the world where capitalism works-- e.g., by having so much capitalist competition that corporate profits are low. (See my review of Breakneck.) But I suppose it'll be a generation before the world realizes it.
There may be better pictures available, but here's a chart of US corporate profits (red, right-hand scale) over a 70-year period:
There are two entirely different economic systems shown in this chart. One, 1946–1980, is liberal capitalism; note the high and stable wage portion of the economy, and the lower and stable corporate profit level. Two, 1980–2016, is plutocracy; note the steady decline in the wage level and the steadily increasing profit level.
(I can't find comparable data for the last 10 years, but profits are up.)
Capitalism doesn't mean "high and always rising corporate profits" as it apparently says in the Comintern manual; if it did, the manual would be entirely unable to explain the liberal period, or for that matter mature industries like food distribution, which is still very low-profit.
High profits mean that businesses are not under pressure to increase wages, and that sectors are increasingly controlled by monopolies or cartels. Capitalists always hate high wages— Adam Smith pointed this out two centuries ago, and had to spend a large part of his book explaining that no, bad years (what we would call recessions) are bad. They are not however always able to prevent wages from rising, and the smarter ones among them (including, famously, Henry Ford) understood that high wages meant a larger and more profitable economy.
If Trump gets his way we'll enter a third type of economy, crony capitalism. If under plutocracy the CEOs (re)took power, under crony capitalism the president and his coterie subjugate the CEOs to themselves. This has mostly been seen in the Third World, and is disastrous for both the people and non-corrupt businesses, but it's great for that coterie.
Sure, and all these numbers are higher in Europe. For instance, government spending / GDP is 58% in France; cf. 38% in the US, 27% in Chile. The same source (the IMF) has 33% for China.a quarter of the GDP, half of market cap, a bit under a third of corporate profits and something like a tenth of employment is directly state-owned companies. sure, you can call that state capitalism if you want, but the same can be said about the soviet union. also, there's a lot of coops. sure, there's a big private sector as well, but hey.
Sure, and Dan Wang's book explains what they are good at— building stuff— and what they are bad at— anything social or health-related. The CPC spectacularly mismanaged Covid and population policy, and its increasing authoritarianism doesn't benefit anyone but Xi.the CPC says "yo guys we're gonna develop renewables" and the chinese economy, in fact, develops renewables. they CPC says "yo, its time for trains" and, in fact, the chinese build trains.
But Wang is also worth reading for what happened in Shenzhen, where the government's hand amounted to piling electronics makers together. The original impetus was, IIRC, helping Apple build iPhones, but there was a free market in electronic parts, all suppliers were in walking distance, and the area learned to make more and more iPhone components, which turned out to be excellent training for making electronics in general, such as drones. The Party wasn't there saying "Make part X329 more slender and instead of using Y4359 tell the guys who make Z4503 to fit W4304 instead." Also note the "catfish principle": allow a more versatile foreign company in with few restrictions in order to spur local firms to do better.
There's a lot to learn from China, but one of those things is not "let policy be determined by old men reading Mao and Marx with no say by the actual workers.". It's a lot more explanatory to think of China's leaders as being engineers (most of them are literally trained that way), with all the good and bad parts of the engineering mindset.
