Americas Middle Class Massacre *sobs*

[GreyICE]

Is government by currency the only measurements

Nope. Currency is actually more-or-less just an enabler of transactions. As long as you have something that can be exchanged that has no intrinsic value, but which people value, you have a currency. If a forum has a reputation system where users can exchange 'rep tokens' it's a form of currency. It really has very little to do with which economic system is in use.

Socialism is defined as workers owning the means of production. Capitalism is a system where private owners control the means of production, and it is used for profit. The meeting of the two is called "socialist market economy".

There's quite a few others, including feudalism, Georgism, and a few hypothetical ones, as well as some religious ones.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Systematically, I don't think profit is a necessary condition, but it tends to tap into the human nature and social conditions quite lucratively, no pun intended of course.

[TulipQulqu]

The Mesopotamians were using money 7000 years ago. We have found actual accounts that detail the goods traded. Sounds like capitalism to me. Any difference between that and today sounds like splitting hairs frankly.

If has money is all that's needed to be capitalism, then by your own definition communism has never even been attempted.

Fair question, lets go by the ACTUAL definitions.

Communism: A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.

Capitalism: 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.

The latter describes basically any country with a monetary system regardless of what it calls itself. China for example is no more ''actually communist'' than a fork is actually a teaspoon.

This is all some rather strange thinking. Gonna go from top to bottom:

I am unsure on that 7000 year figure, but there were pre-currnecy societies that were able to exist in highly structured ways without currency systems. Palace economies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_economy had centralization and commanded production by an empowered minority, but without the money-form. They even had slavery!

The claim that communism has never been attempted is maybe misplaced. Revolutionary Catalonia and the Paris Commune may well have been shooting for that ending in one step. Marx's conception of full Communism/Socialism was of a moneyless society though. There were obviously also pre-monetary societies that did primitive communism.

Capitalism is more well defined as "the system where owners of the capital engage in individual profit seeking". The world we living in has governments that own lots of capital and pursue their own profits, this is basically what everyone criticize the CCP for, but I would say Russia is similar. The USA has more elaborate means by which the government is captured by its owning class.

One can get closer to communism by more democratically distributing capital resources, with maximal communism being that capital is held entirely in the community trust without the mechanisms of currency or a state.

Finally, it is worth noting that a state is needed to really enforce currency, thus the state must predate currency.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I didn't find it very obscure in general consistency or anything. Money actually has been around for some stupid time and Communism has a lot of roots in more theory based social contract. The idea that it's never been established has to do with it being specifically designed in theory as an endgame in social order. What China and USSR were technically doing was state-sponsored socialism in order to get to that goal.