(To be clear, you’re not wrong that it’s always distinguished from earlier systems by people who know the debate)
It seems like that description shows just how vague the term is. It starts with private ownership of the means of production, but then pivots into supply/demand and minimal government intervention as a driver, and lists three additional emphases on top of that.
You can focus on profit, but nobles were all about that too - they needed to fund all the expensive stuff for warfare and subjugation, and sometimes they did go broke and have to marry a rich commoner. Europeans moved into Canada for fur pelts, and across Africa and into the Caribbean for spices. Other agrarian civilisations had their own tradable resource dramas.
The original Marx definition is at least coherent, but runs into the problem that it’s not politically useful anymore. Even among people who really hate the rich, there’s a general reluctance to have no private property.
Side note: The landed gentry saw it’s last blow into irrelevance in continental Europe around WWI, but in America the untitled rich had long dominated - think of Carnegie or Rockefeller - and Britain had it’s own system where the very rich and powerful tended to join the aristocracy.
(To be clear, you’re not wrong that it’s always distinguished from earlier systems by people who know the debate)
It seems like that description shows just how vague the term is. It starts with private ownership of the means of production, but then pivots into supply/demand and minimal government intervention as a driver, and lists three additional emphases on top of that.
You can focus on profit, but nobles were all about that too - they needed to fund all the expensive stuff for warfare and subjugation, and sometimes they did go broke and have to marry a rich commoner. Europeans moved into Canada for fur pelts, and across Africa and into the Caribbean for spices. Other agrarian civilisations had their own tradable resource dramas.
The original Marx definition is at least coherent, but runs into the problem that it’s not politically useful anymore. Even among people who really hate the rich, there’s a general reluctance to have no private property.
Side note: The landed gentry saw it’s last blow into irrelevance in continental Europe around WWI, but in America the untitled rich had long dominated - think of Carnegie or Rockefeller - and Britain had it’s own system where the very rich and powerful tended to join the aristocracy.