A lot of people don't know the difference between capitalism and ... having markets and shopping and little coops and companies in non-super-essential economic sectors that operate independently.
Markets existed before capitalism and will exist after.
Of course in the US there are people who think that ... the postal service is communism. Or that any government service is communism.
And of course communism is the worst most evil thing in the universe.
To be honest I don't really know what I think about communism I've grown up soaking in absurd definitions and extreme positions. So communism is the postal service and communism is evil... this leads us to the absurd conclusion that mail carriers are the servants of Satan.
Capitalism is similarly muddled. For the longest time I though capitalism was "when you go shopping at a store" --and so the people who hated capitalism were confusing to me. What's wrong with going to Hot Topic and getting a cute black velvet choker?
You know you are dealing with a deep and pernicious ideological divide when any conversation has to start with new definitions for all the fundamental words in the discussion.
Despite the best efforts of American culture I managed to learn what capitalism was, both in theory and in practice--
In capitalism individuals can own, buy, sell and rent capital. But what is capital? Is my laptop capital? I use it to make money. Everyone will agree a big factory is capital. But what about intellectual property, like a logo, or ecological diversity in a region?
There are issues of scale and scope and they aren't exactly trivial.
Owning something, and having that ownership respected is a form of power. This could mean owning a media franchise, software, a segment of the airwaves, a slur, land, the artistic output of another person, a laptop, a factory.
I'm trying to suggest that some of this is a lot more arbitrary than we realize.
@futurebird one useful distinction I've heard is between private property and personal property. The two things are often conflated in a deeply ideologically capitalist society. But when you think about it, it is kind of weird that nearly everything that can be commoditized is ultimately owned by individuals, perpetually, to the exclusion of EVERYONE else.
