Capitalism is about trade and industry being done by private owners, instead of by the state. It's a decentralized economic system that acknowledges a state's inability to fully plan the economy due to imperfect information.

It's not anchored in labor exploitation.

> Capitalism is about trade and industry being done by private owners, instead of by the state. It's a decentralized economic system that acknowledges a state's inability to fully plan the economy due to imperfect information.

> The basic concept of capitalism is that there are capital owners, and they hire workers who use that capital to generate value. The capital owners receive all of that value and then pay the workers for their time.

These are both true.

This is incorrect. You can have state capitalism as well as non-state non-capitalism (worker-owned cooperatives are a common example of private non-capitalism).

As the person you're responding to said, capitalism is the philosophy that concentration of capital should be rewarded. It's that simple.

Whether the state or private magnates concentrate the capital and get rewarded for it is irrelevant.

State capitalism exists.

capitalism cannot differentiate between efficiency and exploitation

That's only the 'basic concept of capitalism' at a reductionist Fischer-Price level-of-understanding by its detractors. That's just as impoverished a model of the real world, in its own way, as simple microeconomics analyses of 'perfect competition'.

> a reductionist Fischer-Price level-of-understanding

By the way I got this from Richard Wolff. Here is his education history:

B.A. History magna cum laude Harvard 1963

M.A. Economics Stanford 1964

M.A. Economics Yale 1966

M.A. History Yale 1967

Ph.D. Economics Yale 1969

Ideology can make even the highly-credentialed pretty dumb.

But did Mr. Wolff really say – "The basic concept of capitalism is that there are capital owners, and they hire workers who use that capital to generate value. The capital owners receive all of that value and then pay the workers for their time." – ? Where?

I disagree. The description I used is helpful in distinguishing capitalism from previous modes of production like feudalism or alternatives like communism. I explicitly said the description is not comprehensive, but it is one aspect of capitalism.