Capitalism in a truthful word: Exploitation.
The long form definition is full of complexities purposely installed to hide the fact the short version sounds so ugly, because few would agree to engage in an economic system that was called what it truly is, exploitism.
Through decades of red baiting and condemnation of any alternative system that doesn’t drive monetary resources to the few at the expense of the many we’ve arrived at a state of indoctrination where people cannot see past the wall of propaganda that has been projected in Plato’s cave. Minds are bombarded with falsehoods about the virtues of money and capitalism, at all times they tempt people to go with what pays and sell out to the bottom line.
What capitalism fundamentally says about labor is that it doesn’t mind if the people have no will to do a job, simply put downward economic pressure on them for a long enough amount of time and wait for them to be fighting over the exploitative jobs being offered.
Capitalism is a cruel top down system where the one who holds the money holds all the power. It doesn’t so much matter how an employer made the money, but if they have it then you better do what they say if you want to pay rent this month.
Americans wonder why so many are just living paycheck to paycheck, but if you think about it, the more menial and harmful the jobs become personally and to the planet the more you have to keep people poor so they will reluctantly do those jobs. No one wants to spend their life working in a CVS or Wal-Mart. That is zero people’s ambition in life, yet countless do because they are more or less coerced into it since the consequences are having to live out on the street.
Thus a longer form definition while still remaining concise would be to say that capitalism is a competitive bargaining system where one tries to trick others into doing/giving more for less money or conversely from the sellers perspective to trick someone into paying more and receiving less. Fooling people is admired, shysterism promoted and encouraged, undercutting your opponent lauded.
Capitalism is a system based on gaining leverage over someone and then exploiting that leverage. Much like a game of chess you are trying to corner your opponents options to the point there are no options left except for the options you allow. This is how business is done in capitalism.
It should be noted that chattel slavery was always a product of capitalism and could be no other way. A currency of some form being paid so that another person can be a servant and thus profit off their labor, that is the root of the capitalist system. The basis of it is quid pro quo, and even if we didn’t call capitalism by its current moniker it existed in some form during the entire run of western civilization.
In capitalism the people build the buildings, grow the food, stock the shelves, and are then charged to use all the things they collectively produce and use while elites take all the profits. Elites create warfare and climate destruction, and plan a next yacht to buy while the indebted indentured servitude class of everyone else struggles with the basics, even when the basics are in ample supply, the money supply will be artificially be kept low among the plebs to effectively take away any power the people might have, in a system where people are intentionally made reliant on money to create a barrier to entry for having a voice.
Pro-business propaganda sells a meritocracy while in reality offering a very strict class system in an oligarchy. All exploitation to natural systems are done in today’s world through capitalism. The banks socially engineer society when they decide what gets a loan and what doesn’t. What gets a loan gets done, what is denied is repressed.
In the end capitalism is simply a tool for controlling the lower classes, it’s a shell game used for maximum confusion that pits people against one another other in a high stakes game that divides the lower classes against themselves where they learn to blame the players instead of focusing on ending the game.
