That's actually just propaganda phrasing without deep insight, laying claim to a shared heritage as a claim to legitimacy while pretending that your mere opinions are theorems derived from facts.

It's no more insightful than Christians and Muslims debating if Moses was a Christian or a Muslim, because clearly all historic leaders were members of the one true faith.

> Yes, there were some abstraction layers added on with the development of capital/share markets and limited liability corporations around 1400-1500AD, but it seems to me what we call capitalism is simply the name given to the economic system we've deduced to be present wherever we find things like coinage and contracts/exchange agreements in history. Were the ancient Greeks "capitalists"?

This is a perfect example, because it's not true. The features of a modern system (of which capitalism is one) are very much a modern invention, precisely because they require that modern notion of social structure/corporate ownership.

Those "arbitrary layers" are what defines capitalism as a thing distinct from socialism or mere economics. Conflating capitalism with the "physics" and not the arbitrary layers is precisely the conflation between capitalism and economics I was calling out earlier, and seems to be rooted in capitalism having been the dominant economic model of your society -- you seem to have a hard time delineating and separating that choice from the nature of economics vis-a-vis physical constraints and their impact on all viable models.

> Because the characteristics you give for Socialism, workers owning what they produce and co-ops, are not only possible in our capitalist system, but they are present in significant number.

Our system isn't strictly capitalist.

You can look at, eg taxes to fund social projects as an example of that. The public is the ultimate owner of the nation, and retains a portion of any value created by investments of capital there, which is then used to benefit the public. That this distribution of wealth to the public instead of capitalists tends to create several dollars more wealth from the induced spending is actually a socialist benefit, not a capitalist one.

But also, you're correct that our legal system doesn't mandate capitalist economics for corporations. It's just the dominant model.

> In fact, in capitalism everyone owns the fruits of their labor.

Only the immediate fruits of their labor, that is, what they can charge for that piece of labor.

That's not what we're concerned with here. We're talking about the method by which we allocate the generated value when you scale up via corporations (or other mechanisms). That is, how we handle collective allocation and management.

Socialism is an attempt to allocate those benefits more evenly between capital and labor (or in the more radical cases, entirely to labor) in an effort to combat the social harm from "cogification" of labor, in which a corporation has many laborers perform a basic, easily replaceable task so that most of the value added by the collective labor can be extracted by capital.

> So you're saying things would be better if such agreements were restricted by law?

Such agreements are restricted by law, eg you can't select your programmer based on if they're male or female and you must pay them at least somewhat over $7/hr it takes them to create it, etc.

However, the ultimate argument between the two is this: is it better to aggregate wealth around points so that it can be coherently deployed even if these economic eddies decrease overall economic volume?

In practice, "top-down" control is a failure and capitalism in terms of efficiency of dollar to dollar spending can't compete with market-based socialism, and so (because of the physical demand for efficiency!) we see practically every major economy in the world (including the US) function as a mix of socialism and capitalism.

We would be better off if we stopped listening to greedy people and nudged it more socialist.