The Socialism and Capitalism dichotomy has nothing to do with markets or planners. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.
Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.
The point I'm making is that the mechanisms by which an economy chooses what to produce are distinct by the mechanisms which determine who is in control of those choices are distinct from who the proceeds from the production accrues to.
> Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.
That's Marx's explanation, all right.
What free markets are, is when people freely decide to make transactions with each other, without using force or fraud.
The simplest case is you have an apple tree, I have an orange tree. You have too many apples, and no oranges. I have the reverse problem. We trade. We are both better off. I exploit you for apples, you exploit me for oranges.
But we don't "have" trees. Owning a tree is dependent on a highly abstract concept of ownership, enforced by an organized state that monopolizes the use of force.
Saying a transaction is without force or fraud is only begging the question. If it is legal, and someone thinks it is illegitimate, then it logically involves both fraud and force from their perspective. It was fraud to write the rules down, and it is force to use guns to make people comply.
It's too easy to defend "free markets" while ignoring that the usual description is circular.
'"He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No Body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they begin to be his? When he digested? Or when he eat? Or when he boiled? Or when he brought them home? Or when he pickt them up?"
Locke answered these questions by selecting the last of these options. The acorns became the private property of the owner when he picked them up, for it was in the gathering that labor was first expended. "That labour put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right."'
I'm not endorsing or dismissing this, but notice how it conflicts with ownership of the tree.
Free markets are a game with rules set by the government. "Without using force or fraud" just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government. It's a very deceptive way to describe rule-following. It implies a very idealistic, unrealistic vision of what those rules are and how they are made.
The people who benefit most from the rules control the system, making sure rules don't change.
The benefit they receive from the rules is to be in a parasitic, extractive, predatory relationship to most of humanity.
Why not use "force or fraud" to liberate yourself from predatory relations?
> just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government
You can make up your own definitions of things as you like. It's a common rhetorical device to divert a conversation into a swamp. Me, I'll stick to commonly understood meanings.
You're still comingling the concepts of capitalism and markets. I actually 100% agree with your entire post (as a description, anyway, not as an ideal or with respect to the conceptual foundations of property rights), but is in no way a refutation of what I said or what Marx said. It's somewhat tangential entirely, really.
EDIT: Also, I wouldn't use the word "exploit" in such a simple descriptor of commerce.
the thing is, there is no way for the workers to own the means of production, unless its a set of tools or stuff like that. But with a factory, you only have 2 options: owned by capitalists, who's goal is maximizing gain, and owned by the state, who's goal is in theory common wealth, in reality it depends on the people actually making decisions. And those people can be corrupt, or ideological lunatics, or just unmotivated clerks waiting to hit the clock at 5PM.
Why is there no way for workers to own the means of production? Do many of us software people not own shares in the companies we work for? All that needs happen is that all shares are owned by the employees of the company and, voila, the workers own the means of production. Obviously this is quite a simple and un-ideal implementation of said concept, but the practicalities of worker owned enterprises are not some kind of far fetched impossibility.
Because owning something means you have the right to trade it and sell it. Most workers, if they came into ownership of such shares, would quickly sell them to a few people who would build up many such shares: Capitalists.
You can't declare who will "own" what in the long term. The people who own it decide whether they will continue to own it - not you. They will decide not to.
If you say the workers can't sell the shares of their workplace, then they don't really own those shares. In fact, it's more like the shares own them. They are forced to continue "owning" part of their workplace, which someone decided should be their workplace. Variations of this are how authoritarian communism work.
(This is ignoring lots of other such issues with worker ownership, e.g. it becomes very complicated or impossible to bring new people on even if desperately needed since existing workers/owners don't want to dilute their shares. Also how can a new worker join if he cannot afford the shares to do so?)
Centrally planned capitalism doesn't exist. Private ownership, while technically separate from market vs command, definitely has an influence on it. Even market socialism has central planning elements (e.g. initial public investment).
> Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.
how can there be capitalism when central planners tell the owners of the capital what to do with their capital? that sounds like authoritarianism to me (which is basically why all communist countries must be authoritarian, since without it, the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic).
Which is almost entirely my point. There's at least three concepts that are quite distinct components of an economic system that people commingle when they talk about these broad categories like capitalism and socialism in popular discourse.
This naive conflation of commerce with capitalism is certainly one manifestation of this conceptual confusion.
Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.
The point I'm making is that the mechanisms by which an economy chooses what to produce are distinct by the mechanisms which determine who is in control of those choices are distinct from who the proceeds from the production accrues to.