> Political economy is the predecessor to economics, and is (in some places) still alive today as modern/radical political economy.
I know that. What I still don't know, is whether you've meant Adam-Smith-proto-economics or LTV-inspired ideology. Because those things aren't interchangeable.
Not to mention why two schools of thought which are on their own obsolete at this point matter here.
> "Human capital" is excluded precisely because it is "living labour" as opposed to "dead labour" (machinery etc.) and can therefore be exploited to extract more value than what was paid. This is the same principle with both slavery and wage labour - living labour.
What about live stock? What about seed stock? What about IP? What about machinery that was bought under market price?
The only reason I can see why this separation might be important is if we remember that labour and employment affects aggregate demand through wages. Obviously that doesn't apply to slave labour.
> Besides this, twe're talking beside the point...
Glad you agree.
But if we redefine "capitalism" as "historic period" now, we might as well define it as a form of music and compare to Frank Zappa songs...
I mean, if we take the features of society which were dominant the most to define the historic period, we might as well call ourselves primitive humans, since out of our ca. 2 billion years of history, that was the most dominant features of our society.
All of this partitioning is arbitrary and has nothing to do with economics. It is more about setting a political narrative. But that isn't tethered to reality and we might as well be using astrology.