The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

There is plenty of this messiness in the US as well. Which puts the judgement solidly in "I know it when I see it" territory, leaving that definition pretty useless. This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.

( considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis. We can then start criticizing things we don't like about their system within the context of capitalism, rather than othering it and pretending we can't have similar problems )

> But equating [corruption] to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.

I'm not drawing this connection lazily in general, but rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself. I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons. But rather than stopping at creating the general concept, we get things like the DMCA that privilege large accumulators of capital over distributed individual ownership.

There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.

And I haven't even touched upon "private" entities themselves promulgating paradigms that reject the concept of private ownership (eg "trusted" computing, SaaS/platform sharecropping). Those seem solidly in the realm of capitalism trumping/abhorring free markets and freedom in general.

In a different context I can see myself arguing that these things aren't "true" capitalism (the centralized vs distributed distinction I made elsewhere), and if only the government held truer to the concept of private ownership we'd be in a better spot. But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves, despite those changes going against other people's private ownership interests. In a way it seems that corrupt legislation and precedents are themselves forms of capital that have been invested in because they facilitate rent streams, at the direct expense of our distributed societal freedom.

The general thrust of my critique is why should we put the philosophical focus on capital itself defaulting to the label of "capitalism"? Why not private property, free markets, the rule of law, personal freedom, etc? It feels like a propaganda push from large centralized capital holders to privilege themselves over those other ideals.

If you can't recognize that the Roman state had a monopoly on violence for the vast majority of its duration I can't help you. Obviously, it got weaker during its terminal decline - that's how state decline works. As soon as the monopoly of violence weakened the Empire started imploding, and indeed when it was healthy the state did enjoy it's monopoly.

The bucellarii, the private armies which were able to rival the Roman state, only became a thing in the late 300s. Rome fell only a hundred years later. For the vast majority of Roman history armies belonged to the State, and any mercenary formations were negligible - the regime you're describing was due to the Empire crumbling and is indeed what led to feudalism.

> The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.

Westphalia formalized the modern Eufopean state. But there were a great many similar states before, with a monopoly on violence, a defined political system, since ~4000BC. They just didn't bother formalizing what being a state meant.

> No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.

Technology maybe, and only in the most basic sense, and Rome is the example. In 1100 years of Roman history, not a single basic scientific discovery was made, because it was completely unprofitable. Technology advanced, yes, but soon enough it was limited by the extremely primitive scientific understanding they had, so they barely made any progress for hundreds of years.

> Incentives are surprisingly powerful.

Practical technological is incentivized in every political economy.

Incentives are surprisingly powerful.

Just because there is a lot of noise being made about anti-racism in the US doesn't mean it's the most progressive country in the world. It just means that a lot of noise is being made there.

But, agree, not relevant to the original story. Just a little.

The original story was about 'elites'. In the US, any conversation on that subject gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'elite's are, and if they are Socialist. One side thinks the 'elite's are Socialist, the other side think the 'elite's are corporate CEO's.

This thread digressed to the discussion of Socialism (not the academic definition), and I was just following along with that tangent.