Sorts of Capitalism

[The Cheshire Cat]

How many sorts or kinds of capitalism are there? And is liberalism one of them? At first I thought that capitalism was just capitalism, where there is a 'free' market and where corporations 'secretly' rule the country. But apparently there are more kinds of capitalism?

[Prinskaj]

There are 28.. Not really.
Capitalism takes many form, but these are merely shifts in the power structures, i.e. The role of the state vs. the market.
But capitalism will always contain the same fundamental traits, these being the commodity production, exploitation of labour and many others.

[Questionable]

Capitalism is the dominance of exchange-values over society. It can take on different forms depending on many factors such as the intensity of the class struggle, but that basic fact will still remain.

[The Cheshire Cat]

Do these different forms clash sometimes? Or do capitalists just apply whatever form they find the easiest, and not frome some kind of special theory?

[Luís Henrique]

How many sorts or kinds of capitalism are there? And is liberalism one of them? At first I thought that capitalism was just capitalism, where there is a 'free' market and where corporations 'secretly' rule the country. But apparently there are more kinds of capitalism?

Capitalism is a mode of production; things like liberalism, social-democracy, fascism, libertarianism, conservatism, are political lines. An economy does not cease to be capitalist because it changes from a liberal government to a social-democratic one.

Since there are about 200 different economies in the world, all of them capitalist, each with their own different rules and customs (not to talk about how those economies were in the past), it follows that there are many different "kinds of capitalism", with varied degrees of State intervention in the economy, market regulation, union rights, and wealth. Those are differences in degree, not in kind; and any kind of capitalism is a mode of production where competing capitalists hire the labour power of workers in order to produce things and make a profit out of it.

We usually distinguish two most important historical stages of capitalism, being "concurrential capitalism" and "monopolist capitalism"; they differ in the degree in which monopolisation of markets allow capitalists to actively play "against" the market and make superprofits of it (in a concurrential economy it is not very probable that a private company can dump its competitors by underpricing its products until destroying them). But there are no really truly concurrential capitalist economies any more.

Luís Henrique

[The Cheshire Cat]

Thanks, I failed to understand that but I think it is clearer now.

[Halleluhwah]

From what I understand, you could probably look at simple cooperation and manufacture, industrial capitalism, finance capitalism, and state capitalism as different forms of capitalism or stages in its development, keeping in mind that "epochs in the history of society are no more separated from each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs."