Economically, the private economy is dominant, with little or no government intervention. Politically, the bourgeois party is in power, or the capitalist democratic political system is implemented.
Highly developed productive forces and prosperous societies, such as Western Europe and the United States, began to develop in the18th century. On the other hand, countries with low productivity and poor society, such as Latin American countries, encourage free market economy and minimize government intervention in the economy.
Commodity production has developed to a very high stage, becoming a universal and dominant social production form, and labor has become a commodity.
Capitalists possess the means of production and exploit the working class by hiring labor. The purpose of production is to create profits (in Marx's words: the purpose of production is to seize the surplus value created by workers).
Characterized by large-scale production using machines, the contradiction between production socialization and capitalist private ownership constitutes the basic contradiction of capitalist society and runs through the whole development process of capitalism. It is embodied in the contradiction between the organized production of individual enterprises in the economy and the anarchy of the whole society, and the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in politics. The development of capitalism has gone through two stages-free competition capitalism and monopoly capitalism.
In line with the ruling form of capitalist relations of production, various superstructures before capitalism were replaced by bourgeois superstructures, resulting in bourgeois state power, legal system and ideological system, and forming a social system including capitalist mode of production and corresponding superstructures.
Marx believes that capitalism is a social system based on capitalists' possession of means of production and exploitation of wage labor.
One of the Signs of Capitalism: Economic Freedom Index
The controversial index of economic freedom is sometimes used in economic research. One of the two most famous indexes is published by The Wall Street Journal and the American Heritage Foundation, and the other is published by the Fraser Institute in Canada. Both indices try to measure the economic freedom of each country, mainly focusing on laws and regulations, the degree of government intervention, private property rights and trade freedom. The definition of economic freedom index "economic freedom" is "people are not forced or constrained by the government in the production, sale and consumption of products and services" (this is also called laissez-faire).
They use the data of some independent institutions, such as the United Nations, to calculate the scores of each country in different projects, such as government size, tax rate, property rights security, degree of free trade and degree of market control. Many published materials have also been used by other independent think tanks to study the relationship between capitalism and poverty. Fraser Institute argues that the more thoroughly capitalist countries have higher national income, the poorest 10% population also has higher income, higher life expectancy, higher literacy rate, lower infant mortality rate, more opportunities to use water resources and less corruption. The poorest 10% population, the proportion of total income in capitalist countries and non-capitalist countries is the same. Some people emphasize the importance of the credit system in capitalism, especially the role of micro-credit.
Reasons for the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: the system formulated by capitalists is mainly to safeguard their own interests; Socialism is ruled by the proletariat, and the system formulated by the proletariat mainly represents its interests; The interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are obviously opposed, but capitalism and socialism are not. It's about how the executor does it. Capital is society, and society is capital. There is only one ultimate goal.