this and this.
Also, one can talk about socialism/communism from the perspective of surplus value like Richard Wolff does. In socialism the production, appropriation, and distribution of goods would all be accomplished by the same people rather than different classes. In capitalism the workers produce but the capitalists appropriate. And distribution usually takes place by mercantile firms who specialize in selling products rather than producing them.
Wow, I didn't think I would actually need to post in this thread but apparently there are quite a few anons confused on what capitalism is.
Capital is the self-expansion of value or "value in motion". It's starting with a thing (usually money) and doing something with that thing to end up with more afterwards. This takes basically three forms:
Finance Capital
M -> 'M
Money-lending capitalists provide loans to people or entities with interest and eventually end up with more money than they started off with due to interest payments. Finance capital has been around for millenia, it's older than money and perhaps as old as civilization itself. In fact the first thousand years or so of civilizations throughout the ancient Near East including Egypt and Mesopotamia established a robust tradition of regularly canceling the consumer debts to avoid situations where people become too indebted to creditors that they fell into debt peonage and were unable to serve in armies or perform corvee labor for states. It's where the concept of the Jubilee Year in the Bible comes from. Finance capital is old; it is not the form of capital that defines the economic system of capitalism.
Merchant Capital
M -> C -> M'
A merchant capitalist exchanges money for some sort of commodity and then sells that commodity back to someone else to end up with more money than they started with. Think Wal-Mart. Perhaps not quite as old as money lenders, merchant capitalists have been around for a really long time as well. They existed in the midst of previous economic systems and they too are not what define the economic system of capitalism.
Industrial Capital
M -> materials, tools, land, and worker wages -> C -> M'
Industrial capitalists exchange money for the "means of production"–the essential resources, tools, and space within which to produce something–and also use that money to pay workers a wage. The workers then produce a commodity for the industrial capitalist, and they sell this commodity to someone else to finally end up with more money than they started with. It is this fundamental arrangement of production that differentiates capitalism from the economic systems that came before it. Rather than owning people and forcing them to work as in slavery while being obliged to feed and take care of them, or bonding people to the land and forcing them to work on the lord's land for some % of the year while they feed themselves off communal land for another % of the year, industrial capitalists compel people to work by paying them a wage.
Finally, capitalism is not about the existence or absence of markets. Markets have existed for thousands of years before capitalism; even Plato and Aristotle wrote critically about the markets of their time. The system we know as capitalism which arose out of the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries distinguishes itself from past systems by the manner in which people relate to production.
With all that said, the basic critique of capitalism is that the industrial capitalist arrangement is fundamentally exploitative. Workers are not paid the full value of their labor as long as the industrial capitalist ends up with more money than they started with. Dealing with this and the various other contradictions of capitalism that stem from it are where the historic movements for socialism and communism come from. These words have all meant very different things to a variety of different people at different times. The solution to capitalism's problems must be to provide all the workers access to the means of production so that they can decide for themselves how much labor value to return to themselves and cut out the capitalist middleman. Socialisms and communisms reference ways to go about achieving that. Marx for instance did not make any distinction between socialism and communism, and said that communism was the "movement to change the present state of things". Lenin, on the other hand, tried to define communism is an advanced state of global socialism where states, whose major function in capitalism was to defend the concept of private property that empowers the industrial capitalist arrangement, have withered away and we are left with a moneyless and classless society.
Are you tellin me I wrote all that crap for nothin?
I appreciate you user. have a cute anime girl for your efforts
damn she cute