Mayflower pilgrims had a system in which all goods were owned by the community. All produce was in a common store, from which each individual would receive equal ration regardless of how much he had contributed. The colony was unable to produce enough food until individuals traded with Indians.

Pretty much.

These are problems with capitalism as we currently experience it, what AnCaps might call crony capitalism. AnarchoCapitalism would not have a Monsanto or intellectual property.

[deleted]

The management of scarcity is not simply a numbers game, producing enough X to satisfy need Y. It is also a problem of economics, including the information transmission and distribution problems that go with it. Producers need a means for aggregating information about their market. They also need an incentive structure to motivate them to produce in the first place. That's why ancaps advocate the existence of individual private property and the price system to handle these problems of distribution that you gloss over.

Monsanto is also a pretty terrible example to use here, since it is a product of the state. Without their state protectionism, their anti-reproducing seeds would lose market share to competitors who offer self-reproducing seeds. Offering a poor product to consumers is not a successful business model, unless you can hijack the state to prevent competition.

Monsanto injects genes that stop their crops from reproducing so they buyers have to keep paying for more)

And people know they're going to have to buy more the next season instead of harvesting seed. Why do you think they do that? Did Monsanto force them to, or is it because it's actually easier and cheaper to buy the modified crop year after year? You're also assuming that people in local areas are doing this. If you're subsistence farming, the last thing you're going to do is buy that shit. It only works in massive monoculture scenarios. Sadly, most of farming is now a massive monoculture scenario because most people don't want to grow their own. I suspect this will change in the future.

Hahaha. Lots of conclusory unproven suppositions. "Class" isn't even defined at the beginning of the novel.

All those other things exist in our economy and the rate at which they exist is increasing each day.

It seems your definition of 'capitalism' is simply "the economic system which exists today", which is a pretty useless definition.

Trading is a goddamn symbiotic relationship. How is it exclusively anti-socialist?

The point of the article isn't about trade. It's about individual ownership vs. collective ownership. Under collective ownership, the settlers had too little food. Once they established individual ownership, they produced in excess, and were able to trade those excesses with the Indians.

Now if I'm not mistaken, individual ownership is rather anti-socialist, is it not?

If the settlers invaded the indian farms and forced them to pay taxes, that'd be considered capitalism.

No. This would just be statism. Capitalism got nothing to do with people paying taxes or forcing anyone to do anything, quite the contrary.

All those other things exist in our economy and the rate at which they exist is increasing each day.

We're not in a real capitalist society. The system that exist today would be a form of socialism (and we're leaning more and more toward this) or crony-capitalism.

Capitalism is forcing your workers to work in private property which you own.

This wouldn't be considered capitalism but slavery. In capitalism, you don't force the worker to work for you, you propose them a wage or something in exchange for their time. If they value the wage more than the time they giving in exchange they accept to work for you, if they don't, they refuse. The relationship is mutually beneficial, that's pretty much what capitalism is all about.

So why do you respond to ~MaxBoivin's assertion that the pilgrims abandoned the socialist lifestyle by talking about this artificial scarcity capitalism? Why not talk about free market capitalism instead?