Edit: This question attracted way more interest than I hoped for! I will need some time to go through the comments in the next days, thanks for your efforts everyone. One thing I could grasp from the answers already - it seems to be complicated. There is no one fits all answer.

Under capitalism, it seems companies always need to grow bigger. Why can’t they just say, okay, we have 100 employees and produce a nice product for a specific market and that’s fine?

Or is this only a US megacorp thing where they need to grow to satisfy their shareholders?

Let’s ignore that most of the times the small companies get bought by the large ones.

  • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    101·
    2 days ago

    If we are going by the original definition of the word, it is. The farmer here is growing produce to sell it in exchange for money; they are not sharing it with their community, bartering with it, growing it to eat themselves, or giving it to their liege lord.

    • einkorn@feddit.org
      141·
      2 days ago

      I’m not sure why people always insist if money is involved that it’s capitalism. Money is an abstract form of trade. No one is suggesting that trade will cease to exists in a world without capitalism.

        • einkorn@feddit.org
          71·
          2 days ago

          Well, if you assume the farmer excludes others from using the means of production i.e. the fields, then yes you can argue that they are acting as capitalist. But you have to make the distinction between private and personal ownership: Private ownership of the land and personal ownership of the produce. The former is what communists reject. The latter is fine in their books.

          • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            7·
            2 days ago

            Well, I’d say that the definition of capitalism changes depending on if you’re talking about capitalism as opposed to feudalism (original/historical definition) vs capitalism as opposed to communism (modern definition).

            • einkorn@feddit.org
              2·
              1 day ago

              I.e. the TV channel Arte, which is a cooperation of French and German state media has a multipart documentary called Work, Salary, Profit that touches on a lot of fundamentals.

              Of course there is always the option just to straight up read the original works by Marx, Smith and so on, but they are not for the feint of heart.