Sorry, this is a bit long.

Right, Chris, we are allies in the class struggle to end capitalism because capitalism will never do right to the people and the planet! Capitalism is incapable of that because of its major and intentional design flaw.
To understand capitalism, as Carl Sagan said, “We must know the past in order to understand the present.” I have learned this is necessary for understanding the capitalist economy as well as what capitalism is. So, let’s first go back to when capitalism began.

I first want to say that money is a much older innovation than any city or nation state. By the time those came about monetary authority had begun to be abused. Previously it was simply a free exchange medium facilitating trade, basically representing labor hours. As civilization emerged gold and other precious metals began to be used. This is commodity money which does not make good money because the commodities are always privately controlled. As noted, the Greeks recognized the problem and changed it. The money they issued was bronze that had been dipped in vinegar when hot to make it worthless as a commodity. Thus, Aristotle’s quote, “Money exists not by nature but by law.” This practice created a prosperous economy for 350 years. The Roman Republic copied the system allowing them 450 years of prosperity until Julius Caesar began pursuing empire and changed the money to the oligarch’s gold. Greek slaves of that time were not so mistreated, they were paid, they got time off weekly so basically what we would call employees today unless you were serving time for a crime as a slave. If you did work at someone else’s behest, you were considered a slave. Free men worked at their own behest. 3000 years later Jesus reportedly chased the money-changer priests out of the temple and was executed for it. Because they issued money as debt, they had to declare a jubilee every so often because their economy would seize up with everyone so in debt, they couldn’t get what they needed to produce. This practice allowed the priest/kings to continue their usurious scam.

The middle-ages are rich with some monetary history as well. Many believe it was an awful time, but the 12th century was a time of great prosperity, the ‘high middle-ages’, which scholars regard as the real renaissance. There was work for all, the workday was 6 hours, with favorable working conditions and abundant time for family, community, and personal pursuits. They celebrated some 90–170 holidays per year. Average daily calorie intake was 3500–4000 and people grew tall. During this time the first wave of European universities were founded and there were significant advances in science, technology, education, literature, music, arts, craftsmanship and more. In the agricultural sector small holdings exploded and were twice as productive as Seigniorial holdings. Europe became a world of small producers with the family unit as its fundamental engine. The population of Europe doubled. There was a flourishing commercial expansion as well and providing the products people needed, the quality of life was higher than Europe today. The growth of industry brought growth to cities which had begun to abandon their role as military and administrative headquarters as they filled with the life of commerce and industry. It was also a time when women enjoyed a high level of autonomy, even holding some positions of authority. This was also the period when all the great cathedrals were built by the people without help from the state or sovereign. Villages were thinking of the future when they built cathedrals that could seat 2–3 times the population of the village. They built them to attract pilgrimages which would benefit their village economy, it is still working today.

Enter the capitalists. While there was a local currency the trade between nations was done with gold. The sovereign rulers had incurred crushing war debts with the wealthy goldsmith/money-changers, the capitalists, those with the capital, who demanded and got control of the monetary systems of the European nations and immediately ended the local demurrage monetary systems plunging all of Europe into a deep depression. The population began to shrink, and people were forced to live in such squalor it created the conditions for the Black Death, a plague that killed half the population of Europe.

In the 15th century the spawn of the money-changers joined together in Genoa to fund expeditions seeking new places to plunder. Later, they moved their operation to Antwerp forming the bourse of Antwerp, the world’s first commodity exchange in 1531. When the Bank of Amsterdam was established in 1609 by the city’s municipal authorities the capitalists’ moved operations to Amsterdam which became the major world financial center. From there the capitalists devised ways to fleece the population even more with innovations such as derivatives and began to establish central banks for the monetary control of each country, Sweden was the first. With Europe under their control the Capitalists turned their eyes toward England who still had its local and successful monetary system. They funded a propaganda campaign against the Catholic King James II, shipping thousands of Bibles to England. They funded the invasion of England by Prince William III of Orange which became the Glorious Revolution because there was very little opposition to it. James was deposed and William took the throne. The capitalists who funded him now established the Bank of England and in 1694 King William handed them the monetary authority of England making the King just kind of a hood ornament for the capitalist juggernaut issuing all money as interest bearing debt. The capitalist expanded the navy and pursued global empire. This was accomplished not just militarily of monetarily as well. You may have heard of the Hut Tax Britain imposed on Africans to destroy their economy by requiring it be paid in British money.

The American colonies suffered through this time because they had no means of exchange except for the Crown’s money which always went immediately back to England. More people were leaving that arriving during that time. After 100 years of monetary experimentation by the colonists they finally figured out they could issue debt-free Bills of Credit to use as money. This created enormous prosperity for the colonies, and they grew. Once the Bank of England realized what was happening, they had the Crown outlaw the colonial currencies in 1764 which immediately plunged the nation into a deep depression. This, not some piddly tax, is what precipitated the American Revolution which was funded by publicly issued debt-free money, the Continental. It funded the revolution despite Britain’s massive counterfeiting operation with ships in New York harbor printing bills around the clock, flooding into the economy. However, by the time they had destroyed the value of the Continental the colonists had won the war militarily. We lost monetarily, however, in the post war power struggle between Jefferson, the farmer who sought an agrarian economy, and Hamilton, the banker who sought and industrial economy. Of course, we know who won that struggle and the nation has been harnessed to privately issued debt ever since. But the people were not happy about that and the struggle for democracy continued.

The bankers wanted complete control but were constantly being frustrated by government action. They (international capital) tried to dissolve the nation by funding the abolitionist campaign and fomenting a civil war that they had hoped would break the nation up. European financiers feared that the US would become an economic powerhouse that could dominate the world economy. When that failed Lincoln was assassinated, and their man Johnson took over. Still the people demanded more public money which the bankers hated because Greenbacks were a permanently circulating debt-free medium of exchange that continued to build wealth for the workers who had much less need to borrow money. The money issue was at the top of every platform of the progressive populist movements up until 1913 when through some legislative sleight of hand, the Federal Reserve System was established. The US now had a privately owned Central Bank like England and the rest of Europe controlling the power of the purse. This despite the 1912 Pujo Committee investigation which showed in diagrams how the big banks controlled every industry in the nation with JP Morgan dominating them all.

The Fed was supposed to bring economic stability but because the bankers were in charge stability was not to be had. The fed caused instability and eventually the Great Depression which the 1933 Pecora Commission investigation proved. After pumping up a massive bubble, the Fed banks stopped lending and with no money the economy crashed massively. As with every boom/bust cycle the bankers make a killing on both ends as the real wealth collateral for the defaulting loans was collected for pennies on the dollar. The assets of 4000 community banks were subsumed in 1933 alone. This brought hundreds of economists to the fore who proposed taking the money creation powers away from the banks and replaced with a public system. Roosevelt was from a major banking family so of course the proposal was rejected in 1933 and again in 1939. The proposal, they all knew, would end the depression in weeks but this was not allowed. After the 2008 debacle an improved monetary reform bill was introduced by Dennis Kucinich in 2011 as the NEED Act, HR 2990, which got him promptly gerrymandered out of his seat by the “Democratic” Party. Money is power and money rules all public policy as well as the polity.

The fatal blind-spot that nearly all thinkers, be they left right or center, have when it comes to money and banking, is that they all assume that banks lend savers’ deposits to borrowers, when in fact this never happens. Banks not only lend the money, they also create the money, and thus make the whole economy (and polity) entirely dependent on them. They have “the upper hand” over everyone else; industrialists, unionists, media, and politicians. It’s a hidden hand too because of the general ignorance of money and that the banks create money when they make loans (and destroy it when loans are repaid) — thus, the entire money supply is rented from the banks; they’re the ultimate rentiers (not landlords, not industrialists). The landlords and industrialists are all in debt to the banks too.
So, I define capitalism as the private control of the creation and allocation of money, which is its central feature of power from the very beginning.
So, what is money? Here is a useful viewpoint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opwUrGVc8dA We at the Alliance define money as an abstract social power embodied in law as an unconditional payment system. Money also is a force of production in and of itself. Money was an innovation out of necessity as the division of labor emerged and trade with strangers increased.

Monetary history reveals that the exploitation of human labor does not have its origins in the private ownership of the means of production, but rather occurs primarily in the sphere of distribution due to the structural defects in the monetary system. Money has more to do with power than economics. With enough money you can buy all the means of production. You can even set things up to avoid the liabilities of ownership. What we are proposing with monetary reform is a huge shift in power relations, from private to public. The failures of socialism have always been due to ignorance of money. If socialists would realize they need this social power, who knows what might happen.