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While the "capitalism" isn't a thing you can poke with a stick, and a map isn't the territory, maps still exist, and are often pretty useful.

"Capitalism" is a map; it's a pretty good description of the social relations, especially the social relations around production and distribution of goods and services, in our present global culture. Other cultures have had different social relations; even the European societies of a few hundred years ago in which capitalism developed had a different set of relations. You'd need the map labeled "feudalism" to make sense of their culture. And as you get farther afield in both time and space, you'd need more maps, and even complete different collections of maps (though anthropologists love to argue about what to call different collections of maps, and what maps to put in each collection).

When people start saying "we need to change from capitalism to whateverism", they mean "we need to change our culture (i.e., the way we as an aggregate think and act) to reflect the social relations described as whateverism". And people have done that thing a lot before, in history and prehistory. I second the recommendation for the Graeber and Wengrow book, though I'm not sure it's the absolute best place to start.

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~inquiry wrote:

> While the "capitalism" isn't a thing you can poke
> with a stick, and a map isn't the territory, maps
> still exist, and are often pretty useful.
>
> ...

I really appreciate the maps reminder!

Per that, my initial post was inadequate in a purely "taking all maps into account" sense, but (per my response to calgacus' response) likely reasonable in a "if we're going to speak generally, then we at least ought be mathematical about relevance of different map-related/driven cases to the overall/general case" sense.

<raises, drains, and holds up pint glass to signal needing another>