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marx didn't give the capitalists hell. he just told the truth and they thought it was hell
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this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Even if that were true, that wouldn't mean any rephrasing is an explanation. The "simply" in my comment was load-bearing, as you would acknowledge if you were arguing in good faith. But I am quite confident in my being able to explain terms such as "beating up" without using terms. I might even be able to use my long-ass comment as a guide for how to explain private property using no terms other than ones derived from term-free explanations.
The only requirement for an explanation to work is that it take something its target audience does not understand, and make them understand it (correctly). For that specific target audience, the explanation is therefore simpler than the explained concept.
However:
In the case at hand, the explanation should for a general audience who has not studied economics, but it cannot work for everyone - there is always an audience in mind. It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term "private property". I think "competitive markets" is on shakier territory there.
You refer to a "term-free" explanation. What is the definition of a "term", and how would an explanation every be free of them?
Here's how I'd explain capitalism to a ten-year-old:
Capitalism is a system where goods are produced by groups of people deciding independently what to make according to what price they think they can get for those goods. Those individual groups need to own things in order to produce goods, which themselves need to be paid for. Since a new or small group might not have enough money, capitalist systems have a mechanism where groups can ask people to give them money for a project and in return promise to pay those people a little bit of the money they hope to make doing the project.
Capitalism is different from the most common system that came before it, where this mechanism did not exist. It is different from some other systems, where instead of individual groups owning the means of producing goods (like a factory), a country as a whole might own such things. Since a whole country has a lot of resources, it doesn't really need to buy a factory - instead it can organise the building of a factory without money changing hands. In this system, the country as a whole decides what needs to be produced, rather than the individual groups. Since countries have different priorities than smaller groups, this results in different things being produced different quantities between these systems.