Market Capitalism, State Capitalism, and Community Capitalism

The collapse of communism in the late 80s and early 90s was widely heralded as the triumph of “free market capitalism”. Market capitalism is usually defined as a system where private individuals and corporations own the means of production, where private investments drive the economy and where competitive markets link employers and workers. This economic system has been dominant in the Western world over the past few centuries and has increasingly spread across the world since the end of the Cold War. However, the confident assumption that market capitalism would become the preeminent economic model in the post-Cold War period has been challenged by the rise of state capitalism, where governments and state-supported businesses direct and drive the economy, and by the rise of what this author calls “community capitalism”, where the major director of the economy is neither the open market nor the state but rather religion/culture. It is important for sociologists, economists and other social scientists to understand the differences between these three forms of capitalism and the implications of the rise of state- and community-capitalism in recent years.