This is a very important question, Glen. I have started and run several businesses myself. I am definitely not anti-business.

The important distinction is between capitalism and commerce — where capitalism is a system of privatization of commonly managed resources in a community to extract wealth from them and commerce is the value exchange between people who can benefit one another. Note how it is entirely possible to have commerce without capitalism.

Indeed, it has been the case that commerce (or business exchanges) have taken place for thousands of years before capitalism came into being. There were businesses of many kinds before it existed and there will be plenty of kinds of business organization after capitalism goes the way of history.

The important thing to keep in mind (since there is so much smoke-and-mirror confusion about these topics right now) is that every business is a cooperative endeavor of people working together to do beneficial things for themselves and others. Capitalism happens to be a system of extracting wealth from the beneficial activities of other people — where the “owner” of capital is able to make “investments” and extract “profits” thanks to their privileged position of power in the system.

In the future, we will find that other models of social organization that already function much better… think of cooperatively owned credit unions, grocery stories, small businesses that are not capitalized with financial investments and equity-ownership arrangements, and so forth…will become the norm.

Indeed, this trend has already been growing in the last several decades. There are now more than 1 billion people who are members of co-ops. Cooperative businesses are not capitalistic. Similarly non-profit organizations, civil society institutions, community associations, guilds — the list goes on and on — are also not capitalistic.

There will be plenty of businesses that function quite well in a world without capitalism. Indeed, it is the systemic nature of capitalism to destroy functioning businesses to extract profit that has destabilized the financial system and destroyed many marketplaces for short-term returns in the last few decade that are creating so much suffering in the current economy.

I hope this helps clarify things a bit more. You’re question is a good one.