The economic system in which the means of production are privately owned, goods and services are allocated through markets, and profit-seeking drives investment — a system that has generated unprecedented material wealth, lifted billions from poverty, and produced inequality, environmental destruction, and periodic crises that have generated the most consequential political conflicts of the modern era.
Capitalism is the water most of the world now swims in — so pervasive it becomes invisible. It produced the Industrial Revolution, the consumer economy, the internet, and modern medicine. It also produced child labor, the slave trade's commercial infrastructure, the Great Depression, and carbon emissions. Understanding it requires holding both simultaneously: not capitalism-as-triumph or capitalism-as-catastrophe, but capitalism as a specific historical system with specific origins, specific mechanisms, and specific consequences that are still being negotiated.