Louis wrote:
And if you define capitalism as requiring a free market in labor, then Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa were not capitalist countries. I find that most unlikely.
============== What do you understand by a "free" labour market? Capitalist states have always actively intervened to regulate wages, employment conditions, benefits, entry qualifications, work rules, union rights, etc.
Such intervention has always been a matter of degree, depending largely on how confident the capitalists have been at different times and in different countries in their ability to determine these conditions with minimum state interference, in accordance with the class struggle unfolding within the economic sphere. When they have had less confidence that the relationship of class forces has been in their favour, they have called on the state to intervene to maintain "labour peace" and "profitability" through anti-labour legislation backed by armed force. In contrast to more stable bourgeois democracies like the US and Great Britain, tightly controlled labour markets were characteristic of the repressive right-wing regimes in Germany, Italy, South Africa, Chile etc. They were sometimes but not always underpinned by race doctrines used to rally the support of the privileged sections of the working class. But the important point is that countries in which production is dominated by wage labour are "capitalist" countries, whether they are governed by states which are social-democratic, liberal, conservative, or fascist in their political colouration. The essential relation which defines capitalism is economic rather than political, as you suggest above.
