Feudalism and Capitalism

Feudalism and Capitalism

Economic processes are those involving the production and distribution of goods and services. However, they do not alone determine this production and distribution. There is an interrelationship of economic, cultural, environmental, and political processes that all help to shape each other. Nothing that we do can be defined as a single process, for it is the interaction itself that helps to produce the final results that we observe. To understand this more fully the following basic definitions may be of use:

"Cultural Processes" are those that involve the creation and transfer of knowledge-the production of meaning. "Political processes" are those by which we establish and enforce rules, and they have to be reproduced and communicated by way of cultural processes. And finally, "Environmental Processes" are processes and transformations of matter into other matter or matter into energy through various activities. From this one can see that the "state" of the environment is affected by culture, politics, and economics. To reiterate, we can't talk about economics and the questions that it attempts to resolve, without talking about or at least including these other aspects because they all interact and must be considered as well.

There are a number of fundamental questions that economic systems attempt to solve: How does one gain access to the resources needed to produce new and useful goods and services? How does one get humans to perform the labor? How do you organize the production process? How do you get the produced output into the hands of consumers? And finally, who gets the surplus and what do they do with it? Using these questions as a basic framework, one can attempt to dete...

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