politics
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I wonder what percentage is able to accurately define what "capitalism" means.
Probably about the same percentage of the other side that can accurately define what "socialism" means.
so basicly nobody
Well, there are like five different things that people use "capitalism" to mean.
For instance, doctrinaire right-libertarians will insist that "capitalism" means the same thing as "a free market in goods and labor" even though the core institutions of capitalism — stock markets — were developed to finance colonial monopolies that used slavery. (Monopolies = unfree trade; slavery = unfree labor.) Capital markets don't care about your freedom; they work just fine without freedom of anything but capital itself.
Meanwhile, doctrinaire communists will insist that "capitalism" is a historical stage followed by workers' revolution creating socialism and eventually communism — despite actually-existing "workers' revolutions" instead producing a new sort of monarchy and feudalism, in which power is held by a single dictator and his powerful supporters.
There are other uses. For instance, a lot of pop-progressives use "capitalism" to mean something like "the vale of tears, the fallen world, this age of brass and clay, the Kali Yuga" — the human condition! Anyone who thinks scarcity, poverty, or hierarchy are the fault of capitalism is ignorant of history; these troubles are much older than capitalism! Anything that Jesus or Buddha had to deal with, isn't capitalism.
During the Cold War, "capitalism" sometimes simply meant "the geopolitical interest of the United States and Western Europe; as against those of the Soviet Union and Communist China", and secondarily "access by American and Western European businesses to the materials, labor, and markets of 'developing' countries, typically without the people in those countries enjoying the freedoms that Americans and Western Europeans themselves enjoy."
And of course, the only correct definition of "capitalism" is mine, namely "an economic system under which ventures seek funding by selling equity (partial ownership), principally through regulated public markets (i.e. the stock market)." It's not about freedom and it's not about America; capitalism is about shareholder value.
Stock markets are not fundamental to capitalism and that is most certainly not "the only correct definition," given it's not even a correct definition. The only element fundamental to capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and that can exist and has existed without stock markets. A capitalist economy is one in which private owners make a claim to a farm, factory, or any other means by which commodities are produced or service is rendered, employ wage laborers to produce commodities or provide a service (using tools, equipment, or even just a space that is privately owned), and collect the value of their labor in the form of profit while returning a small fraction to the workers in the form of wages. Stocks just divide ownership of the means of production into shares that can be bought and sold at prices tied to the speculative value of the corporation.
Nah, there was private ownership of the means of production in Ea-nāṣir's day, but capitalism didn't come around until a few centuries ago.
I don't think capitalism is new, even if the word itself was only coined in the 17th century. Private property has existed on small scales throughout nearly all of human history, but our current state of affairs where it is the dominant force in the global economy and the basis of nearly all trade is relatively new. Prior to the 16th century most commodity production was done by artisans, guilds, and subsistence farmers, not wage laborers. Agrarianism changed the property relation to land from one governed by custom and feudal obligation to one governed by market forces, and Mercantilism led to merchant traders forming corporations and becoming a power that can influence and rival that of monarchs. Even in the age of Mercantilism commodity production was still mostly done without wage labor, but the new companies that arose from that era eventually took over commodity production themselves through the enclosure of the commons, marking the beginnings of modern capitalism.
That's just mean.