Because it's a useful illusion to portray the present system as capitalist.
What I don't get though is why if he thinks the status quo can't adequately be described as Capitalism, why would he go and label it "Capitalism". It seems self-serving as it needlessly attaches a "shitty way of running economy" to the word.
Part of what he was pointing at, I think, is that labor value is distorted because the same labor in different places is worth more or less basically arbitrarily, where low value labor is a marker of a deranged economy to begin with.
I am fully on board with the idea that there are some very "bizarre" realities about the status quo... personally, I think we'll move more in the direction of free market capitalism in the end in order to get rid of some of these shortfalls in the status quo. Case and point would be that, as you point out, in some places a man physically labors all day for US$100 in one part of the world, but in another part of the world that'll only earn him US$3. Personally I see this as a unrelated to capitalism in-and-of-itself (ie. it isn't a necessary feature of it) and instead it comes about due to how the world saves so much inside a debt-based US-dollar-centric banking system and yet we on a global basis will obviously have a very different relationship with, "how hard is it for you to get a US dollar, the unit that is the primary wealth reserve in the system"? If you're a citizen inside America and your country is running an unrelenting trade deficit, it's going to be much easier for you to get your hands on dollars than if you were in a country where you couldn't just borrow them to yourself in existence and you instead had to earn it through trading your real wealth production. So what you end up getting is people in the West not having to labor as much as others in the East in order to get the same amount of US dollars. This is a temporary privledge that only lasts so long as the citizens of the world who are getting the "raw end of the deal" choose to stay in a monetary arrangement where, by design, certain currency zones are going to have a much easier time of it. As those who are "getting the raw end of the deal" stop saving so much of the fruits of their labor in foreign currency-denominated bonds, the whole distortion of labor prices should disappear quite naturally.
I don't think debate between capitalists and socialists is useful.
I would respectfully disagree. What I think we should do is get as many of them into a building as possible, the more passionate you are about your economic beliefs the better, and then right before the debate starts we tell them they CAN'T use the terms socialism, communism, Marxism, capitalism etc.... they must instead flesh out the logic of their thoughts in a way that they can't anchor their argument to SINGLE WORDS that are supposed to replace very complex subjects. Doing so risks "not really having an adult discussion of thoughts" at all.
Basically, to use a simple analogy to show what sort of "half-thinking" I'm trying to prevent, if you knew someone named Tom in your community was a murderer, and you disliked murderers, you wouldn't be allowed to "skip over your logic" and say, "I dislike Tom". Instead, to facilitate fruitful discussion, you would have to say, "I dislike Tom because Tom is a murderer". I think economics in particular is a field where there is such an incredible amount of "talking past one another" because we are rarely forced to flesh out the details of our thinking and we can instead skirt through it all very, very quickly by chaining together some words that are used in a variety of different ways by different people.
Instead we should both conclude that the present system reflects neither of our interests and move mutually for change.
Completely agree x 1,000,000. I think the debate should start at, "the status quo really sucks and isn't working, don't ya think?"
FWIW, I think the concept of "too-big-to-fail" is a great starting discussion to represent the status quo and, while I can't speak so well from the socialist side of the debate, I can certainly understand why a self-described capitalist would cringe at the idea that an institution in the economy should have the power to take a bunch of wealth from a large number of people under the threat of force in order to transfer it to a small minority of people who want their bad investments to be "made whole" and they don't want the value of their investments to have to stand on their own merits.
We don't need to agree on a method to agree on some goals.
To me the heart of the debate is actually the MEANS far more so than the ENDS though. I think it's easy for most people to dream up the ENDS that they want to get to... a very nice world if you will, however to me the entire debate is essentially on the MEANS to get there. I mean, what if one camp wants more coerced wealth transfers in the economy and the other camp wants less? They can't both win that. And they both think they have the right path to take us to those glorious ends? Will be interesting to see how the whole debate plays out over the next 10 years. One thing is certain... if we keep getting the MEANS wrong, we will not end up at the lofty ENDS we envision in our heads. So I guess the silver lining is that a society can only screw up a MEANS for so long before it's forced out of necessity to change its thoughts (or go off a cliff I guess).