not to mention that most corporations in the US are owned by the public through the stock market and the arrangement of the American pension scheme, and public ownership of the means of production is one of the core tenets of communism. Every country on Earth is socialist and has been socialist for well over a century. Once you consider not just state investment in research, but centralized credit, tax-funded public infrastructure, etc. well yeah, terms such as "capitalism" become used in a totally meaningless way by most people lol.

My thoughts on these ideologies lately have shifted to viewing them as "secular religions". There are many characteristics that line up with that perspective.

Both communist and capitalist purists tend to be enriched for atheists (speaking as an atheist myself). Maybe some of that is people who have fallen out with religion over superstitions and other primitivisms, and are looking to replace that with something else.

Like religions, the movements have their respective post-hoc anointed scriptural prophets: Marx for one and Smith for the other.. along with a host of lesser saints.

Like religions, they are very prescriptive and overarching and proclaim themselves to have a better connection with some greater, deeper underlying truth (in this case about human behaviour and how it organizes).

For analytical purposes there's probably still value in the underlying texts - a lot of Smith and Marx's observations about society and human behaviour are still very salient.

But these ideologies, the outgrowths from those early analytical works, seem utterly devoid of any value whatsoever. What is even the point of calling something capitalist or communist. It's a meaningless label.

These days I eschew that model entirely and try to keep to a more strict analytical understanding on a per-policy basis. Organized around certain principles, but eschewing ideology entirely. It just feels like a mental trap to do otherwise.