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okay, No Way, i'll bite. at least for a little while. only someone with an ideological disposition geared toward wanting capitalism to be inherent to human nature could say what you said about "hunter gatherer [sic] cultures along the west coast of California" exhibiting "nascent elements of capitalism." your highlighting of shell currency and trade as any sort of element of capitalism is a fucking stretch, mate. one of the defining aspects of capitalism is the monopoly on a recognized and exclusive currency, which is enforced though legal mechanisms. capitalist currency is both substantial (gold, for example) and abstract (banknotes or checks or bonds, for example), but both types are recognized as having specific value, and therefore enforceable. archaeological finds of items thousands of miles from their places of origin is a long-established fact, indicating extensive and established trade routes from at least the time of the Neolithic; all that proves is that humans from different areas and cultural groups have interacted with each other for thousands of years -- and all without developing anything that resembles capitalism, because capitalism is about property and ownership, and gatherer-hunters and pastoralists have very different ideas about ownership than capitalists. it's ludicrous to describe a culture that never developed into capitalism as having "nascent elements" of something that never emerged. the presumption of using the word "nascent" is that eventually these "elements," as an integral aspect of the culture, would have created actual elements of capitalism. absurd. unlike the enforceable and monopolized forms of currency known under capitalism, the accumulation of shells doesn't confer wealth.

but to get back to more basic aspects of capitalism. what must exist in order for an economic and social and political system to be called capitalist? the concept of property/ownership must be present. so too, must the concept of value inherent in concrete objects, in time/labor, and in the medium of enforceable exchange (aka currency). perhaps one of the most important aspects of capitalism is the process of generating profit from the exchange of goods and the providing of services. this is much more than "trade" although certain forms of trade are certainly a characteristic of capitalism, especially those that are based on the purchase of goods and services by using the local currency. but it's another stretch to refer to barter, for example, as capitalist, since even if there's a clear division of ownership as well as a way to recognize the time/labor that went into creating particular goods and services, there's no way to generate a consistent profit though it (although there might be temporary and ad hoc profit), and barter takes place outside the realm of currency. barter could be called casual or informal capitalism if you insist on characterizing it as capitalist, but again, it makes little sense to me to describe it that way without the well-known capitalist profit motive, to say nothing of an actual profit. the last aspect that defines capitalism is wage labor, the payment of enforceable currency for the time/labor of those involved in the production of manufactured goods and those who provide services to those who own the means of production. in short: the legal status of ownership; the ideology of value; an enforceable means of exchange (currency); wage labor. for you and other vulgar capitalists, the issue is who owns the means of production, while for those of us in the actual anti-capitalist camp, that's irrelevant. to use just one perhaps not well-enough known example, when the CNT-FAI implemented worker control/management over much of the industry of Catalonia and agriculture in Aragon from the summer of 1936 until the Stalinist counter-revolutionary offensive in the spring of 1937, many anarchists critiqued those experiments as "self-managed capitalism" since workers were still being paid wages in currency with the aim of generating profits (sure, to reinvest in the means of production rather than for personal wealth, but still).

anyway, if you put the state in control of the means of production, you can call it socialism or communism using a pro-capitalist dictionary all day every day until the cows come home, and you'd still find anarchists, socialists, and communists who will dispute that definition. because those of us who have a more nuanced, sophisticated, and historical understanding of how capitalism developed, how it became institutionalized, and what its actual characteristics are all share a common analytical framework. when the state is responsible for the manufacture and distribution of goods and services, for the payment of wages to workers, and for the reinvestment of profits, that's a system we will definitely call state capitalism. as opposed to private or corporate capitalism, but it's still capitalism because that's how radical anti-capitalists define capitalism.

my invocation of Bakunin and Goldman wasn't meant to rest my opinions on their authority, but to show you that the use of "state capitalism," far from being understood as a contradiction, has a long pedigree among anarchists. i agree that we need to look at the actual meanings -- and perhaps, more importantly, on the usage -- of the words, but just as we shouldn't rely on Bakunin, we also shouldn't rely on capitalists to define their own system for us. i'm not quite sick and tired of always having to explain what capitalism really is and what characteristics of it are salient for anti-capitalists. but i am sick and tired of people who invoke a single self-congratulatory Cold War pro-capitalist dictionary definition they learned in high school.