What Capitalism is
With all the talk about Anarchy and Capitalism and Revolution and such, I think it's time to contribute some information on 'Capitalism'.
It is important to know who coined this word.
Karl Marx
Words he coined
- Capitalist
- Capitalism
- Working Class
- Communism
Whenever you use these words, be aware they are part of his ideology and you are probably arguing within his frame of thought.
I remember when studying Marx learning how incredibly impressed he was by capitalism and how necessary he thought it was as a stage toward communism. I guess the Bolsheviks proved him wrong. :)
Henry Ford came up with the word automobile. It doesn't mean that every time it is used we are making reference to his idea of the car.
Words are part of cultural context. They assimilate and become part of everyone's dictionary.
#newspeak
I'm not sure
The idea of a car certainly wasn't his.
Colonel Benz invented the car.
No, the term is a french invention, as well as the original inventor, Cugnot. Benz is the inventor of the internal combustion engine and a practical version of the automobile.
Though if we really nitpick, the concept of a self driving programmable automobile had already been drawn by Da Vinci, and his plans have been tried out for real, even though there is no record of him actually having built and tested one.
Capitalist is an insult form from a similar meaning as 'entrepreneur'. Capit means 'grasp' in latin. Entrepreneur means 'one who grasps between'. Marx did not start this, it was upper class slang for the dirty factory owners who gave jobs to the newly displaced heathens, I mean, the nomadic, camp-dwelling types who lived in the commons until the Enclosure Acts push them out into the cities.
Thank you for your comment !
I actually have a degree in latin and understand the etymology of these words very well.
'caput' means head.
On the rest you have the timeline and background wrong.
I also speak native german and read in 'Das Kapital' by Marx and know where he's coming from.
Hm. Thanks for that clarification.
Marx's labor theory of value, and every theory of prices that tries to make it objective is wrong, however. This is a point that socialists and those who basically are socialists really get it wrong. The marginal theory of value shows both the subjectivity and the issue of sacrifice between a set of choices that constructs the scales of value that then interact between people to form a market price.
I don't completely understand you here, but I think I agree.
His definition of 'value' ( "Wert" ) is so fundamentally flawed, that I wouldn't even know where to begin.
It should be seen as a poem not a guidebook.
The term capitalist, meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term capitalism. It dates back to the mid-17th century. Capitalist is derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin word based on caput, meaning "head" — also the origin of chattel and cattle in the sense of movable property (only much later to refer only to livestock).
That's why I wrote, he 'coined' the word.
He didn't invent the word.
The capitalist as a poltical concept had no relevance before his works. ( and his buddies )
He proposed the concept: political class.
'class' hadn't even been used like that before.
Your sentence above, is like 80% latin. ( too lazy to count )
Obviously he didn't invent latin.