WHAT IS A CAPITALIST MARKET OR A CAPITALISM? Part 1

Capitalism is a loaded word so it would help to give a compressed history definitive history to unpack it. From the sixteenth until the nineteenth century it was used to describe asset, monetary value, commercial paper, commodities and manufacturing plants. The term seems to escape its designated description only ardently enforced by its critiques.

In the seventeenth century capitalist meant-

• capital rich man who has monies and wealth acquired through interest and rent.
• those designated as "capitalists"include merchant, bankers, pensioners and other persons who lend money and thus, brokers and those who deal it capital.
• all those who engaged in the acquisition of wealth, if they accumulate the surplus of their labor, their earnings, over and above their required consumption, in order to use the surplus anew towards production and labor.

In the eighteenth century, those termed as capitalist were placed in contrast to workers as poverty grew following the workers revolutions 1848-1849.

It was only in the nineteenth century that the linguists use of the term caught on to the social critique.

Albert Schaffle described it implicitly as a conflict between wage labor and capital "a national and international organism of production under the leadership of the entrepreneurial capitalists competing for the highest profits".

The Encyclopedia Britannica had an entry for capitalism in 1922 describing it as-

• a system in which the means of production were owned by private proprietors who employ management and workers for production.

Therstein Veblen (1914) described it as a mode of production persisting since days of old, older than industrialization-

"it's highest development comes with the advanced stages of mechanical technology and is manifestly conditioned by the latter."

 In their book, Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Historical Concept, Jurgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden describe it as-

"Industrialized property rights; commodification on the markets for goods, labor, land and capital; the price mechanism and  competition, investment, capital and profit; the distinction between power holding proprietor and dependent property-less wage workers; tensions between capital and labor; rising inequality; the factory system and industrialized production... these were, varying combinations, major characteristics of the concept of capitalism as it emerged in the periods leading up to World War I. The term was mostly used to denote an economic practice or system frequently with special attention to it's social and cultural consequences."

In the run up to the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the term "capitalism" changed into a term of analysis as intellectuals, social scientists and cultural studies scholar began regarding it as the defining feature of the twentieth century.

Next time we'll look at the three major figures who help shape the intellectual discourse-

• Karl Mark
• Max Weber
• Joseph A. Schumpeter.

Related:

THE INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE OF CAPITAL: KARL MARX?

JOSEPH SCHUMPETER: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION?

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