Capitalism's Long Revolution

"Capital and capitalist slipped into use, unnoticed and unremarked, in the 13th and 17th centuries. Capitalism burst through the barricades of political argument in the 1830s, announcing immediately the hostility of its user. "Long live capital!" cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. "Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity." As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker-as a worker, a radical, a hater."

"If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else. Blanc described it as an act, the taking of collective wealth and turning it into individual or private profit. Proudhon claimed it was a citadel, casting medieval and military shadows across the land. Despite his obvious interest and extensive writing on the subject, Marx steered clear of the term."

"A 19th-century dictionary usefully notes that "ism" words are "systemative," and a system might have been the one thing that everybody agreed capitalism was. But a system of what? The economy was hardly a concept at the time, and even if it had been, was capitalism only an economic system? Was it not also a "social system," as the conservative German economist Johann Karl Rodbertus claimed, or a political system, as the subtitle of Marx's Capital and Adam Smith's discussion of "the system of natural liberty" had suggested?"

"If it was a system of property and production, finance and labor, how could one distinguish where the economic dimensions ended and the political and social dimensions began? This uncertainty over domains and their differentiation indicates a deeper anxiety. Whatever kind of system capitalism was, it had a tendency to blur, to ooze and spread across distinctio"

“Capitalism” appeared in the 19th century, while “capital” and “capitalist” entered use earlier without notice. In the 1830s the term broke into political argument and immediately carried hostility, with radicals using it to attack a “mortal enemy.” Different thinkers treated capitalism as different kinds of things: an act of taking collective wealth for private profit, a citadel with medieval and military imagery, and a concept Marx avoided naming directly. The “-ism” form implies a system, but disagreement persisted over what system capitalism referred to. Economic, social, political, property, production, finance, and labor boundaries were unclear, creating anxiety about how capitalism spread across domains.

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