[p2p-research] Why Post-Capitalism is Rubbish

[Kevin Carson]

On 6/11/09, Chris Watkins <chriswaterguy at appropedia.org> wrote:
>
> Dmytri Kleiner wrote (re the term "capitalism"):
>
> > The term originates in Socialist critiques of the emerging social
> > relations of the industrial revolution.
> >
>
> It doesn't look like that's true. Wikipedia again:
> Arthur Young[45] first used the term capitalist in his work Travels in
> France (1792).[46] Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[45] an English poet, used
> capitalist in his work Table Talk (1823).[47] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used
> capitalist in his first work What is Property? (1840) to refer to the owners
> of capital. Benjamin Disraeli[45] used capitalist in the 1845 work Sybil.
> Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also used capitalist (Kapitalist) as a
> private owner of capital in The Communist Manifesto (1848).

But all those references are to the use of "capital-IST" as someone
performing a particular economic function, whereas Dmytri's claim is
for the use of "capital-ISM" as a social system.  I was vaguely aware
that the "capitalist" usage predated "capitalism";  but I still think
"capitalism" came into widespread use by radical critics of the
system, and initially carried a largely pejorative connotation.  I get
the impression that both Mises' and Rand's preference for "capitalism"
over "free enterprise" reflected a deliberate intention to scandalize
by reclaiming what had been a slur (much like gay rights activists
using the term "queer," etc.).

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html