> Capitalism is what happens when government and bullies leave people alone. OK, if that's what you're using the term "capitalism" to mean, then I'm for that. (The leaving-alone, I mean.) > You can call it whatever the fuck you want. OK. Just as long as you keep in mind that people might also use the word "capitalism" to refer to other things; and if so, then when they say that they are against "capitalism," what they are saying is not necessarily that they are in favor of government or bullies trashing people's stuff. (Some -- Marxists, say -- *are* in favor of that. Others -- mutualists, for example -- are not.)

**ttk2,** Well, I don't know why you think definitions 2-4 that I suggested are any more "twisted," as meanings, than definition 1 is. Certainly, they are not more *novel* meanings -- using "capitalism" to mean, say, the wage-labor system dates back to 1840, in Louis Blanc's Organisation du Travail, can be seen in Proudhon's La Guerre et la Paix, etc. Tucker (writing from the late 1870s up to the early 1900s) generally used the term either to refer to pro-business political privilege, or to the wage-labor system, depending on the context, etc. Definitions 2 and 3 of the four that I give are both *older than* definition 1, and have remained in continuous use all the while that definition 1 was being used. Definition 4 may be somewhat more novel -- it's really not a definition that anyone *gives* in systematic or theoretical work, but it seems the best I can do to systematically explain a certain kind of sloppy popular usage of the term. In any case, though, it's probably the single most common usage that you're likely to encounter in every day life, unless you spend all day arguing with libertarian economists, anarcho-syndicalists, or academic Marxists. But. Even if these other uses *were* obviously novel uses, and capitalism-as-the-free-market were obviously the original use -- well, what then? Words sometimes change their meanings; glasses used to be called "spectacles," "silly" used to mean holy and "snob" used to mean "a member of the working class." Not to put too fine a point on it, but "Anarchist" used to mean something different from "an advocate of a peaceful, stateless social order;" the term originally meant someone who advocated lawless violence or civil war. But we now use words like "Anarchist" ("market Anarchist," "Anarcho-Capitalist," whatever) to describe ourselves because the meaning of the word was (deliberately) changed by a group of libertarian theorists, beginning with Proudhon. Anyway. When words take on new meanings, you can complain about it, or you can try to document the different shades of meaning, take them into account and try to understand what people mean by them, rather than insist (or simply presume) that they must *really* mean what you would mean by it. The latter seems like mainly like a good way to make sure that you spend a lot of time miscommunicating, and bickering at cross-purposes with your conversation partner, rather than getting to the substantive issues at stake. (That is, for example, why I don't spend all day complaining that Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises changed "capitalism" away from its Real Original Meaning, even though the definitions that they give are really quite different from the definitions given in the work of Tucker or Swartz or whoever. *Given* that I know what they mean by it, I'm willing to work with that, even if *I* wouldn't make the same word choice personally.) > The last person to try and draw a line was Ayn Rand, she tried to save the word "selfish" .... I think Rand was actually pretty clear that she was *deliberately redefining* the term "selfish." That's fine; there are good reasons to redefine terms (her reason was that she needed a term that was more *precise* in order to express what she wanted to express; rather than invent a new word, she set out to reclaim an old one. Which seems fine, to me at least, as long as you're clear about what you're doing. (I disagree with Rand about "selfishness," but not because she chose that word; I disagree with her because I disagree with the ethical theory that she used the word to express.)

Author here. > He didn't even address the actual definition of capitalism, which is an simply economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Anything else is just a redefinition. You know, part of the reason I put up this post is because I'm getting tired of seeing people throw out these completely unsourced declarations about "the actual definition of capitalism," "redefinition," etc., as if they had in front of them some stone tablets where God Himself wrote out the Real Definition of the term in letters of fire. If you think this is The Real Definition of the term, you need to realize that it's not necessarily obvious to everyone else that it is, and you'll have to tell me at least where you *got* that definition from and why you think that that source is so especially definitive, compared to all the others that I've reviewed from 1840 to the present. Because that definition may or may not (on which, see below) be the definition given by Louis Blanc, when he coined the term in 1840 (in the Organisation du Travail); it's certainly not the definition given by, e.g., Proudhon (in La Guerre et la Paix) in the 1860s, etc. If you've got the Actual Definition and these other usages are "just redefinitions," then they are "redefinitions" that are *as old as, or older than* the Actual Definition you've got. Which would seem odd. Anyway, that said, I probably should have included a note about the definition of capitalism as (say) "private ownership of the means of production;" my excuse for omitting it (not necessarily a good one) is that the piece already clocks in at about 3,000 words as it is, and my take on the P.O.O.T.M.O.P. definition, if I had included it, is that the definition is itself subject to the same confusions as the term "capitalism" is. Here's what I mean: "private ownership" may be used to mean one of two things. First, "private" may be used to mean ownership which is private in the sense of being civil rather than governmental. If that is the case, than private ownership of the means of production is simply encompassed by the meaning of my first definition, "capitalism" as meaning simply "the free market." (What it is for a market to be free is, in part, that people are free to earn and keep property, without any de jure limits except those imposed by the need to respect the equal liberty of others. Government ownership, to the extent it happens, undermines the free market to that same extent, because government as such is a coercive monopoly, and what it takes, it takes at the expense of peaceful people's property rights.) This is, importantly, the sense of "private ownership" that libertarians usually mean when they talk about the importance of private property, etc. But on the other hand, "private ownership" may be used to mean private in the sense of solitary rather than common, or personal rather than social, meaning that the titles and the profits accruing from ownership go to a relatively few people, rather than being widely dispersed. But there are many senses of "social ownership of the means of production" which are *perfectly compatible* with free markets -- worker and consumer co-ops, for example, are a sort of distributed social ownership, and non-governmental common or public property (of the sort discussed by Roderick Long in, e.g., ["A Plea for Public Property"](http://freenation.org/a/f53l1.html)) are perfectly possible -- and, historically, perfectly common -- exercises of free association and individual property rights, just as much as are personal property, sole proprietorship, corporate ownership, et cetera. For a number of anticapitalist writers (including pro-market anti-capitalists, such as Proudhon), the specific reason they spend a lot of time writing against "private ownership of the means of production" is because they are concerned about the social and economic effects of ownership being concentrated in a few hands, rather than broadly distributed, so that, e.g., the people who work in a shop are generally not the people who own it, the owners of a hospital are generally not the people who depend on its services, etc. -- that is to say, they are concerned about something that they call "private ownership" not necessarily because they're opposed to free markets (most are, but many aren't), but because they're opposed to "capitalism" *in my third sense*, to the wage-labor system and closely related phenomena like landlordism and the predominance of corporate ownership in general. A free market with ownership that is *non-governmental*, but *widely distributed* rather than *concentrated* would satisfy their stated "anticapitalist" norms -- although only some (Proudhon, Tucker, Swarz) explicitly recognize this, and others (Marxists, Progressives) do not, generally because the former understand something about market economics and the latter do not. Anyway, if "private ownership" means capitalism-1 in some mouths, and capitalism-3 in others, and is often (as I think it is) used confusingly to conflate the two and try to take a position for against the conflation, then it suffers from the same basic problems as the term "capitalism" itself, and does not help as a clarification of it. Hence, I didn't offer it as one of the meanings to be distinguished; but I probably should have added a note explaining why. For more on the same issue, cf. Roderick Long's [Pootmop!](http://aaeblog.net/2008/06/27/pootmop/) and [Pootmop Redux!](http://aaeblog.com/2009/06/22/pootmop-redux/) posts. Hope this helps.