Comments Elsewhere

Ofer: It’s hardly surprising to learn that the terms were popularized by Karl Marx in Volume 1 of his book Das Kapital (1867).

Julia: Marx didn’t coin the term “capitalism”. It was first used by free-market anti-capitalists to describe the system of monopoly.

Ofer: That’s why I said he popularized it, not coined it….

That’s not right either. Marx uses the word “capitalism” (*) only twice in Capital Vol. I, and less than a dozen times in all three books combined. (And those are some big, fat books to combine.) You can search for yourself if you want using a verbatim Google search over site:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ (Vol. 1), site:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ (Vol. 2), and site:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ (Vol. 3).

Later Marxists wrote about “capitalism” all the time, of course. But they got that terminology mainly from earlier, non-Marxist and anti-Marxist radicals, not from Marx. (**)

(* Actually Kapitalismus, since he did not write Das Kapital in English.)

(** Early users of the term who might actually count as having “popularized” it include Louis Blanc — in his book Organization of Labor the 1840s — and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon — in his book War and Peace in the 1860s. Both were extremely influential at the time they published and helped set the language for a lot of the anticapitalist movement, including for Marx and his followers. But the term was not really very “popular” at all until the early 20th century when all these folks, Marx included, were long dead: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Capitalism&yearstart=1800&yearend=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=capitalisme&yearstart=1800&yearend=2000&corpus=7&smoothing=3 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Kapitalismus&yearstart=1800&yearend=2000&corpus=8&smoothing=3 ….)