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 ….)

Marx was wrong.

There, that was easy.

It’s worth noting as well, in addition to the points that Roderick and Tracy make, that the relevant question, in this particular case, actually isn’t whether the economies of scale in online retail sales would be large or small under freed-market conditions. For all I know, they might well turn out to be considerable. (Certainly, there is a natural economy of scale involved in a lot of long-distance shipping and tightly-packed warehouse storage.)

But the real question here is what the economies of scale are, not only for potential competing retailers, but in all competing uses for the distribution center worker’s labor — since the question is not only whether the worker could make as good a living or better setting up as a competitor for Amazon, but also whether or not the worker could make as good a living or better in other lines of work outside the industry, or possibly outside of the cash-wage economy entirely. So there is not only the question of opportunities for entrepreneurial competition with Amazon downstream in the retail market, but also the question of opportunities for entrepreneurial competition with Amazon upstream, in the labor market.

If it is true (as Kevin has argued, and as I argued in Scratching By) that, absent the state, most ordinary workers would experience a dramatic decline in the fixed costs of living, including (among other things) considerably better access to individual ownership of small plots of land, no income or property tax to pay, and no zoning, licensing, or other government restraints on small-scale neighborhood home-based crafts, cottage industry, or light farming/heavy gardening, I think you’d see a lot more people in a position to begin edging out or to drop out of low-income wage labor entirely — in favor of making a modest living in the informal sector, by growing their own food, or both, quite apart from the question of economies of scale in the formal retail sector. If that’s the case, then, on the one hand, workers who dropped out wouldn’t have to deal with Amazon’s taskmastering at all; meanwhile, back at Amazon, in order to convince others to stay in, Amazon would have to offer them a corresponding premium to make it worth their while — whether in the form of wage increases, improvements in conditions, or both.

Well, one way is just by distinguishing the terms “anarchistic socialism” and “state socialism.” Francis Tandy (a follower of Tucker) used the term “voluntary socialism.” Today, Kevin Carson likes to use the term “free market anti-capitalism”.

If more than two or three words are needed, you can explain that, even though most people today use “socialism” to refer only to state socialists, anarchistic socialism has been around as part of the socialist movement longer than Marxism and Social Democracy have, and that anarchistic socialism is based on the idea that workers should own the means of production, either individually or as part of voluntary associations, rather than the government owning the means of production, as state socialists suggest. You might also point interested parties to Benjamin Tucker’s essay, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ,” which explicitly mentions Proudhon and his ideas, and is, I think, one of the finest discussions of the distinction ever put to paper.

You write: “PLEASE NOTE THAT PROUDHON WAS BY NO MEANS A SOCIALIST, AT LEAST NOT BY THE MODERN DEFINITION OF THE TERM, …”

Well. Proudhon certainly was a Socialist by his own definition of the term, and by the definition of the term that was widely in use at the time amongst other people who called themselves Socialists. In the General Idea, he flatly states that Socialism is “the new name for the Revolution,” and also that “But an idea cannot perish. It is born again, always from its contradictory. Let Rousseau triumph: his glory of a moment will be but the more detested. While waiting for the theoretical and practical deduction of the Contractual Idea, complete trial of the principle of authority will serve for the education of Humanity. From the fulness of this political evolution, we finally arise the opposite hypothesis: Government, exhausting itself, will give birth to Socialism as its historic sequel.”

If many people who use the word “Socialism” today think that it implies something incompatible with Proudhon’s views (e.g. government expropriation of the means of production, or central economic planning by the state), that hardly settles the question of whether or not Proudhon should be called a Socialist. Those people may be using the word incorrectly or confusedly. Or they may be using it as part of an ideological package-deal, which should be combated rather than pandered to. I for one see no reason why the views of Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, V.I. Lenin, or whoever you like have a better claim to the word “Socialism” than the views of Proudhon, or other anarchistic socialists, such as Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, et al. Proudhon came to both the term and the movement years before Karl Marx ever did, and there is an old and continuing tradition of anarchistic socialism that rejects, root and branch, the Marxist disaster of State monopoly and State planning.

Many people today misunderstand what the word “anarchist” means; they think that an anarchist is someone who advocates riot and social disorder. Nothing could be further from the views that Proudhon was referring to when he called himself an “anarchist.” Does that mean we should go around saying, “Proudhon was by no means an Anarchist, at least not in the modern definition of the term”? No, of course not. What we should do is correct the misconceptions that people have about the meaning of the term “Anarchism.”