If you want to change a system, it is helpful to have a name for it. Apparently, Louis Blanc created the word 'capitalism':
"It is worth noting here that Mill never uses the term 'capitalism,' though later commentators have been happy to use it on his behalf in describing his views. Blanc is generally credited with the first use of the term in our modern meaning (in his Pages de l’histoire de la révolution de 1848, 1850), so Mill could have come across the term via his friendship with Blanc (and his reading of Blanc's work, though we have no evidence he read this particular one). Similarly, Ricardo had used the term 'capitalist,' and Mill was very familiar with his work. Where Mill uses 'capitalist,' it is in a similar sense - referring to a person who owns capital. His examples in Principles are all of individual manufacturers who own factories, employ labourers, and are involved in the day-to-day running of their business, despite spending some of their income 'in hiring grooms and valets, or maintaining hunters and hounds,' which implies they also have a good deal of leisure. This is also similar to the way in which Coleridge (in 1823), Proudhon (in 1840), and Disraeli (in 1845) use the word. Even Marx only began using 'capitalism' (rather than 'the capitalistic system') in Capital (in 1867), and generally preferred 'the capitalist mode of production.'" -- Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (2021)
As can be seen above, the word 'capitalist' predates 'capitalism'. The word 'capital' is much older. Adam Smith talked about 'commercial society'. Friedrich Hayek talked about the 'Great Society'. Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, wrote about 'civil society', a term later taken up by, among others, Gramsci.
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A nicely written piece. Does the asset-debt macroeconomic system upon which capitalism (and socialism) are based have a precise self-ordering of the temporal cyclical growth and decay of its assets' valuations and following a power law distribution. It seems so. The system appears to be in a self assembling 1982 13/32 of 33 year cycle with a cycle global equity peak on 29 Oct 2025 and is now in the window of self-ordered criticality, heralding asset valuation devolution over the next 9 to 12 months.
Proudhon used it before Blanc did in 1850 -- from 1846, Volume 2 of "System of Economic Contradictions":
"The English people have set themselves on the path of living, no longer on the natural products of their territory, augmented by a proportional quantity of manufactured goods, plus a further proportion of products supplied from abroad in exchange for their own; but on the exploitation of the entire world through the exclusive sale of their hardware and fabrics, with no other return than the money of their customers. It is this abnormal exploitation that has ruined England, by developing capitalism and wage labour excessively within its borders; and this is the evil it strives to inoculate the world, by laying down the shield of its tariffs, after having donned the armour of its impenetrable capital."
He may have used the term before that, of course.
Anarcho
www.anarchistfaq.org
Thanks. I think many more do not know about Proudhon's usage.
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