Against Capitalism

Against Capitalism 

- Deirdre Nansen Mccloskey

CAPITALISM IS WHAT the Dutch call a geuzennaam—a word assigned by one’s sneering enemies, such as Quaker or Tory or Whig, but later adopted proudly by the victims themselves.

The word is a Marxist coinage. Karl Marx himself never used the word capitalism, but let’s not get pedantic: He freely tossed around capitalist to describe the bosses who were busily reinvesting surplus value on top of their original accumulations of capital.

Like economists and others before and after, Marx claimed that the accumulation of capital was the watchspring of wealthy modernity. The Marxian sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, wrote in 1983 that “the word capitalism is derived from capital. It would be legitimate therefore to presume that capital is a key element in capitalism.”