자본주의 민주주의 사회주의 전체주의 독제...등등...사회학의 용어들은 어지럽습니다.
이런 용어들이 자연과학 처럼 딱히 정의된 것도 아니고.....
어찌 어찌 정의가 되엇다고 하더라도...사용하는 사람들이 지 죶 꼴리는 대로 맘대로 씨불려 버리면..
그리고 그 사람이 존나 힘 잇는 사람이거나...배운 사람이라면.... 문맥상의 의미를 추정해야 합니다.
성여리가 시도 때도 없이 씨불 거리는 ..자유란...우리가 생각하는 그런 자유와는 너무 다르고
요즘에는 궂이 힘 잇고 배운 사람이 아니더라도...개도 소도 지들 죶 꼴리는 대로 지 멋대로 씨불리는 것이 유행이지요.
-우리 교주 노무현님 께옵선 진보적 서민적 대통령이엇다........왜 꼽냐??
이런식 이라면 정상적인 토론 조차 불 가능 합니다...
토론에 앞서 사용하는 단어의 정의 부터 서로 결정 하여야 그 나마 의사 소통이라도 할 수 잇게 되는데
이런 것은 참 짜증납니다. 그러니
상대가 어쩟던 자신들이 할 말만 자신들의 언어로 씨불거리고 말지요
저 븅쉰쇗끼들 과는 도무지 대화가 통하지 않는다..고 ....깍깍거리며..
자본주의가 뭐냐??
라는 질문은 그런것과는 또 다릅니다..
경제학자들에게 질문을 햇다 하더라도...자본주의를 제대로 설명 할 수 잇는 경제학자가 몇명이나 되겟쓰며
그들의 설명을 이해 할 수 잇는 사람은 또 얼마나 될까요??
3위일체....성부 성자 성령이 3개 지만 하나라는 신학적인 주장..
3개지만 하나?? 이게 몹니까??
교황 프란치스코에게 물어 본다면...답을 할 수 잇을까요??
그런데....이는 기독교의 가장 기본적인 이론입니다..
이런 황당무개한 주장이 기독교의 근본이 된 이유는...누군가에 의해 언제 부턴가 그렇다고 이야기 되엇다는 것이지요.
교도들은 이를 주님의 말씀이니....찍 소리 말고 따르라.....고 합니다.
그것이 무엇인지도 모르고 따라야 하는 것이....기독교의 믿음의 근본입니다.
기독교가 유별나게 악질적인 것은 ..
이렇게 분명하지 않는 것을 믿음이라 포장하여 임의적인 해석을 할 수 잇게 남겨 두엇다는 것이지요....
그러니 개도 소도 다 선지가가 되고 예수의 아들이 되고, 허경원이는 대통령리 되려 하고 전광훈이는 재벌이 되려 하지요..
자본주의 또한 그렇습니다.
그것이 뭔지 모르니....개 도 소도 쥐쇗끼들도 수구 꼴통들도 노무현교 교도들도 다 자본주의를 씨불리며...때 부자가 되려 하지요.
그런 너는 아냐??
당연히 모르지....
다른소린 자본주의에 관심조차 없고 그래서 알려 하지 않는다..
다른소리가 자본주의를 공부 하고 경제를 이야기 하는 것은...하두 주변에 똥 오줌 못 가리는 븅쉰쇗끼들이 지들만 잘낫다고
설처 되느니...그런 년놈들 빈정거려 줄려는 의도 말고 없써..
쫌 길긴 합니다...
시험에 나오는 것도 아니지만....자본주의 라는 단어와 의미가 어떻게 형성되어 오늘날까이 오게 되엇는가를 짚어 보는 것은
자본주의 실체를 이해 하는데 ....도움이 될 것 이다....는 생각에 복사 햇습니다..
결론 부터 말 하다면...
자본 자본가 자본주의는 여러가지 의미로 혼란 스럽게 사용되 엇지만
오늘날의 거대한 의미를 갖게 된것은 볼세비키 혁명 이후의 동서 냉전시대에 서구 국가들의 주류 세력들(주류 언론)에 의해 인위적으로 조작되엇다는 것입니다.
그들은 소련의 공산사회에 대한 경계심과 적개심을 고양 하기 위한 목적으로 언어와 표현을 정리할 필요가 잇엇고
이 과정에서 "자본주의" 라는 단어가 오늘날의 절대적인 의미로 까지 진화 되엇다는 것입니다.
창고 저 구석에 처 박혀 잇는 것을 들처내어 때 빼고 광내고 하여 비까번쩍하게 바꿔 놓는 것 처럼
자본 자본가 자본주의라는 단어 또한 그런 것이다는 것입니다.
창고 저 구석에 처 박혀 잇을때야....그것이 그곳에 잇기나 한 것인지 그것을 어떻게 부르던 어떤의미로 부르던 아무 상관이 없겟지만
오늘날의 비까번적해진 자본 자본가 자본주의는 ..그것이 무슨 뜻인지도 잘 모르지만..혀튼 인류의 모든 사람들이 다 씨불거려 되는 의미를 갖게 된 것이지요.
The Etymologies of Capital, Capitalist, and Capitalism: A Brief Sketch
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
In a recent — and very stimulating — discussion between Michael Hudson and Steve Keen,(이런 비됴는 꼭 보시기 바랍니다...
마이클 허스든이야 다른소리가 너무 많이 소개하고 설명햇던 사람이고...아고라 시절에 스티븐 킨의 경제학 강의를 링크해 드렷습니다....이 사람 또한 2007년 금융붕괴를 정확히 경고한 학자중의 한명이고....작고한 데이빗 그레이버와는 막연하 사이로 ,,그레이버가 죽엇을때 킨의 글을 링크해 드렷습니다..........이제부턴 누구 하고 영감을 받는 대화를 할 수 잇을까??.....라는) a question arose: When was the term “capitalism,” er, coined? This intrigued me, and being a glutton for punishment, I thought I’d look into “capital,” and “capitalist” as well.
I should caveat right away that, as far as possible, I’m looking at the emergence of the words in context (source, nation, date) with meanings as understood in normal commercial life. The post is in no sense systematic, it’s totally not an intellectual history, and it’s Anglo-Centric, since English is the language I speak, and English tools are the tools I have. The post only covers what Bourdieu would call economic capital (and not social or symbolic capital, even if understanding those two forms of capital has great potential for understanding why capitalism is so anti-fragile).
Here is the Indo-European root of “capital”, kaput (!):
(I love this stuff. From the root, branching out: “capital”, “caprice,” “cattle,” “caudillo,” “chef”….) Historically, “capital” comes first, followed by “capitalist,” and lastly by “capitalism,” and I will take the terms up in that order. First, a perspective that applies to all three from Stephen Stoll, “The History of ‘Capital’“:
So complete has capital become throughout the social order that it appears to have emerged from the natural order, and the behavior it instills seems to many people to be an expression of universal human motives and aspirations. As three historians observe, “One of the distinguishing features of a free-enterprise economy is that its coercion is veiled … Far from being natural, the cues for market participation are given through complicated social codes [social capital, symbolic capital]. Indeed, the illusion that compliance in the dominant economic system is voluntary is itself an amazing cultural artifact.” It might be true that the gentry did the same thing in 1650 that they did in 1250. They extracted value from people and environments. But they did it differently than anyone had before, through a discipline imposed by rents and wages, through social codes and cues that appeared to be independent of people. They aren’t. Perhaps the most radical idea we can have about capital, the single most subversive thing we can think about it, is that it begins as nothing more than a relationship between people. Like the meanings of words, relationships change.
Of all the insights of the people who coined “capitalism,” I think that is the most important, if not exactly mainstream.
Capital
My Oxford English Dictionary (OED), dates “capital” to M16, that is to the middle of the 16th Century CE:
Frederic Pryor, in Capitalism Reassessed, “Appendix 2-1: Etymology Of ‘Capitalism’” gives the word’s history after the Indo-Europeans but before the English glommed onto it, as we do (which is why English is such a wonderful language and there are so many volumes to the OED[1]):
[The word “capital”] comes from the Latin words capitalis, capitale, which in Western Europe in the Middle Ages designated, among other things, “property” and “wealth.” (Berger, 1986: pp. 17-18). In classical Latin, however, “property” was designated by a different word, namely caput. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1906-12, vol. 3: 43-34) provides examples of this usage: for instance, around 30 B.C., Horace employed it to indicate “property” in his Satire 1 (Book 2, line 14). Several decades after Horace, Livy also employed the word with roughly the same meaning. A common derivation linking “capital” to “head of cattle” (hence wealth) appears to be incorrect.
(On “cattle,” the American Heritage Dictionary would appear to disagree. “Infinite are the arguments of mages” applies to a lot of the derivations here presented, and, I think, to etymology in general.) Franz Rainer, in “Word formation and word history: The case of CAPITALIST and CAPITALISM” adds a twist:
[B]y the time that the first derivative, capitalist, appeared, capital generally referred to the property, not necessarily only money, that a rich person owned. In double-entry bookkeeping, the term referred to the net worth owned by the merchant after taking away the liabilities from the assets.
(Rainer’s scholarship is a real pleasure to read, and if you have the time to sit with it, I recommend you make a cup of coffee and do so.) Sadly, Rainer doesn’t footnote when and where the double-entry bookkeeping usage appeared, but it would be pleasing if it were Italy, where double-entry bookkeeping (at least for the West) first propagated, and even more pleasing if it were one of the Italian city-states where, at least according to Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century) capitalism originated. Rank speculation! We turn now to a later addition to our stock of words, “capitalist.”
Capitalist
My OED dates “capitalist” to the late 18th Century:
It’s interesting that we have a word for the thing relation, “Capital,” and had to wait two centuries to have a word for the owner of the thing relation.
Here we turn again to Rainer, “Word Formation,” whose research is exhaustive and properly sourced:
[T]he noun Capitalist was indeed coined in the Netherlands (then: “United Provinces”) back in 1621 by tax authorities in order to designate a wealthy citizen who possessed 2,000 guilders or more… [For the] Dutch Capitalist was a complex concept, designating at the same time a wealthy person, mostly engaged in money-lending or investment activities, as well as a category of the tax authorities.
And:
The 17th century is called the “Golden Age” in Dutch historiography, because the United Provinces at that time were at the forefront of trade, military, science and art. This background, especially their eminent position in international finance, explains how a Dutch neologism could spread abroad and start an astounding international career. Already by the end of the 17th century, we find loan translations in German and French. German Capitalist (today written Kapitalist) appears as early as 1671 in a document on the financial system of the United Provinces, where, due to its novelty, it is glossed as ‘money-lender’ The German word, as far as I can see, had no influence on French.
“Capitalist” now hops to France, rather like a virus on an airplane, still in Rainer’s telling:
The few examples that we find in French until the middle of the 18th century…. refer to that same Dutch reality. In the second half of the 18th century, however, the noun capitaliste firmly established itself in French with a reference independent from the Dutch context. Here is a quote from the Dictionnaire domestique portatif (Paris: Vincent 1765), vol. 3, p. 505: “RENTIERS; ce terme est synonyme à capitaliste, c’est-à-dire, à celui qui fait valoir son argent, en le disposant suivant le cours de la place, & qui vit de ses rentes.”The diffusion of the term among a wider public was furthered by its adoption by the Physiocrats [Turgort, 1788], an economic school that began holding much sway at that time, in France and abroad.
(Sadly, “rentiers” is out of scope for this post.) Finally, “Capitalist” now crosses both the Atlantic and the Channel to the English-speaking peoples[2]:
Nowadays we strongly associate capitalism with the Anglo-Saxon world, but the truth is that Great Britain and the United States were the last among the big, developed nations to take up the word capitalist. In English, capitalist does not make its appearance before 1787, when the following example is attested in Madison’s [(!!!!)] writings… “In other Countries this dependence results in some from the relations between Landlords and Tenants in others both from that source and from the relations between wealthy capitalists and indigent labourers.” Four years later, the word is used in England by Edmund Burke…. There can be no doubt that French was the donor language for the English calque.
(A “calque” is “a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation” (English “hamburger” to French “hambourgeois”). And so to the final addition to our word hoard, “capitalism.”
Capitalism
My OED dates “capitalism” to the middle of the 19th Century:
So, from move from the relation, “capital,” to the person playing one of the roles in that relation, “capitalist,” and then to the system in which those players play those roles, “capitalism,” takes about three hundred years.
Here we have two different narratives that, so far as I can tell, do not intersect. First, Rainer:
[C]apitalist acquired the sense ‘entrepreneur’ after having crossed the Channel (and the Atlantic), a sense that migrated back to France from the 1830s onwards, where it has cohabitated with the original sense ever since. Capitaliste, in that way, became the antonym of ouvrier, travailleur (both ‘worker’) and prolétaire ‘proletarian’, just like capital ‘capital’ had become the antonym of travail ‘work’. This lexical opposition simply reflected an extra-linguistic phenomenon, namely the well-known social divide created by the Industrial Revolution. In the 1840s, French capitalisme was also attracted by this lexical field and thereby was converted into the standard designation of the new economic system characterized by the exploitation of workers in factories owned and often run by a small group of capitalists/entrepreneurs. Here are some of the first examples of this new sense, which are probably attributable to Louis Blanc: “Une lutte récemment engagée entre Lamartine et L. Blanc a donné naissance à un nouveau mot ; le capitalism. Ce n’est pas au capital, s’écrie ce dernier, que nous avons déclaré la guerre, mais au capitalisme ; c’est-à-dire, sans doute, aux capitalistes“
(Louis Blanc was a French utopian socialist.) Importantly, from its formation, “capitalism” was always explicitly oppositional both in nature and in conception:
[T]he new lexical opposition [of capitalism] with socialisme and communisme could be viewed either as a consequence of this conceptual change, or as its trigger. In fact, the relevant meaning of these two terms, namely an ‘economic system where the means of production pertains to the workers or to society as a whole’, called for a designation for the opposite concept of an economic system where the means of production was concentrated in the hands of a small group of wealthy individuals. Since this means of production was referred to technically as capital and the entrepreneurs had come to be called capitalistes, capitalisme was a natural choice. This reconstruction of the word’s origin also neatly explains why the word was used with negative connotations right from the beginning: it was launched by the opponents of capitalism, while capitalists themselves and circles close to them used to call the then prevailing economic system libéralisme (économie de marché ‘market economy’ is of much more recent vintage).
The second narrative comes from Michael Sonenscher, “Capitalism: The word and the thing.” Here again “capitalism” is oppositional, although framed by post-1789 French reactionaries, rather than utopian socialists:
[A] number of royalist publications that began to circulate before and after the French Revolution of July 1830 [used the word, inspired by a Royalist named Bonard]. Here, capitalism became a shorthand for a fusion of two related problems. Behind the political question of the type of constitution suitable for the new regime, there was also, they argued, a social question, which asked whether any or all of the constitutional arrangements established by the July Monarchy were compatible with the combination of the division of labour, public debt, and inequality that, they claimed, were the hallmarks of capitalisme. No simple constitutional adjustment, they argued, could erase the legacy of the French Revolution. Real closure would have to come from erasing the French Revolution itself.
Capitalism, in this setting, began as a French royalist and legitimist concept that was designed to expose the limitations and fragility of the Restoration settlement and July Monarchy. It also, more importantly, began as a real political problem since the original concept of capitalism was a palimpsest of many of the most morally and socially explosive issues to have arisen over the course of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution: from war and debt to constitutional crisis and social dissolution. Positioning the concept of capitalism in a context that, right from the start, was significantly more apocalyptic than that of an industrial revolution or an economic category helps to explain the urgency and intensity of efforts made to understand the nature of the thing itself.
Whether from the right or from the left, “capitalism” propagated rapidly until “legitimized” in Germany in 1902. Rainer once more:
A more interesting conceptual change occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, academic circles began using the term not only to refer to the contemporary economic system, what we now call industrial capitalism, but also to economic systems of past times that, in their opinion, presented sufficient similarities with the contemporary system to be called capitalism. Proto-capitalism was located in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, or even in Antiquity. This conceptual change, which was the result of conscious conceptual manipulation for scientific purposes, resulted in a more abstract concept of capitalism, freed from some of the more contingent aspects of 19th century industrial capitalism, as well as its negative overtones…. [T]he international success of this scientific sense was certainly due to the publication, of Werner Sombart’s monumental Der modern Kapitalismus [in 1902].
After 1902, of course, came 1917[3], after which “capitalism,” still oppositionally charged, exploded into the American media environment of that time. From Steven G. Marks, “The Word ‘Capitalism’: The Soviet Union’s Gift to America“:
As the press conveyed the earth-shattering events occurring in Russia they adopted the word “capitalism” en route. Nearly every New York Times article that mentioned it in the 1920s had to do with the Soviet Union and its rulers Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Simple reporting on the USSR required adoption of the term, and editorializing necessitated defining it. The definitions varied according to the political orientation of the writers and publications. By 1919, the first Red Scare was in full fury, and conservatives in the US were denouncing Bolshevism as a ‘menace to Americanism.’
Fast forward to the present day:
[M]y purpose has been to call into question what we really know about capitalism by showing that at nearly every moment since the word came into use it was defined by way of comparison with the dreaded Soviet Frankenstein economy. As a result, American conceptions of capitalism have been, and still are, imbued with what Samuelson once called the economic ‘science fiction of the right as well as of the left and center.
Let me close by quoting Christine Lagarde, “Economic Inclusion and Financial Integrity—an Address to the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism,” in a speech before the International Monetary Fund:
Capitalism originates from the Latin “caput”, cattle heads, and refers to possessions. Capital is used in the 12th century and designates the use of funds. The term “capitalism” is only used for the first time in 1854 by an Englishman, the novelist William Thackeray—and he simply meant private ownership of money.
Holy moley. But I don’t have time to put on yellow waders. Perhaps, armed with this post, readers can pick apart LaGarde’s words….
Conclusion
I should really have a terrific peroration here, but since the goal of the post was purely to explain, perhaps not. Once again, the moral:
So, from move from the relation, “capital,” to the person playing one of the roles in that relation, “capitalist,” and then to the system in which those players play those roles, “capitalism,” takes about three hundred years.
That’s a long time to rectify the names. Are we doing any better today?
--))) 오늘날의 자본주의는 언어학적 의미을 훨씬 넘어 훨씬 광범위 하고 다양한 의미로 사용됩니다..
도대체 이 자본주의가 무슨 의미로 사용되엇는지는 ...화자의 의도나 문맥으로 추정하는 것 말고는 다른 도리가 없습니다.
그런데 그런 추정과 이해를 하기 위해서도 자본, 자본가, 자본주의 라는 단어가 어떤식으로 사용되어 왓는지의 역사를
알아 두는 것은 중요합니다..
NOTES
[1] Sadly, my printed Shorter OED, the one with the magnifying glass, which I got as a signing bonus from the Book of the Month Club, is gone where the woodbine twineth. All I have now is an app!
[2] I am guessing many usage examples could be gleanded from the “Positive Good” theorists in what would become the Confederate States. From George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All, 1857:
[3] Here is an interesting discussion on the issue of whether The Bearded One used the word “capitalism.” From his letters, yes he did.