Braudel on the terms "Capitalist" and "Capitalism"
Rakesh Bhandari
bhandari at Princeton.EDU
Sun Mar 12 09:33:53 PST 2000
For Marx what was important was grasp of the historical specificity of a
mode of production vis a vis those had preceded it and what would follow it
(see Karl Korsch, Karl Marx whole sections of which are quoted in
Benjamin's Arcades Project). Neither Blanc nor Prodhoun had worked through
Richard Jones so it was Marx who specified that it was in the capitalist
era that the great mass of agricultural workers must relate to the
capitalist farmer through the mediation of what appeared to be an exchange
process involving wages and labor services. This mediation replaced the
legal 'ties' of slavery and the legal cum traditional ties of 'feudalism'.
(see Allen Oakley, Marx's Critique of Political Economy, vol 2, p.197f). It
was due to his attempt at historical specification in terms of relations of
production that Marx would speak of a capitalist mode of production instead
of simply capitalism which often often conjures images of the exchange
process, the stock market, and the power of money. While there may be
passing references to Kapitalismus by Blanc or Prodhoun, wouldn't Sombart's
Quintessence of Capitalism be responsible for the popularization of the
word?
Yours, Rakesh
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