>, I have only a
> very murky idea
> of what "capitalist" means (as employed in
> meaningful sentences).
Taking this at face value, I proffer the following definitions, rooted in Marx's critique of political economy:
1. a person who has private ownership of sufficient productive assets so that he does not have to sell his own labor (power) (i.e., ability to work) to live and who instead employs others who work for wages to make goods or services that are sold at market;
2. a person who satisfies the characteristics of (1) and who is aware that he and others like him do so enough to have shared interests in preserving that status, a common identity with the others, mutual values and a common culture rooted in a conception of history.
These definitions are not axiomatic or totally transparent, but they are no worse than many definitions in the human sciences and better than many. As a definition it might be improved, but I aware that there are really no necessary and sufficient conditions for anything, and that there are possibly examples of capitalists who lack one or more of the qualities attributed to them, as well as borderline cases.
It must be understood that the term is rooted in a theory about how the worlds works -- all terms with any theoretical interest are. (Consider "neutron," "gene," "compound") In this case the theory is historical materialism, which posits that "capitalist" is a class relationship, that is, that someone's having the properties of a capitalist is a function of his class position, his location in a certain kind of social structure ("capitalist society") with a certain kind of dynamic (accumulation of surplus value through exploitation of wage labor).
So defined "capitalist" is a far better term than "the rich" (your alternative), an ahistorical category that fails to distinguish between Crassus and Carnegie, and is not anchored to any theory about the way society works or why "the rich" are, in any particular instance, rich.
Or maybe all this is superfluous and you are just spoofing us.
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