[lbo-talk] "Capitalists" and "the rich"

[andie nachgeborenen]

> 	--ravi says:

>, 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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