A professor who hasn't learned to read, how sad.
Look what you missed:
1. Owns productive assets 2. Hires wage labor to 3. Make goods or services sold at market.
You got only:
4. Doesn't have to sell own labor power
That's 25%, an F, Woj, unless the curve is low enough to pass a Hopkins professor. Go back and read Marx.
And that's only the objective part of this definition.
Btw, as you ought to know,
1. many corporate execs aren't capitalists. There's a large literature about the separation of ownership and control. See Berle & Means (the classic) and going back before that Burnham, and
2. Individual proprietors aren't capitalists, they are petty commodity producers. (they are one of the marginal groups I mentioned.
And we haven't even got into the class consciousness part of the definition.
Your "effective control" definition is not an improvement. It elides the difference between capitalists and state bureaucrats (whether in a capitalists or communist system) who control economic resources, who have a distinct set of interests, and the communist (I mean Stalinist, state-bureaucratic-rule) systems had an entirely different dynamic.
In many ways the capitalist system has not changed that much since Marx pretty correctly foresaw how it was going to work. You say "Nineteenth Century" like that it's obvious that the world MUST have left all that behind. Sorry, Woj, there is still a (dominant, ruling) class of private owners of productive assets who exploit labor.
As for "emotive" element:
1. The Old Man was never afraid of a little fire and brimstone. Neither are you, so so why should we be?
2. Although it unclear how much negative "emotive" charge remains in the term.
3. "Exploitation" is a really super-loaded term, can you think of something nice to call the wrongful appropriation of another's labor? Oh, yes, "enterprise."
4. If we _effectively_ rename "capitalists" something else and the renaming works to become part of a critique, the new term "shmapitalists," or whatever, will become just as loaded. It's the critique that gives the term meaning that conveys the charge, Woj. If the enemy doesn't hate it, it means you failed.
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > 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;
> >
>
> [WS:] By that definition, corporate executives are
> not
> "capitalists" whereas owners of a mom-and-pop candy
> stores are. That is not very useful for
> understanding
> power relations in the US society.
>
> I think the Old Man based his theory on the British
> capitalism ca. early 19th century in which the role
> of
> private ownership was rather unique comparing to the
> cartel system that developed later in continental
> Europe.
>
> I suggest a different definition, one that
> substitutes
> ownership by effective control of productive assets
> to
> the degree that such control affects the functioning
> of social, economic and political institutions. I
> do
> not think that dubbing such control "capitalism"
> would
> serve any useful purpose, though. If anything, it
> would only add a distracting and confusing emotive
> element.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
>
>
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