Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by every owner of wealth, property or production ability in financial and capital markets, whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets. Economists, political economists, sociologists and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free-market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition and state-sanctioned social policies. The degree of competition in markets, the role of intervention and regulation, and the scope of state ownership vary across different models of capitalism. The extent to which different markets are free as well as the rules defining private property are matters of politics and policy. Most existing capitalist economies are mixed economies which combine elements of free markets with state intervention and in some cases economic planning. Market economies have existed under many forms of government and in many different times, places and cultures. Modern capitalist societies—marked by a universalization of money-based social relations, a consistently large and system-wide class of workers who must work for wages, and a capitalist class which owns the means of production—developed in Western Europe in a process that led to the Industrial Revolution. Capitalist systems with varying degrees of direct government intervention have since become dominant in the Western world and continue to spread. Over time, capitalist countries have experienced consistent economic growth and an increase in the standard of living. Critics of capitalism argue that it establishes power in the hands of a minority capitalist class that exists through the exploitation of the majority working class and their labor; prioritizes profit over social good, natural resources and the environment; and is an engine of inequality, corruption and economic instabilities. Supporters argue that it provides better products and innovation through competition, disperses wealth to all productive people, promotes pluralism and decentralization of power, creates strong economic growth and yields productivity and prosperity that greatly benefit society. The term 'capitalist', meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term 'capitalism' and it dates back to the mid-17th century. 'Capitalism' is derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin word based on caput, meaning 'head'—also the origin of 'chattel' and 'cattle' in the sense of movable property (only much later to refer only to livestock). Capitale emerged in the 12th to 13th centuries in the sense of referring to funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.:232 By 1283, it was used in the sense of the capital assets of a trading firm and it was frequently interchanged with a number of other words—wealth, money, funds, goods, assets, property and so on.:233 The Hollandische Mercurius uses 'capitalists' in 1633 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital.:234 In French, Étienne Clavier referred to capitalistes in 1788, six years before its first recorded English usage by Arthur Young in his work Travels in France (1792). In his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), David Ricardo referred to 'the capitalist' many times. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, used 'capitalist' in his work Table Talk (1823). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term 'capitalist' in his first work, What is Property? (1840), to refer to the owners of capital. Benjamin Disraeli used the term 'capitalist' in his 1845 work Sybil. The initial usage of the term 'capitalism' in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ('What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others') and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ('Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour').:237 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the 'capitalistic system' and to the 'capitalist mode of production' in Capital (1867). The use of the word 'capitalism' in reference to an economic system appears twice in Volume I of Capital, p. 124 (German edition) and in Theories of Surplus Value, tome II, p. 493 (German edition). Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism, but instead those of capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear more than 2,600 times in the trilogy The Capital. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term 'capitalism' first appeared in English in 1854 in the novel The Newcomes by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, where he meant 'having ownership of capital'. Also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German American socialist and abolitionist, used the phrase 'private capitalism' in 1863.