{"id":1052,"date":"2019-03-11T15:49:14","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T15:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=1052"},"modified":"2019-10-21T15:59:43","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T14:59:43","slug":"a-question-of-definition-1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/a-question-of-definition-1\/","title":{"rendered":"A Question of Definition (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From the Socialist Standard<\/em> March 1978<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Words, written and spoken, are the tools we use in our task of\n trying to spread socialist understanding and we are therefore \nparticularly concerned to clearly define the words we use. Language, \nlike everything else in the world, is constantly changing, as new social\n experiences demand new words or as old words assume new meanings. \nDictionaries only give the meaning of words at the date they are drawn \nup and even then merely describe how words are used rather than \nprescribe how they should be used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why when there is an argument over a definition of a word \nthis cannot be settled by a simple reference to a dictionary. To assume \nthat it could is to assume that the definition of words has been settled\n once and for all and that arguments over the definition of words are \nillegitimate. We don\u2019t accept this, not only because we know that words \nchange their meaning but also because we reserve the right to define \ncertain words in ways which we consider more useful, from the point of \nview of understanding and changing the world, than the currently used \ndefinitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why we do not accept current dictionary definitions of such \nwords as class, socialism and revolution. As dictionaries merely \ndescribe how these words are used they merely reflect what is in our \nopinion confused and confusing current popular usages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A book such as Raymond Williams\u2019 Key Words<\/em> (Fontana), which \nseeks to give both the history of a word and controversies over how it \nshould be used, is thus to be welcomed. Williams is the author of a book\n published in 1956 called Culture and Society, a title which indicates \nhis main concern: literature and art in relation to society. \nNevertheless there figure among his \u201ckey words\u201d words which are also key\n words for us such as (to mention only those which occur in our \ndeclaration of principles): capitalist, class, common, community, \ndemocracy, equality, evolution, interest, labour, mankind, monopoly, \nsocialist, society, wealth. We do not of course always agree with his \nconclusions, or even his history (he attributes, for instance, the \ncoining of the phrase dialectical materialism to Engels whereas it was \nfirst used by Joseph Dietzgen in the 1870s), but we will follow his \npractice and give our history and definition of the key words in our \nvocabulary: capitalism, class, reform, revolution and socialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism, Capitalist<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both these are key words in the socialist vocabulary since we \ndescribe present-day society as capitalism and one of the two classes \ninto which it is divided as the capitalist class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalist came into the English language in the early part of the \n19th century and meant someone who had \u201ccapital\u201d. Capital was a \nshortening of the phrase \u201ccapital stock\u201d and referred to a monetary \nfund. Thus capitalist was basically somebody with money. Later, as the \nclassical political economists came to distinguish various types of \ncapital employed in production\u2014circulating capital, fixed capital\u2014the \nword came to apply also to employers of labour and owners of factories, \nmines and mills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism was not originally the name for a system of society but \nfor a system of production, one based on the investment of \nmoney-capital. Williams claims that to talk about capitalism as a system\n of society it to confuse a distinction made by Marx between \u201cbourgeois \nsociety\u201d and \u201ccapitalist production\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainly Marx did speak of \u201cbourgeois society\u201d or rather its German \nequivalent \u201cb\u00fcrgerlich Gesell-schaft\u201d. Bourgeois is of course a French \nword and originally referred to the citizens of towns in Mediaeval \nFrance which enjoyed certain privileges, for which the English \nequivalent might be \u201cfreeman\u201d. Later it came to be associated with \nanyone who, not being an aristocrat, enjoyed a steady income and led a \nrespectable life. As it was precisely this class of people which gained \nfrom the French Revolution, taking over from the landed aristocracy as \nthe ruling class, it was quite natural that in French this should have \nbeen called a \u201crevolution bourgeoise\u201d and the society over which they \nruled a \u201csoci\u00e9t\u00e9 bourgeoise\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The German equivalent \u201cb\u00fcrgerlich\u201d is a further complicating factor \nin that it also means \u201ccivil\u201d (hence \u201cBurgerkrieg\u201d = civil war) and was \nused by Hegel, who considerably influenced Marx, in the phrase \n\u201cburgeriich Gesellschaft\u201d (= civil, rather than bourgeois, society) \nwhich he contrasted with the State. Civil society was, if you like, all \nthe non-political activities of men, i.e., above all their economic \nactivities. Thus, whether translated \u201cbourgeois society\u201d or \u201ccivil \nsociety\u201d, the German phrase used by Marx led him to a study of the \nsystem of production which, in both English and German, he called \n\u201ccapitalist\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bourgeois is not a word we use except in the phrase \u201cbourgeois \nrevolution\u201d (to describe political revolutions in which the rising \ncapitalist class\u2014then only a \u201cmiddle class\u201d or, even, a \n\u201cbourgeoisie\u201d\u2014takes political power from the landed aristocracy). It is \nnot and never has been in wide use in English where there have always \nbeen adequate alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this connexion it is significant that when Marx and Engels wrote \nin English they chose to avoid the word \u201cbourgeois\u201d. Thus in Value, \nPrice and Profit, a talk delivered in 1865, Marx talks of \u201cthe \ncapitalist class\u201d and \u201cthe capitalists\u201d. Engels in the series of \narticles he wrote for the Labour Standard in 1881 followed the same \npractice and in one place even used the phrase \u201ccapitalist system\u201d. Both\n Marx and Engels were deliberately trying to express themselves here in \nEnglish idiom, to use phrases already current in the working class \nmovement in England, phrases which have survived and fully justify the \nuse of \u201ccapitalist\u201d rather than \u201cbourgeois\u201d to describe present- day \nsociety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, when in the early part of this century the ending -ism, in \nconnexion with socialism, came to mean not just the theory but also the \nputting into practice of that theory and so to a system of society, it \nwas natural that the same transition should take place with regard to \ncapitalist so that capitalism became an alternative word for what had \npreviously had to be called \u201ccapitalist society\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism, then, is defined by us as a system of society based on \nthe monopoly of the means of production by a minority class and their \nuse to produce wealth to be sold on a market with a view to profit, \ni.e., as capital, as wealth used to produce other wealth with a view to a\n profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adam Buick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Back to the Society and Culture index<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Socialist Standard March 1978 Words, written and spoken, are the tools we use in our task of trying to spread socialist understanding and we are therefore particularly concerned to clearly define the words we use. Language, like everything else in the world, is constantly changing, as new social experiences demand new words or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2084,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1052","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2683,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1052\/revisions\/2683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}