Categories that become stuck in the past

The Cold War ended and communism ceased to be an opponent to the West Liberal Democracies some 20-years ago but the concepts that date from the early nineteenth century during a time of crude manufacture, as judged by modern systems, continue to catch the mind of everyday thought. Karl Marx, as epitomised by his laconic and luminous Manifesto, 1848, has made a major contribution to this stasis. Marx’s depiction of the capitalist, the factory owner, who is juxtapositioned opposite a multitude of unskilled labourers, is massively outdated: this ‘capitalist’ is superseded by capital markets were most ‘capital’ is the sum of small and medium-sized pension savings of a large proportion of ‘Western-style’ societies. To help clarity of debate, capitalist should be excluded from nearly all debate.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.