Excerpt:
Over the past few years, it seems, everybody and his brother speaks about the capitalist system in America. Before, using the word was the hallmark of marxist training or influence. Yet lately, everybody is using the word - regardless of political leaning.
It bothers me because capitalism - the word and the concept - was the brainchild of Karl Marx. As well as offering an “-ism” opposite his own -ism, it describes a rigid class society in which one class possesses the means of production, the other nothing except its labor. The latter class is called “The Proletariat” who, as Lenin declared, can lose nothing but its chains when it rises against the oppressor.
This is not the place to argue whether capitalism was the appropriate way to describe certain European societies. The point is that owning things has always been open to Americans. The moment you buy one share of stock, you part-own “means of production,” not to mention owning your home and arriving at your place of work in your own automobile - a very American image.
America never had a proletariat.
In that case, America could not have been a capitalist country.
http://balintvazsonyi.org/shns/shns100202.html
Interesting.
Thanks for posting.
However, I use the word “capitalism” above pretty much like anyone would use the expression “entrepreneurship”.
My basic point is that entrepreneurship and economical self-reliance is MORE firmly rooted in Scandinavian culture than in others.
This is a key explanation behind the fact that the Scandinavian countries (25 million inhabitants all in all) has 69 companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list while Germany (housing a population of 82 million) - a former victim of Feudalism, Communism and Nazism - only has 57.