Socialist! Capitalist! Economic Systems as Weapons in a War of Words (NYtimes)

• Language changes, and as convenient as it can be to use linguistic shorthand, it’s important to remember that beneath the words are ideas — the things we should be talking about.

• Joseph Stiglitz

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• Interview By Andrew Ross Sorkin 
  
  

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  “Some people are trying to attach more emotions to the historical legacy of socialism, which was never the same as communism, but in the United States those distinctions have gotten blurred,” Mr. Stiglitz said.

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  It all comes back to semantics, Mr. Stiglitz said. And perception was on his mind when titling his new book, “People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent,” which is to be published next week.

  In it, he maps out a plan that he calls a “social contract” to improve jobs, health, education, housing and retirement. …

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  Even the word “capitalist” has evolved, Mr. Stiglitz said. It is only since the late 20th century and the rise of the economist Milton Friedman, he contends, that “capitalist” stopped being a dirty word. It was once used in what he called “a pejorative way.”

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Condemn communists’ cruelties, but capitalism has its own terrible record || Owen Jones

Owen Jones - 

Condemn communists’ cruelties, but capitalism has its own terrible record

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Don’t get me wrong: regimes that took the name “communist” – from Stalin’s to Pol Pot’s – committed unspeakable, monstrous crimes. But for the right, a revival of interest in Marx’s pre-Stalinist vision of communism is the most striking and chilling example of its own collapsing ideological supremacy: “communism” is synonymous with tens of millions of deaths and nothing else. Capitalism, by contrast, is presented as a largely bloodless, blameless engine of human prosperity.

The story of capitalism is more complicated than that. If you want to read effusive praise of capitalism, you’ll find it in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto: the revolutionary dynamism of the capitalists, they wrote, had created “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”. But capitalism is an economic system drenched in the blood of countless millions.
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The excess in mortality of capitalist India over communist China was estimated to be a horrifying 4 million human lives a year. So why isn’t India held up as a case study for the murderousness of capitalism?

Capitalism was built on the bodies of millions from the very start. From the late 17th century onwards, the transatlantic slave trade became a pillar of emergent capitalism. Much of the wealth of London, Bristol and Liverpool – once the largest slave trading port in Europe – was made from the enslaved labour of Africans. The capital accumulated from slavery – from tobacco, cotton and sugar – drove the industrial revolution in Manchester and Lancashire; and several banks today can trace their origins to profits made from slavery.

Even when the international slave trade began to crumble, the blood money of colonialism enriched western capitalism. India was long ruled by Britain, the world’s pre-eminent capitalist power: as Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts explores, up to 35 million Indians perished in needless famines as millions of tonnes of wheat was exported to Britain in times of starvation. Here was a cash cow for British capitalism, becoming the country’s main source of revenue by the end of the 19th century. The west is built on wealth stolen from the subjugated, at immense human cost.

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