Re: the Communist Manifesto: critique

I remain agnostic about the existence of capitalism, and the psychology of 
those who use the term, until people clearly define what they mean by 
'capitalism'.  In general, debates about 'capitalism' are textbook examples of 
reification--the pretense is that there is some answer to the question of 
whether 14 century England, the nineteenth century world economy, twentieth 
century Soviet Union, contemporary China are or are not capitalist, when in 
fact the answer hinges on the meaning of the concept being employed.

Although capitalism as wage labor ultimately involves drawing too many weird 
boundaries, describing those with means and interest in accumulating as much 
capital as possible as 'capitalists', and tracing their ascending relationship 
to other centers of power (territorial rulers, ideological structures, etc) 
strikes me as a valuable project, regardless of what one is going to call it.  
I also don't believe it's a particularly good idea to let capitalists organize 
the world for their own benefit, so I'm not sure its a bad thing to 'fight 
capitalism'.

Steven Sherman

<<I wholly agree -- many years ago I wanted to jettison the term
> "capitalism," but people cling to it like a lifeboat in a storm.
>
 

In this case quotation of the original is more than apt, if only because I
had intended to add a note about that to my own: THAT is where virtually
ALL my friends/comrades/colleagues and I part company for the very reason
that Jack says, only moreso: I get the impression that the clinging to
"capitalism" by those how reject it [!] is by no means an only an
''academic'' or theoretical or political matter. NO, it is highly
[intimately?] personal as well. The ''clinging'' as to a life-boat in a
storm is a defense of their very personal idendity, which is tied to their
- like mine! - life-long dedication to combatting ''capitalism''. So to
admit - or even to consider that maybe - there is none and never was any
such challenges one's identity in perhaps having to admit having
mistakenly followed Don Quijote tilting at will-of-the-whisp windmills.
Perhaps that is not a problem for me personally, because I know that I
have made lots of other mistakes and because I have and need no identity
to defend.>>