{"id":60909,"date":"2026-07-09T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=60909"},"modified":"2026-07-08T10:23:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T14:23:59","slug":"qotd-the-labels-capitalism-and-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/09\/qotd-the-labels-capitalism-and-socialism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The labels “capitalism” and “socialism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Before identifying why they were wrong, we need to acknowledge what Marx and his disciples were right about. Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer in the United Kingdom grew over 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The proportion of national income going to the top percentile of the population rose from 25 percent in 1801 to 35 percent in 1848. In Paris in 1820, around 9 percent of the population was classified as “proprietors and rentiers” (living from their investments) and owned 41 percent of recorded wealth. By 1911 their share had risen to 52 percent. In Prussia, the share of income going to the top 5 percent rose from 21 percent in 1854 to 27 percent in 1896 and to 43 percent in 1913. Industrial societies, it seems clear, grew more unequal over the course of the nineteenth century. This had predictable consequences. In the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, for example, the mortality rate for individuals with an income of less than 800 marks a year was thirteen times higher than that for individuals earning over 50,000 marks.<\/p>\n

It was not necessary to be an intellectual to be dismayed by the inequality of industrial society. The Welsh-born factory owner Robert Owen envisaged an alternative economic model based on cooperative production and utopian villages like the ones he founded at Orbiston in Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana. It was in a letter to Owen, written by Edward Cowper in 1822, that the word “socialism” in its modern sense first appears. An unidentified woman was, Cowper thought, “well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist”. Five years later, Owen himself argued that “the chief question … between the modern … Political Economists, and the Communionists or Socialists, is whether it is more beneficial that this capital should be individual or in common”. The term “capitalism” made its debut in an English periodical in April 1833 \u2014 in the London newspaper the Standard<\/em> \u2014 in the phrase “tyranny of capitalism”, part of an article on “the ill consequences of that greatest curse that can exist amongst men, too much money-power in too few hands”. Fifteen years later, the Caledonian Mercury<\/em> referred with similar aversion to “that sweeping tide of capitalism and money-loving which threatens our country with the horrors of a plutocracy”.<\/p>\n

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before identifying why they were wrong, we need to acknowledge what Marx and his disciples were right about. Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer in the United Kingdom grew over 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The proportion of national income going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,25,7,28,41],"tags":[1166,1076,400,213,91,76],"class_list":["post-60909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","tag-industrialrevolution","tag-karlmarx","tag-language","tag-newspapers","tag-poverty","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fQp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60909"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103489,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60909\/revisions\/103489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}