150 Years After Marx, 'Capital' Still Can't Shake Loose Of 'Das Kapital'

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

The most surprising bestseller of the year has to be "Capital In The Twenty First Century" by the French economist Thomas Piketty who argues that capitalism naturally leads to increasing inequalities of wealth. Last week the Financial Times challenged some of his data, but Piketty stands by his conclusions.

It isn't the data, or the book's conclusions that's grabbed the attention of our linguist Geoff Nunberg. It's the use of the word capital in Piketty's title which seems to be a plain allusion to Carl Marx's classic "Das Kapital," or in English "Capital," which led to the modern use of the words capitalism and capitalist. Here's Geoff.

GEOFF NUNBERG: "Capital In The Twenty First Century" evokes another famous tone with capital in its title. It makes comparisons inevitable. The title's a red flag for the right, in every sense of the term. A Frenchman who alludes to Marx and advocates a global wealth tax to reduce inequality is like shooting poisson in a barrel. And while liberals don't find the book particularly Marxist in its theory or its predictions, they do see it as Marxian in the sweep of its ambition and its ideas.

There's a linguistic link, too. For all their differences, Piketty and Marx talk about capital in the same singular way. Each of them puts it at the center of his narrative, not just as a sum of money and productive assets, but as a historical character in its own right. Piketty sometimes talks about capital as if it were an animate being. Capital is always entrepreneurial. That is its vocation, he says, which echoes Marx's remark that capital throws off living offspring. For both men, in fact, the capitalists themselves figure only as personifications of capitalist extras, neither heroes nor villains, just the supernumeraries who carry capital on stage on her litter.

It says something that Piketty could write a 700-page book on the concentration of wealth under capitalism without ever using the word greed. William F. Buckley used to say that the trouble with capitalism was capitalists. Piketty would have told him, no, you've got it backwards.

We don't usually think of capitalism actor in itself, which may be why "Das Kapital" is the only classic work of Marx whose title we usually leave in the original German. It makes the concept seem alien, along with those other European words for class and money that we leave untranslated, like ronchiez and bourgeoisie.

But it was Marx's notion of the centrality of capital that led later socialists to use the word capitalism to describe the prevalent economic system. When the term first entered English, it belonged entirely to the left. It conjured up workers bent over their machines, child labor and the plutocrats personified by the top-hatted little man on the Monopoly set - which by the way, was based on a game invented in 1903 to instruct people in the injustices of the capitalist system.

Defenders of the system objected to those connotations and complained that capitalism was a misleading name, which it may very well be. They preferred private enterprise, which focused on the businessman's initiative rather than his inquisitiveness, or better yet, free enterprise, which linked the system to our democratic values. That term caught on in the 1930s when American business launched a concerted PR campaign to add it to Roosevelt's four freedoms as the fifth freedom - freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and from fear, and freedom of enterprise, too.

By the postwar years, free enterprise and free markets were slogans that defined the American way of life. But to some, those phrases suggested Chamber of Commerce boosterism which is what led writers like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman to try to reclaim capitalism as a positive term that didn't require sweetening. They had some success, particularly among the people who like to dwell on the frontier justice of capitalism's capacity to reward success and punish failure.

Yet even now, the name capitalism can still make its advocates uneasy. The Republican wordsmith Frank Luntz has urged the party to replace it with economic freedom. And not long ago, the conservatives who control the Texas State Board of Education ordered that textbooks should replace the word with free enterprise, which is still a term people prefer to use when they are endowing a foundation or university chair to promote the virtues of the capitalist system.

But if capitalism is still half in the shadows, capitalist is completely out of bounds. You can use the word as an adjective of course - as in capitalist societies - and you can describe somebody as a venture capitalist. But Forbes and The Wall Street Journal almost never used capitalist by itself as a job description, unless they are mocking the jargon of the left. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Walden offspring - they're not capitalists but entrepreneurs, investors or just billionaires, depending on how they came by their piles.

There are people who probably describe themselves as capitalist, of course, but usually with a slightly defiant tone. We don't even use capitalist for somebody who advocates the system the way we do with socialist. To call somebody a socialist is to say what he believes. To call him a capitalist is just to tell you what he does.

Capital can't shake off its historical resonances even now which is what gives Piketty's title its power to rouse. That's the real contradiction of capitalism. Even at the moment of its absolute global triumph, it's haunted by the Marxist specters buried in its name.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley School of Information. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.