The Financial Times is debating capitalism, but what it is really debating is the future of the market economy.
Karl Marx never used the word capitalism. But after the publication of Das Kapital, the term came to describe the system of business organisation which had made the industrial revolution possible. By the mid-19th century that system was central to the economic landscape. Werner Siemens in Germany, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller in the US, and in Britain Richard Arkwright’s successors. As individuals or with a small group of active partners, they built and owned both the factories and plants in which the new working class was employed, and the machinery inside them.
While the fascia labelled Barclays Bank tells you only the name of the company you are dealing with, the sign that said Arkwright’s Mill told you that Sir Richard owned it. And no one who passed forgot that. The economic and political power of business leaders derived from their ownership of capital and the control that ownership gave them over the means of production and exchange.