kapitalismo

Kapitalismo is kapital- plus -ism- plus -o, and the ending is doing real work rather than decorating. -Ismo is the international suffix for a doctrine, a system or a movement, and once you have it a whole shelf of words opens at no extra cost: socialismo, komunismo, faŝismo, nacionalismo, idealismo, Esperantismo. Its partner -ist- names the person who holds to one, so a kapitalisto is to kapitalismo what an Esperantisto is to Esperantismo. Neither ending is native to Esperanto in the way -ej- or -ul- is; both were taken whole from the European vocabulary, which is why they behave the same way here as in every other language you know.

The historical facts, briefly and without taking a side. The noun capitalism appears in English in the 1850s, in Thackeray, and in French around the same time; Marx himself wrote about the kapitalistische Produktionsweise, the capitalist mode of production, more often than about Kapitalismus as such. The word therefore describes the system from outside and slightly after the fact, which is usually true of -ismo words. Kapitalo itself is older and duller: it is Latin capitalis, "of the head", and it reached money through livestock, the same route that gave English both cattle and chattel.

This is encyclopedic vocabulary and it belongs in factual sentences. It sits with ideologio, ekonomio and socio, and with the twentieth-century political words this chapter and its neighbour carry.