Can it be true that our language has become subjected to capital? This question occurred to me the other day. The reason: apparently we cannot speak of anything that matters to us unless we add the suffix capital to it.

My namesake Karl Marx of course wrote a veritable tome about this: Das Kapital. With a capital K. He really had a lot of things to say. Capital is quite a remarkable book, written in London as a critique of the horrors of classical 19th century capitalism. Britain at this time was a place where capitalists had more ro less free reign and could amass capital by exploiting labourers in their own country, not to mention those who had – against their will – become colonial subjects to the British or other European nations.

But the concept of capital has really got a new lease of life in recent years. Take for example the oncept of social capital, which I got quite interested in at the beginning of this century. This concept simply means what the Icelandic poet Einar Benediktsson put so well: „Maðurinn einn er ei nema hálfur, með öðrum er hann meiri en hann sjálfur“. In other words, people benefit greatly by interacting with others. Among other things, relations with others can help one getting one‘s ideas and projects realised. But does this have to be anchored to the concept of capital?

The worst of all in my opinion is the concept of human capital, which has been all-pervasive in our society in recent years. By this is meant the knowledge and skills that each individual member of staff can contribute to a firm or an institution. Yet this implies a very limiting view of the role of the labourer or staff member. His or her person is now insignificant. The person is objectified, made exchangeable for other factors that can contribute to the growth and success of the firm or institution. And then a whole new cadre of human resource managers has been invented for managing the staff – hiring it or firing it, and coercing people to run faster all the time with the help of all kinds of invented yardsticks.

My thesis is that this general "capitalisation" of language has to do with the inroads of neoliberalism: this insidious political ideology that has impregnated most aspects of our existence in recent years. Even Karl Marx did not quite see this coming in his weighty tome Das Kapital.