The history of the vexatious words capitalism, democracy and racism

"Capitalism" is first found in 1854 to mean the "condition of having capital". In 1872 it was first used to mean a political and economic system, by socialists who disapproved of it.

"There is no satisfactory definition of the term, though nothing is more evident than the thing" said the entry on "Capitalism" in the 1929 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, written by J.L. Garvin.

It's a word to beware of. Its meaning is not clear and it still implies to some extent a negative connotation, however much it is used by people who think it a good thing.

"Democracy" means and always meant rule by the people. It also used to have negative connotations. Cleisthenes made Athens a democracy in 508 BC and we don't know if the word had been in use before then. Aristotle wrote disapprovingly of it.

The word had negative connotations among most educated people until America was made a democracy by the slave-owner, war criminal and populist Andrew Jackson, who has often been compared to Donald Trump. 

It still had negative connotations in England until 1917 when the Russian Tsar was overthrown and America joined the war. At that point the Allies claimed to be democrats, even though the UK did not have universal manhood franchise till the end of 1918. Germany and Austria did, but not Hungary.

I have read many times that the word racist was coined almost simultaneously in around 1936 by a Russian Communist and German National Socialist. This is not true.

Did Trotsky coin the word racist, as some say? No, but he popularised it.

He used the word (расистов) in Chapter 1 The Peculiarities of Russia's Development of The History of the Russian Revolution (1930).

Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, has based its philosophy upon the assumption that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through, whereas official Russia is a German bureaucracy imposed upon them by Peter the Great. Mark remarked upon this theme: “In the same way the Teutonic jackasses blamed the despotism of Frederick the Second upon the French, as though backward slaves were not always in need of civilised slaves to train them.” This brief comment completely finishes off not only the old philosophy of the Slavophiles, but also the latest revelations of the “Racists.”

I have always liked the Slavophiles very much, by the way. Solzhenitsyn was one.

The English word racist seems to have first been used by an American called Pratt in 1902. 

'Raciste' was used in France long before, with a positive connotation. Charles Maurras wrote on 25 March 1895:

I am myself a 'racist'! Elsewhere I had occasion to say to my distinguished colleague M. Gaston Mery, who at a point became the Knight of the Race and coined the epithet 'racist'. Like him I believe that there is a French race.

Racialist and racialism were words in English from the 1880s and were still current in the 1970s. After that racism took over.

An English politician Enoch Powell, often accused of racism, said in a well known remark,

It depends on how you define the word "racialist." If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically "No."