Alfred Reckendrees said: > I don't know whether he was the first, but > Karl Marx: Critique of Political Economy (1859) > used the term. Hmmm, the reference to Marx (the term, incidentally, appears in the 1857 Introduction) opens the thorny problem of whether the translation from German is correct. This seems to be another case of translation in "economicist" language of Marx's original terms, which were "Agenten der Produktion" (http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me13/ me13_615.htm). This was correctly translated into Italian as "agenti della produzione". My experience is that Marx's translation into English is at places extremely inaccurate, and should always be double-checked before being used. Daniele Besomi