Comments Elsewhere

Alex,

Anarquistas por La Causa has the most sustained discussion of this question that I’ve so far printed. I’ve thought for a while now that the term “capitalism” is systematically ambiguous, in a way which is likely to be misleading and to lead to just the sort of talking past each other that you worry about; I tend to think that the word should mostly be qualified or simply avoided in favor of more felicitous terms — “free markets” or “private property in the means of production” or “political patronage for big business” or “the alienation of labor” or whatever it is you mean.

Unlike the word “capitalism,” I don’t think that the same ambiguity attaches to the word “capitalist,” if you’re using it to refer to individual economic actors. That has a pretty well-defined meaning, i.e. a rentier of means of production, and I usually think very little of people who make their living that way. I don’t think that the existence or even the flourishing of capitalists is ipso facto an injustice or that it is incompatible with anarchy, but I do think that their ability to extract rents would quickly evaporate in the face of free labor, and that they are (not coincidentally!) among the most powerful allies of, and the most well-entrenched profiteers from, regimentation, bureaucracy, and systematic State violence.