For example, you quote Szasz- the well known anti psychiatrist that serves as the ’scientific’ background for Scientology’s absurd notions and fantastic beliefs.

This is as crass a textbook example of argumentum ad hominem (abusive form) as you could come up with. Szasz is not a Scientologist, so why even mention Scientology except in an attempt to tar the actual subject of your remarks (Szasz) by association? And if Szasz were a Scientologist, what would that matter? His arguments can be addressed on their merits, without dragging religion into it.

That makes the following very rich:

Finally, this conversation began when I pointed out that you were attacking Dr Sanity herself, rather than her ideas.

That still seems to be the case.

Actually, Mona was criticizing the methods by which she comes up with those ideas. There is a difference between criticizing method and merely attacking the speaker.

Furthermore, contrary to popular opinion, “personal attacks” on an interlocutor aren’t a logical fallacy. In fact there is nothing wrong with them at all, if the interlocutor merits them. The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed only when one claims or suggests that these abuse proves something about the interlocutor’s conclusion, or argument, rather than merely proving something about the interlocutor herself.

Mona’s critical remarks about Dr. Sanity don’t commit this fallacy. Your repeated efforts to dismiss interlocutors’ remarks on the basis of credentials rather than argument, on the other hand, do.

It must surely take a bold and original understanding of civil war and imperial-era Rome to portray the whole of that society as an endless parade of debauchery, intrigue, spectacle and gore.

Nobody’s ever done that before.

MDHinton,

If you want to lay down a precisifying definition for “capitalism” then of course you’re free to do so. My claim is merely that there are at least three major senses in which the word “capitalism” is commonly used which have more or less equally good claim to being “the” meaning of the word. So if you’re trying to understand what someone else is saying about “capitalism,” then it’s usually best to start by figuring out which of these things they mean. (Or, as is sometimes the case, whether they slide back and forth between meanings without acknowledging the change.) And if you are trying to make a point to someone else about any of the three things covered by the term, then it may be best to either use a modifier to make it clearer what you mean (e.g. “state capitalism,” “laissez-faire capitalism,” etc.), or simply to pick another term that doesn’t create the potential for confusion.

As for the definition you offer — “a process which I would define simply thus: investing one’s resources in order that they may grow” — seems to be an attempt to connect the word closely with the common use of the word “capitalist” (as applied to individual economic actors). That’s fine, but I think that you’ve made the definition too broad to quite line up with common usage. The textbook definition of “investment” is expenditure on capital goods, so if a “capitalism” is any process of investment aimed at profit, then that would include not only the factory-owner buying machines for her shop or the banker loaning money to businesses at interest; it would also include a subsistence farmer buying seed, a self-employed craftswoman potter buying a wheel, or a workers’ syndicate buying machines for their worker-owned co-operative factory. (In fact it would cover absolutely any form of economic activity whatsoever other than immediate consumption, anywhere, throughout all of history.) I think this is a mistake. As the term is commonly used, one of the distinguishing features of the capitalist is not just that she invests resources in acquiring capital goods, but that she then employs others to do some of the labor with those capital goods. Otherwise what you have is not capitalism per se, but investment simpliciter.

I’m well aware that individual capitalists often do lose out from government intervention. My claim isn’t that intervention produces net benefits for all capitalists everywhere; only that it tends, on balance, to produce net benefits for most capitalist enterprises. I mention some of my reasons for thinking that in my Fellow Workers articles; for more, I’d recommend Roy Childs’s Big Business and the Rise of American Statism, Gabriel Kolko’s book The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1915, and Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. The basic idea is that capitalists as a class, and especially the largest industrialists and financiers, have played a decisive role in the formation and the direction of the regulatory state in the U.S. (as well as Western Europe and non-Communist East Asia). They did so because they expected to profit from it, by using State intervention to create and enforce a system of subsidies and bailouts for big businesses, interlocking cartels, regulatory barriers to competition, and captive markets. This happened through new licensing requirements, new trade boards, new federal commissions, etc. They also availed themselves of State power to capture, bureaucratize, and bring under control the rising union movement, with the radical unions destroyed through imprisonment, murder, and deportation, and the conservative unions established through State privileges as a junior partner in the “tripartite” system of Cold War economic planning, alongside Big Government and Big Business. The main winners from this process were not mainly the idle rich, but rather the chief investors in behemoth corporations such as Ford, GM, GE, Standard Oil, Bell, etc. It actually shouldn’t be surprising that they would be the winners, either: if going into a line of business means facing down a byzantine maze of licensing requirements, regulations, red tape, bureaucracy, etc., then a big corporation with a lot of money and a lot of credit and a lot of lawyers will have the resources to bulldoze through that barrier to entry. A little start-up or a group of independent workers won’t.

P.S. “Charles” is fine, if that’s what you prefer.

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.

namaroopa,

oh! Not black/brown people at Jonestown (mostly). That assumption is totally incorrect, which is why we’re sort of talking about the event in different languages here.

This isn’t my understanding of the demographics at Jonestown. It’s certainly true that press coverage after the November 18 focused disproportionately on Jim Jones, survivors from the mostly white church leadership, and the mainly white, affluent “Concerned Relatives.” But the sensationalist press coverage was wrong to treat their stories as representative of the People’s Temple or Jonestown as a whole. According to Paul VanDeCarr, 70 per cent of the people at Jonestown were Black. Browsing through the photos on this list of the dead, I’m pretty sure that’s accurate.

Rad Geek: the people at Jonestown very much knew they were drinking poison and had rehearsals for and debates about it, although a few members did resist and were coerced at various stages. People in totalist authoritarian cults don’t sit around wishing they could escape, especially not the kids – they’d get hurt way too easily in a totalist setting if they adopted forms of psychological resistance that are more tolerable in mainstream society.

Well. About 80 people did escape from Jonestown — 16 of them were trying to leave with Ryan when he was murdered, but weren’t killed in the attack, and the other 60-odd people escaped into the woods. That’s a small percentage — less than 1% of the population at Jonestown — but it is important that even amongst able-bodied adults the decision was far from unanimous.

In any case, though, I’m not sure I understand your argument. I agree that several hundred people at Jonestown chose to commit suicide. But a number of the seniors receiving medical care at Jonestown were apparently poisoned in their sleep, not at the “White Night” assembly with the poisoned Flavor-Aid. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that infants or young children understood that the Flavor-Aid they were given by their parents was poisoned, or to make an informed decision about whether or not to commit “revolutionary suicide.” (The infants and toddlers had the poison squirted down their throats with syringes.) Since we’re already talking about several hundred people who were simply murdered by another person, the frequent use of the term “mass suicide” to describe Jonestown is seriously misleading.

Any discussion of physical/psychological agency HAS to be more complicated than what happened on the day they died.

I certainly agree with you about this. (In fact I pretty much detest the use of the term “brainwashing” to apply to anything other than the military torture cases it was invented to describe, and I think it papers over very complicated and important questions.) But my objections to the treatment of Jonestown as a “mass suicide” don’t have to do with any theory about the people who made a knowing choice to “drink the Kool-Aid,” as they say. They have to do with the way in which that description focuses on the conscious decisions of those adults who were in a position to make conscious decisions about whether to live or to commit suicide. It’s misleading because it blanks out what happened to several hundred people who were not in a position to have any agency in the decision, whether complicated or simple, either because their parents decided for them, or because they were killed in their sleep.

For what it’s worth, the impression I got, at least from Mark Rudd’s account of himself in The Weather Underground, is that he is genuinely repentant and a lot more thoughtful and self-critical about his actions and his role in RYM and Weather than some of the other former Weathermen and Weatherwomen — Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and David Gilbert in particular — have been. I don’t know whether he’s a good or bad candidate for the MDS board — I’m not involved enough with SDS redevivus and don’t know enough about Rudd — but I don’t think it’s fair to rule him out simply on the basis of having once been involved with RYM and Weather, or on the basis of what other people who were once involved with RYM and Weather may be like.

Unfortunately, Bernardine Dohrn is another one of the nominees to the MDS, Inc. board — something that I’m less than thrilled to see.

namaroopa,

For what it’s worth, the reason that I refer to Jonestown as a “massacre” isn’t because of any particular theory about “brainwashing” or the agency of the people who committed suicide. It’s because the hundreds of children and senior citizens at Jonestown, who made up about 2/3 of the population, were unquestionably murdered. They didn’t commit suicide; they were poisoned without their knowledge by other people. So calling what happened a “mass suicide” (as often happens in press and reference sources) is misleading in the extreme.

Actually, THAT’s the point. The koolaid joke is one way of raising the topic of cults, only to point out what one could never be a part of.

I think you’re exactly right about that. Something I didn’t mention in my original post, but which is important, is how the identification of the people at Jonestown as “cultists” is used to avoid thinking of them as actual human beings with real lives like yours and mine. People who make “Kool-Aid” cracks would usually never consider making similar jokes about, say, the massacre at Srebrenica or the Zealots’ mass suicide at Masada, or whatever. But when it comes to Jonestown, such horrible suffering is treated as perfectly good fodder for making snide little wisecracks about your partisan opponents, because of the rhetorical distance that you get from dismissing the dead as a bunch of basically alien crazies.

Alex,

I’m not sure the drowning-rescue case is the best hypothetical for the principle you want to prod me on, because the loss inflicted on the owner of the life-preserver is likely to be nearly zero, and the owner is unlikely to demand any compensation for it. Even if she does, it would be unjust of her to demand a level of compensation that’s disproportionate to the trifling loss imposed by taking the life-preserver. But here goes, anyway.

On my view taking the life-preserver entails taking on a debt to the owner of the life-preserver. As with any debt, you need not be able to repay the debt in full immediately; you just need to be willing to make a good-faith effort at repaying it as quickly as you can. Presumably the stranger that you saved from drowning might also chip in for the compensation—although whether she can be compelled to do so may depend on whether she was aware that you took the life-preserver without permission from the owner. In the case of something as trifling as taking a life-preserver that’s not otherwise in use,

Now, if you realistically expect that you and the drowning stranger together will still never be able to repay a substantial amount of the debt to the owner, then I suppose it would be wrong to take the whatever you’re taking, but I can’t imagine how that would come up in the drowning-rescue case. But in those other cases it may not be so obvious that it’s permissible to take the more precious property without permission.

In any case, I think that if you’re not willing to accept a financial burden, if necessary, as the cost of saving someone from drowning, then what you’re doing doesn’t deserve the name of virtue.

Alex,

Well, my own view is that pragmatic concerns play a role in specifying the correct application of justice to cases where justice alone leaves the question vague. It’s not that they can trump the demands of justice, but rather that they offer some guidance as to what the demands of justice in a specific case are, in that subset of cases where reflection on justice alone would underdetermine the answer.

I do think that some of the emergency cases you have in mind are morally permissible — including grabbing a life-preserver without prior permission from the owner in order to save drowning stranger, or, say, breaking into an empty cabin to survive overnight during a blizzard. But I think it’s a mistake to treat these cases as cases where some other duty or right overrides the duty to respect property rights. Property rights are not simply erased by emergency conditions, but rather the application of them is altered; so, for example, it’s permissible to break into the cabin, but only if, and to the degree that, the person doing so accepts responsibility for paying compensation to the owner, for the use and for any damage inflicted, later on.

Alex,

You’re right that some of the factors I listed in settling abandonment conditions for a given species of property sound a lot like conditions derived from pragmatic concerns. That’s because they are partly derived from pragmatic concerns.

My point of disagreement with the utilitarian position I’m criticizing is not that I think pragmatic concerns never play any role in deliberation about justice (as concerns property rights). Rather, it’s over the role they can properly play. For one, I don’t think that all of the factors to be taken into account in making judgments about abandonment are pragmatic concerns; I would argue that some have to do with agent intent, others are purely conventional, and still others have to do with the content of other virtues, e.g. courage or fairness. More importantly, my view is that the virtue of justice imposes some duties that have vague boundaries; you can justly lay claim to abandoned property, but doesn’t fully specify the exact conditions under which a particular piece of property counts as being abandoned. Precisifying that boundary in order to make judgments in particular cases can take things like calculations of aggregate pleasure, etc. into account. But the fact that conventional and utilitarian considerations play a role in fixing the boundaries of justice does not entail they determine the whole content of justice, or provide the sole reason for being just.