Roderick: … would you run a headline saying that the find “challenges the law of gravity”?

We are talking about the O-A News here. Don’t give them any ideas.

... Because states are by definition territorial monopolies of authority over the use of force. Where you don't have centralized authority, you don't have a

... Huh? Why would he need to believe that there are historical examples of what he wants in order to believe that it ought to be brought about in the future?

... Why do you need to "bet?" Just pick up a book and read something about it rather than shooting off your mouth. In addition to some of the libertarian

Well, for what it’s worth, I think Tucker was wrong on Kropotkin, too. (I mean, wrong in refusing to classify him as an Anarchist. Some of his criticisms of Kropotkin were correct; I just disagree about the import of the criticisms.)

In any case, I don’t think Tucker’s willingness to accept Molinari or Spencer as an Anarchist is of itself a decisive reason to accept them as such. (Maybe Tucker used the word too loosely, or too strictly, or both; he has no more a monopoly on the word than Iaian McKay.) But it is a very good reason to complicate the massively oversimplified story that the deletionists want to tell about “traditional anarchism” and how the word has historically been used.

... Well, probably both, in different aspects and at different places and times. My understanding right now (which is very sketchy, and based mostly on sources

Stephan: Well would that make us “industrial economists”? It just seems awkward.

Well, if you follow the Dunoyer route, it would make you an “industrialist.” Which has the awkward double meaning, since it also refers to a specific line of business that somebody might be in. But of course “capitalist” already has exactly the same awkwardness.

I’m a libertarian who happens to favor, as a libertarian, a free market economy, and the “industrial economy” that accompanies it. Fine.

That’s fine. I’m for that, too. Although we may disagree about what tends to best bring it about, I think we do at least agree roughly on the goal, and on the framework for achieving it (i.e, consensual exchange and production in free markets).

One one level, there is a semantic issue. I am hesitant to keep shifting groun to capitulate to our enemies.

I agree with you about that. But perhaps not about who “our enemies” — at least, the ones that we really need to worry about — are. The fact that the effective enemies of consensual society have so often capitalists (e.g. bankers, players within the military-industrial complex, copyright monopolists, etc.) makes me rather uneasy about trying to revise and radicalize the word “capitalism” to somehow outflank them, or curry favor with them.

If they are gonna demonize whatever term we have for our preferred economic order, then we might as well stick to our ground.

I am not so concerned about the origin of the term capitalism; works have meaning after a while.

Well, I agree that terms change their meanings with changes in use. My point in mentioning the origin of the terms was (1) to respond to a specific hyperbolic and misleading claim about the history of the term that Jeff made above; and also (2) to suggest that perhaps those uses of the term “capitalism” are still actually in common use today, including still being used in some technical senses by people who consider themselves “anti-capitalist,” but who mean to oppose something other than what you mean to support when you call yourself pro-capitalist.

I also think that the libertarians here advocating this change are sort of catering to two audiences: normal libertarians, and non-libertarians–those who are opposed to the legitimacy of firms, hierarchies, bosses, division of labor, absentee ownership–employment, landlords, and so on. Those who push self-sufficiency and what I think verges on primitivism and agrarianism. By saying you are for “free market’ it seems to be vague enough to leave open the possibility that a “real” free market does not permit “exploitation,” free market “corporations,” absentee ownership, and the like.

I think you’ve got the polarity wrong here. People who like to lay on the “free-market anticapitalist” line are very rarely concerned with talking about what a free market *won’t* permit. (Except perhaps to say that it won’t have, e.g., patents, copyrights, or other forms of protectionist monopoly.) If you look at Kevin’s writing or mine or Roderick’s or Sheldon’s, I think you’ll find a lot more references to what fully freed markets will permit than you will negative references to what it won’t — i.e., that free market activity isn’t limited to corporate-capitalist business as usual, and that free markets can just as well include grassroots mutual aid networks, formal and informal gift economies, wildcat unions, social investing, strikes, co-ops, and a bunch of other forms of free-market activism and positive alternatives that fit awkwardly, at best, with the notion of all-pervasive capitalism. The point is a positive one, not a negative one, which is intended to broaden, not constrain, people’s conception of what a freed market might include, and to encourage them to think about consensual, grassroots ways of getting what they want. Given that understanding, I don’t think it’s a vice, or even especially peculiar, to point out that free markets allow lots of different kinds of people to get what they want, and that if there is enough demand for alternatives to corporate capitalism, then people are going to supply alternatives.

I agree the left libs have made good points exposing vulgarity and corporatism. But I strongly disagree that there is any good reason to be “left-” as opposed to “right-” libertarian. We libertarians are way better than the left or right.

Well, perhaps you have a different understanding of what the terms “Left” and “Right” mean than we do, or are using it in a different sense from the sense in which we use it.

Brian Drake:

A mutualist argument that gave me some pause was the claim that after self-ownership and first-appropriator/homesteading “external” (non-human resources) property rights, there is no system of property rights that follows logically from those premises and therefore libertarian (“Lockean”/Rothbardian/Hoppean) property rights are no more or less legitimate than the Georgist or Mutualist (et al).

That’s not what Kevin Carson says.

What he says is that accepting (the homestead principle and free market principles logically underdetermines one specific issue that pertains to private property in land — that is, the conditions under which land can be construed as having been abandoned by its prior owner, without an explicit declaration that it has been abandoned. (This is also potentially an issue with other forms of property, but it’s especially important with land, since people are much more likely to leave land behind than they are to leave behind movable property.) And he thinks that different communities in a free society may adopt different conventions for constructive abandonment which are more or less “sticky” (that is, in which it takes less or more effort to count as still holding property, and in which it takes more or less time before neglect can be taken to amount to abandonment). This is not obviously handled by a system of contracts, any more than what to do with a book you found left on a park bench can be straightforwardly settled by looking at the contracts that the prior buyer and seller of the book made with each other. They can make whatever contracts they want; but once ownership of the book is relinquished or lost, those contractual relationships stay only with the people who made them, not with the book itself. Maybe Carson’s right about that and maybe he’s wrong, but the issue does not at all have to do with some kind of global claim that every property rights regime imaginable is equally OK.

The mutualist holds a subjective moral/philosophic value superior to the property rights of the two contracting parties. Whether it’s rejecting absenteeism, usury, or rent of capital, the mutualist claims, as a third party (or as the deceitful second party – something Carson denies as legitimate), a higher authority over the expressed will of those who up until that point, are considered legitimate property owners.

This is perfectly absurd. If you’ve read Carson’s book, you’d know that he’s not for forcibly suppressing usury or the rent of capital. Neither were Tucker nor other 19th century mutualists. Unlike some libertarians I can think of, mutualists have not generally claimed that the prevalent forms of banking were violations of individual rights which could legitimately be banned under a Libertarian Law Code; their point, rather, was that those forms of banking would (they argue) be unsustainable and would be outcompeted by alternative arrangements in a market free of the Money Monopoly. (They held in turn that a free market in money would also have profound effects on patterns of capital ownership and landholding.) This is what Tucker meant when he said that Anarchist economics spoke in not in the language of decree, but of prophecy.

Anyway, I’m sure there’s lots that you might agree with and lots that you might disagree with; but what actually is there is importantly different from what you seem to think he’s saying. Why don’t you get back to us on this when you’ve read Carson’s book?

Stephan,

Depending on what it is you’re trying to express, different words may be appropriate.

(1) If what you want to express is “a peaceful, prosperous, cooperative society with a concomitant advanced economy,” what’s wrong with “industrial economy” or “advanced industry” or something like that? (Dunoyer described what he believed in as “industrialism.”) Or just “prosperity”?

(2) If what you want to express is specifically an economy characterized by “private ownership of the means of production,” then it depends on what you mean by “private ownership of the means of production.” If “private” just means “nongovernmental,” then cooperativists, mutualists, syndicalists, et al. are all in favor of that, too — workers are private citizens just like bosses and shareholders. In which case you may as well just say “a free market in capital,” or “a highly-developed free market in capital” or “industrialized free market in capital” if you really think your interlocutor is going to be confused about that.

(3) If what you want to express by “private ownership” is really something more narrow — that is, not only private ownership of the means of production, but a particular fetishized form of private ownership that you take to be the paradigm for private ownership — for example, private ownership which is primarily in the hands of entrepreneur-owners and absentee shareholders, and, in particular, primarily not in the hands of average employees, then go ahead and call it “capitalism,” if you want, but the important point is then that there’s no reason why it should be presumed that “we” are for that in This Movement of Ours. (But there are also alternatives, if you feel — as e.g. Roderick Long does — that the use of the term “capitalism” is too systematically confused to be worth the communicative trouble. For example, instead of “capitalism” in this sense, you might use “wage labor,” or “the separation of labor from ownership.”)

If, on the other hand, what you want to do is to come up with a term that will package-deal (1) with (2) and (3) all together, and pass it off as if it ought to be obvious to everyone that (2) necessarily produces (1) and that it produces it by means of spontaneously bringing about (3), then I’d suggest that this is better communicated by simply stating the connections you’re making, and perhaps giving an argument for them, rather than by trying to come up with a term that will bundle everything together without making the argument.

The fact is that the history of libertarianism is a history of struggles over words too.

I agree with you about that. But the words we struggle over have not always been the same. In the 1910s and 1920s, libertarians were struggling over the word “liberal.” In the 1880s, libertarians were struggling over the term “socialism” (see also 1, 2, etc.). As near as I can tell, the attempt to claim and radicalize the term “capitalism” didn’t really become part of libertarianism until the 1920s at the earliest (e.g. in Mises’s Socialism), and didn’t really pick up steam until the 1930s-1940s (e.g. with Frank Chodorov’s “Let’s Try Capitalism,” etc.). After World War II, the Cold War made the project of clarifying what “capitalism” was and what it meant seem especially urgent, with the context being the attempt to give a coherent explanation of the differences between life in the Marxist-Leninist countries and life in the “West.”

The whole of history of thought calls what we believe in capitalism. I’m sorry that some lefties are confused but there is no getting around it: the system we want is everywhere called capitalism and always has been.

Come on, Jeff, really? The word “capitalism” wasn’t used at all to refer to economic systems prior to the 1850s. But there were free market theorists before the 1850s; I suppose that what they believed in was called something other than “capitalism.” When Louis Blanc talked about “capitalisme” in the 1850s, he defined it as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others,” and when Proudhon talked about “capitalisme” in the 1860s he was talking about an “Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour.” Neither is clearly identical with “the system we want,” if that latter is supposed to be free markets. Proudhon’s understanding of capitalism is simply orthogonal to the question of a society based entirely on free association and voluntary exchange. Blanc’s may be orthogonal, or may even be mutually exclusive with, free markets, depending on what sort of “appropriation” and “exclusion” he has in mind. (Certainly, a lot of the appropriating and excluding that was going on in France in the 1850s had nothing to do with free markets and everything to do with state privilege.) Of course, you could just write this off as “confused lefties” (and I might even agree with you about Blanc; although I wouldn’t agree with you about Proudhon). But if the word was made by people who used it to mean something other than what you would like to mean by it, and if lefties have continued ever since to use it to mean something like what Blanc and Proudhon meant by it, and something quite other than what you would like to mean by it, then perhaps you should consider that the term is, at least, not univocal in its meaning. And that this kind of statement about what capitalism has “always” and “everywhere” been used to mean is hyperbolic, madly oversimplified, and misleading.