> OWS isn't about forcible takeovers, it's about about regaining the constitutional power of our votes. Well, damn. Sounds like OWS sucks more than I thought it did. In all seriousness, this "constitutional power of our votes" thing is the same old snake oil that voting liberals have been selling year after year, from the Dean primary campaign to the 2006 Congressional takeover to the 2008 election on down. There have been seismic shifts in the partisan composition of government 3 times in the last 3 election cycles and virtually nothing about the status quo of economic privilege changed under any of these governments -- not the wars, not the bailouts, not the military-industrial porkfest, not the war on the poor, not the Goldman-Sachs-approved Treasury Dept., not the corporate domination of every economic policy proposal being issued from Congress or the President, nothing. Looking at the evidence, you might conclude that that status quo is completely insulated from votes -- that voting different politicians or different parties into power is not an efficacious means of making social change. Now, you could react to this realization by saying, "Damn, see how the economically privileged keep beating us no matter how often we try to throw the schmucks out? We need to vote *even harder* until they start listening to us!" Or you could say, "Damn, see how the economically privileged keep beating us? We need *new laws* to make sure that politicians have to listen to ordinary voters. Just as soon as we can find a politician who will listen to our demand that they pass them!" I'm not sure either of these strategies has much to recommend it; certainly, they are not strategies recommended by their past successes. On the other hand, you might say, "Damn, this electoral politics is a rigged game. Maybe we need to [find some other ways](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_action) of making social change, which don't depend on working through the same partisan processes and closed-off power structures that got us into this mess." This is the strategy I recommend. As for the claim that sit-ins "inevitably devolve into violence" on the part of the protesters, well, [that's not true](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins).

> OWS isn't about forcible takeovers, it's about about regaining the constitutional power of our votes. Well, damn. Sounds like OWS sucks more than I thought it did. In all seriousness, this "constitutional power of our votes" thing is the same old snake oil that voting liberals have been selling year after year, from the Dean primary campaign to the 2006 Congressional takeover to the 2008 election on down. There have been seismic shifts in the partisan composition of government 3 times in the last 3 election cycles and virtually nothing about the status quo of economic privilege changed under any of these governments -- not the wars, not the bailouts, not the military-industrial porkfest, not the war on the poor, not the Goldman-Sachs-approved Treasury Dept., not the corporate domination of every economic policy proposal being issued from Congress or the President, nothing. Looking at the evidence, you might conclude that that status quo is completely insulated from votes -- that voting different politicians or different parties into power is not an efficacious means of making social change. Now, you could react to this realization by saying, "Damn, see how the economically privileged keep beating us no matter how often we try to throw the schmucks out? We need to vote *even harder* until they start listening to us!" Or you could say, "Damn, see how the economically privileged keep beating us? We need *new laws* to make sure that politicians have to listen to ordinary voters. Just as soon as we can find a politician who will listen to our demand that they pass them!" I'm not sure either of these strategies has much to recommend it; certainly, they are not strategies recommended by their past successes. On the other hand, you might say, "Damn, this electoral politics is a rigged game. Maybe we need to [find some other ways](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_action) of making social change, which don't depend on working through the same partisan processes and closed-off power structures that got us into this mess." This is the strategy I recommend. As for the claim that sit-ins "inevitably devolve into violence" on the part of the protesters, well, [that's not true](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins).

Well, if it helps, the book is also available for free on the Internet ....

Um…how did this suddenly segue into “support the troops!”? And why?

I could be mistaken, but my interpretation when I read that was that the cop author is thinking of himself as part of the “troops” you are supposed to support.

There has been a really big PR and internal propaganda push over the past several years — a lot of it from the NYPD specifically — to get more people thinking of cops, and more cops thinking of themselves, as soldiers, tasked with fighting a domestic counter-insurgency against an omnipresent “enemy.” I think this is most likely just an unreflective expression of that view.

The reason he “has” to be out there threatening to beat up #OWS protesters is because when it comes to Occupation, the NYPD doesn’t tolerate any competition.

n8chz:

to hammer home (further) the point that the solutions to the big, hard social problems will be found (if at all) in the private sector, with always ample documentaries about for-profit enterprises beating non-profit philanthropy at its own game.

I agree that this is a common (ab)use of the term — that this is exactly what neoliberal apologists are usually talking about when they talk about the economic statist-quo as being “entrepreneurial.” But my point is that the neoliberal rhetoric on this point is deceptive and systematically misleading. They talk themselves blue about “entrepreneurship” but what they mean is really only a very narrow and politically constrained form of opportunity-seeking, which operates against a backdrop of extremely rigid controls on the kinds of discovery and initiative that are allowable, and the permissible forms that they could take. (In particular, limiting what you’re willing to consider to discovery and initiative carried out by highly formalized, commercial-sector, for-profit businesses, at the expense of ignoring, or actively suppressing, the same from informal, grassroots, not-for-profit or otherwise not-stereotypically-commercial social actors — by means of political privileges like IP laws, “development” grants, sweetheart “privatization” contracts to monopolistic corporations, land monopoly, bank bailouts, et cetera.) But then what you have is just another politically-driven, selectively-presented sham. Initiative and discovery have no essential connection with the adoption of monetary gain over other possible motives, or with top-down ownership rather than co-operative ownership.

I understand entrepreneuship to mean going into business for oneself.

O.K. The way I use the term is related to that but not limited to that. One of the things that I’ve found genuinely useful in the work of Austrian economists (not just recently — the theme runs throughout their 20th century work) is the discussion of entrepreneurship as a practice of discovery — the decentralized discovery of unmet needs and the creative effort to devise new ways of meeting them (on which see Mises, Kirzner, etc.). “Going into business for oneself” is one example — the only really prominent example that’s available to so long as the hothouse conditions of state capitalism cause cash-obsessed bottom-line businesses to grow out of control, and the rest of the ecosystsem (the rest of us) to wilt from the heat. But there isn’t any essential conceptual link with a capitalistic structure of ownership, a cash payoff or a commercializing attitude. (Austrians will constantly talk about how entrepreneurship is driven by the expectation of “profit.” But “profit” too can be understood in a cash-balance sense or it can be understood in a broader sense, not necessarily connected with commercial motives or with exclusively private benefits.) I view Argentine factory occupations, food co-ops, Food Not Bombs and other mutual aid networks, “Really, Really Free Market” free-swaps, squatting cooperative community farms, Take Back the Land’s Umoja Village and similar efforts as being just as clear an example of entrepreneurial activity as legally licensed, Chamber of Commerce approved for-profit commercial startups are. Indeed, if you take the economic concept of “entrepreneurship” seriously — more seriously than most economists — then these really are clearer examples than the stereotypical business examples, since they happen without bureaucratic approval and without being juiced by state-created captive markets, political “development” grants, etc.

You might say, “Well, but if the economists created the term, then what matters is how they define the term, not how you wish it were defined, right?” But there is the meaning of the term, and then there is its application. If they claim that the term means any kind of profit-driven decentralized discovery process, where “profit” can mean any net benefit at all, not just cash returns on business — but then they only apply the term to talk about stereotypical business startups — then I think I’m entitled to take their definition seriously, and show how, if used consistently, it applies much more broadly, and hardly applies at all to the wilting hothouse ecosystem we see around us. If they can’t put the word to a good, honest use, I’ll emphatically say that I am happy to expropriate it.

The dream of 100% self-employment seems to be one of universal yeomanry of sorts, …

Well, O.K., but that bit about no bosses was not intended to be a demand for “100% self-employment.” If everyone ends up self-employed, I don’t have a problem with that, but work without a boss can be co-operatively owned and organized just as easily as it can be individually owned and organized. I don’t expect a world of universal yeomanry but rather a big messy mix of yeomanry, co-ops, union shops, gift economies, with a lot of people easily shifting from one to the other in different contexts and for different needs. People will be free to settle on whatever works best under the circumstances, and that may be a lot of different things. It certainly is not intended to mean everyone for herself and the devil take the hindmost — as if a market free of bosses just means that everyone should be cut loose to make her own way on her own personal labor and savings — without co-operative enterprises to join or networks of mutual aid or cultures of solidarity to fall back on. Those forms of social co-operation, mutual aid, solidarity, etc. are just as much a part of individual initiative and market processes — as I see them — as are stereotypically businesslike activities.

Yeah, I've already seen this show. I know how it ends. @: "Yes... yes... This is a fertile land and we will thrive. We will live free in this revolution and we will call it... The Revolution." Bolshie: "I think we should call it -- your grave! Thoroughly smash the rotting counter-revolutionary revisionist line, comrades!" @: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" Bolshie: "Ha ha ha, mine is an evil laugh, now die!"

"I am my own law, an individual fascist." - OP Well, at least there is something we can all agree on.

this is what i’m talking about. i haven’t read the book and don’t think anything about what it’s about. i’m referring to the arguments made like yours above.

You may be referring to it, but you don’t seem to have understood it. The argument that I made above has nothing essentially to do with whether you should choose to call market freedom or individual property “capitalism” or whether you should choose to call them something else. That was your argument (that “we” should not be so hasty, or so lazy). I have my own views and I’ve made my own choices on that, but neither the main argument of the book, nor the argument I just posted above has anything to do with that rhetorical choice. The primary argument I’m making above is that whatever you call market exchange, individual ownership, entrepreneurial discovery, etc., those things do not necessarily produce the set of substantive economic outcomes (large inequalities of wealth, the concentration of capital in the hands of a few highly centralized corporations, the predominance of rent and wage-labor, the corporate economy, etc. etc.) that many people (both pro-”capitalist” and anti-”capitalist”) have traditionally said that they produce. You can signal the distinction by distinguishing “the market form” from “capitalistic patterns of ownership” (as we do), or you can signal it with some completely different set of terms (“laissez-faire” vs. “corporatism,” “clean” capitalism vs. “crony” capitalism, “zaxlebax” vs. “brabubrabu”, whatever). What I care about is the capacity to clearly see and explain the difference between the market form and stereotypically “corporate” or “capitalist” outcomes in the patterns of ownership and employment. Use whatever set of terms makes it easiest for you to see that and explain it.

most of us can agree that capitalism, for everyday purposes (the ones that matter) means “the private ownership of the means of production”.

I entered into the “terminology debate” about what “capitalism” means and where the term comes from only because you brought it up, in the course of making the completely unsourced and factually mistaken claim that we were introducing a “replacement term” for the traditional term “capitalism,” apparently because we are too lazy to defend a meaning that is “already sorted out.” Actually, the meaning of the term “capitalism” is very much more complicated than that, and your terminological dispute against our usage — is, as far as I can tell, a matter of completely unsourced, and factually mistaken claims about the way the term has been, and is currently, used.

… most of us can agree that capitalism, for everyday purposes (the ones that matter) means “the private ownership of the means of production”.

Well, I’m glad that most of you can agree. But the point of mentioning actual sources was to provide evidence that actually a lot of people have used the term in different ways from the way you think “most of us can agree” on. In any case, your proposed definition doesn’t actually solve the problem of conflating market forms with the wage-labor system and the corporate economy. You could use it to mean the former, or you could use it to mean the latter, or you could do what most people do, which is to simply jumble both together as if they were the same thing. My main interest, again, is to un-jumble the mess, and to defend the claim that the one part (market process) does not necessarily produce the other part (concentrated control of ownership and employment). If our particular set of terminological distinctions don’t help you out in getting clear on that point, but some other set does, that’s fine. I’m interested mainly in the economic argument, not in the language that is used to express it.

The term “capitalism” was introduced by anti-capitalists but not by Marx. Its most notable early appearance is in Louis Blanc’s Organisation du Travail (1840), published while Marx was still a grad student in Berlin.

Fun fact: Marx himself actually hardly ever uses the word — “capitalism” (Kapitalismus) appears all of about 2 or 3 times in the whole three volumes of Das Kapital, and hardly anywhere else in all of his work. But he does talk about “capitalists” and the “capitalistic mode of production” all over the place, and when later Marxist writers took up the term “capitalism” from Blanc, Proudhon, and other early adopters (mostly French), it was fairly straightforward to treat the term as more or less equivalent in meaning to Marx’s “capitalistic mode of production” (i.e. a mode of production based on concentrated absentee ownership of capital and the hiring of employees to work it).

None of these folks, incidentally, understood the term to mean “a free market in land and means of production.” Some (Blanc, Marx) believed that a free market in land and the means of production would inevitably tend to produce capitalistic patterns of ownership and control. Others (Proudhon, Warren, Tucker) dissented, and argued explicitly that a free market in land and the means of production could possibly, or even would naturally tend to, undermine capitalistic patterns of ownership and control (in the sense that large-scale inequalities of wealth would tend to dissipate, absolute poverty would largely disappear, and the working class would become the owning class, no longer subject to perpetual rent or debt, and no longer dependent on relationships with absentee owners of capital in order to make a living); hence (they held) if you were serious about being an anti-capitalist, then you ought to be serious about freeing markets and abolishing the state. On this one, I side with the Anarchists.

Stephan,

Well, I don’t think I was denying that government benefits from inflation…. The claim that some companies also benefit, and do so at the expense of other economic actors, is hardly rivalrous with the claim that government benefits too. But it came up in this thread specifically in connection to a question about ways in which large corporations are subsidized; so it seems relevant to point out that early receipt of inflationary money-surges is one of those ways. The benefits which the state derives, while perhaps larger and certainly morally worse (since e.g. they pay for murdering Afghans and other noble projects), are somewhat less relevant to that particular topic of conversation, and hence less likely to get mentioned….

As for how “real” the “real advantage” is, well, it depends on the line of business you are in, and where you are in the queue. In any case the state does not simply print up money and use it to buy durable goods; rather, what happens is that one branch of government invents balance-sheet money, loans it out to banks in the Federal Reserve system, and then those banks turn around and purchase up a number of investments, very prominently including bonds from other branches of government. Then, downstream, the state uses that money to buy buildings, bombers, prison-camps, etc. The state gets these things for “free,” but not (directly) because of the invented balance-sheet money (which they have to pay back with interest), but rather because they can “pay it back” by taxing the rest of us. The bond-buyers essentially benefit (in part) by having one branch of government lay out artificially cheap financing by which they can buy into a share of tax farming from another branch of government. This is a rather different position to be in than your hypothetical builder. Unlike in a Greenbacker scheme, they are in fact upstream from state fiscal policy, not downstream from it, and the issue is not so much that their line of business would be less profitable as that it would simply be impossible. First recipients like Chase (say) essentially have no line of business at all except for the manipulation of sources of artificially easy credit, and have repeatedly shown that the main consequence of credit tightening up to reflect market realities is that they suffer from catastrophic cascading business failures, and would be bankrupt if not for literally trillions of dollars of assistance from both fiscal and monetary policy-makers.