Stephan,

Agree with Jeff. Some of the left-libertarian opponents of capitalism shift their grounds. Sometimes they act like this is a semantic issue: that “capitalism” is not the best term to use to identify a free market/libertarian order, because of its origin or because of its current association with what is in substance crony-capitalism. But others explicitly oppose even “free-market capitalism”–they believe employment is exploitative by its nature, and so on.

That doesn’t sound like a description of one group of people “shifting their grounds.” That sounds like a description of two groups of people with different substantive views. Why would you present that as if people are prevaricating or being dishonest, when those who (for example) have concerns about employment don’t hesitate to tell you that they have concerns about employment, and that that’s part of what they’re referring to when they say they are “anti-capitalist?”

As for the views that the book presents, there are many different authors, and each has different views, but (1) I do not think that we could possibly be clearer that we are not mainly interested in semantic or rhetorical issues, and that if we spend any time digging around in the historical and contemporary usage of the word “capitalism,” it is solely in order to clarify terms and avoid talking at cross-purposes with the people we intend to talk to. (This is repeatedly stressed in my first essay, in Gary’s first essay, etc.) And (2) we could not be clearer that the concerns are primarily substantive concerns about employment, landlordism, structural poverty, etc., not rhetorical or semantic concerns about what market anarchists choose to call themselves.

It would be a mistake, though, to say that the concerns are concerns that “employment is exploitative by its nature,” if that’s being used to say that there would be something inherently wrong with any isolated instance of an employment relationship. My view — and the view defended in the essays in the book, insofar as the issue comes up — is that employment is made exploitative by its political, social and economic context. My concern is not with the act of wage-labor but with what we call the wage-labor system — with the extent to which people are driven into wage labor relationships far more often, and on far more desperate terms, than they would be in a free society. (On which, see for example Ch. 7, de Cleyre’s “The Individualist and the Communist: A Dialogue,” and Ch. 41, my “Scratching By.”) Since we’ve talked about this before, I already know that you disagree with me both about the extent to which that is true, and also about the economic and the ethical implications of it in cases where it is true. That’s fine: we have a substantive disagreement, and you can give your arguments for your view and I can give my arguments for mine. But I think it’s important to get clear on where the argument actually is.

As for what any odd person on the Internet may have said to you, I have no control over that, and I wish that the discussion about our book could be a discussion focused on the views expressed in that book, not on other views expressed by other people in other places. However, I should note that I’m familiar with db0′s writing; he is not a market anarchist or an individualist, and as far as I know he has never claimed to be one. He’s an anarcho-communist, and his use of the term “left-libertarian” has nothing in particular to do with the use of the term by market anarchist folks like ALL; it is really unfair both to him and to us to act as if the views he expresses have much of anything to do with the views expressed in the book or in other left-wing market anarchist forums. Maybe it’s regrettable that so many people have used “left-libertarian” to describe so many different things over the course of history; but of course the only way to deal with a situation like that is to try to be clear about the sense in which you are using your terms, and the book does say that it’s specifically a defense of left-wing market anarchism, not (for example) communist anarchism or Steiner-style philosophical geolibertarianism or Cato-style low-tax liberalism or whatever. We do also try to lay out in some detail what that amounts to, and it seems to me that it would be fairly hard to confuse the views we lay out with those defended by db0 or other communist anarchists.

You got it. The reason we called the book “Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty” is because we are afraid of “edgy” terms, and only want to describe ourselves with comfortable, milquetoast terms, which alarm no-one. Like “Anarchist.”

Jeff,

I can speak only for myself here, not for everyone who’s voiced doubts about the word “capitalism,” but I can say that my worries have nothing to do with worries about “the merit of capital accumulation.” They have to do with worries about the merit of capital concentration, i.e., the extent to which capital ownership is concentrated in artificially few hands, rather than being widely dispersed. (*)

So, when you refer to Haiti, I think you make a perfectly good point about the importance not only of exchange, but also of capital goods. But what we take issue with in the book is not the existence of capital goods (!) or individual property rights in capital goods; it’s the political misdirection and destruction of capital goods — specifically, the concentration of capital goods in the hands of a select business class, and the destruction of those capital goods which otherwise would be dispersed outside of their hands. (**) And in the case of Haiti, what you describe isn’t an enforced absence of “capitalism,” in the sense that we use it, but an enforced absence of what our introduction describes as the first of four distinctive features of “the market form,” i.e., secure ownership of individual property. Which I certainly agree has a lot to do with the political regime (including the U.S. Empire’s long record of trashing Haitian property, incinerating Haitian wealth, and murdering Haitian people, from 1806 to present).

So, the question at stake in the book, as I see it, is not primarily a question about capital accumulation but about who has access to and control over accumulated capital, and the claim we make (for the purposes of this blog comment, of course, this is just going to be a claim — we have an argument, but the argument is made in the book) is that a lot of facts about statist-quo economic relationships can be explained by the extent to which that has been politically determined — by the extent to which capital has been concentrated by a cluster of political privileges and the economic ripple-effects of those privileges. If you want to know why wage labor and debt so pervasive and so predominant as ways of “making a living,” then (we argue) part of the explanation for that has to do with the means by which the state has privileged incumbent capitalists, at the expense of, and while actively destroying, the capital of ordinary workers and would-be competitors.

-C

(* You might worry: well, if it’s dispersed, then you have a million people with hand tools; which is admittedly better than a million people without, but the real advantages of civilization come about specifically from large-scale combinations of whole arrays of capital. But widely dispersed capital doesn’t really mean that the capital cannot be combined or coordinated, any more than widely dispersed labor power — every one has only so many hours they can work in a day — means that labor cannot be combined or coordinated on a large scale. It just means that the coordination happens by means of cooperation and contract rather than by means of concentrated ownership.)

(** This can mean either its physical destruction — as when Urban Renewal and other forms of socioeconomic cleansing simply bulldozed people’s livelihoods — or its praxeological destruction, i.e., disabling a good’s its potential functions as capital and forcing it into the category of a pure consumer good — e.g. when people’s existing resources are forced into involuntary idleness by licensure schemes, zoning regulations, subsidized competition — including the massive subsidy to companies at or near the inflation spigot — and all the other ways in which the regulatory and monetary state does its dirty business.)

Anyway I have no sympathy at all for beholder-relativism (about aesthetics or ethics; I think that these views are not only false but actually moral vices). But I do wonder what someone who defends the view would say in response to this sort of worry. Presumably they can either (a) reject the Simonidean conception of justice, in favor of some different conception (certainly there are a lot of alternatives considered in the Republic; and others you could come up with to try). Or else (b) they can try to spell out the idea of what's "due" in terms that don't refer to an extra-personal reality, but rather to some standard of fitness or appropriateness internal to the beholder herself. (*) Presumably if they are willing to make this kind of move in respect to terms like "good," "right" and "beautiful," they're probably also willing to do it in respect of terms like "due" or "ought." Anyway, I wonder what you think would be the more promising (or threatening) move for the beholder-relativist to try to make -- simply to reject the Simonidean account of justice, or to try and drill down to give a relativist version of the terms that Simonides uses? Or might they try some other option besides (a) and (b) that I've left out?

* * *

(* You might worry: but you already have your reactions; and now you're supposed to see if they're appropriate. But if the only standard of appropriateness is an internal standard, how could it possibly fail to be, when it's your own reaction to start with? But that's only the case if the criteria on which the reaction was made are identical to the criteria that are used to judge the fitness of the reaction as a reaction. I don't know if that needs to be so. Certainly we not only have desires about things, but also desires about our desires -- I may not want to listen to opera, say, but I may want to learn to want that. And the reason for that may be either external or internal to me -- because of something especially meritorious about opera-loving; OR because I want to be a certain sort of person, or to have a certain sort of self-image, or to have a set of likes and dislikes that are noticeably coherent or eclectic or bizarrely juxtaposed, or ... It's not obvious that these sort of internal considerations have to bottom out in some extra-personal bedrock ... at least, you can get higher-order considerations, accepting or rejecting reactions as more or less fitting, without stepping outside of the beholder's head.)

Hey David,

Glad to see that the comments form here seems to be up and running again. So, here:

I definitely agree with you that beauty is something objective -- that the "eye of the beholder" is there to see something that's there, not to make it. And I think you're onto something in seeing how weird a beholder-relativist theory really makes our personal and social practices of praising -- as if the point of saying "That was a beautiful concerto!" were just to report back "Hey, I liked that concerto!" -- not to say anything about the concerto, or to tell me anything about my relationship to it, just something about yours. (Unless the expectation is that I ought to be sharing your preferences just because they are yours, if you bash me over the head with enough of them. But then that hardly seems like the kind of tolerant interpersonal understanding that relativists want to claim their views call for....) I think focusing on the ways in which this makes hash out of everyday practice in relation to beauty (or ethics, or ...) does a nice job of taking on the relativist where they think that they are strongest -- but where their case really is the weirdest and the weakest.

Anyway, on to some questions and concerns.

You write: "Justice is to “render to each his due” according to Plato..."

Is that Plato's definition? In the Republic the phrase appears as a quote from Simonides. But the quote is quoted by Polemarchus, not by Socrates, and Socrates argues that it's inadequate -- or at least that Polemarchus does an inadequate job of spelling it out. (Polemarchus thinks that the definition entails harming your enemies. But Socrates argues that justice as such cannot harm anyone.)

Cool beans. Then, as a mutualist, I could not give one flying fuck for being "anti-capitalist," in your sense of "capitalism," since capitalism is apparently for you anything which is not communist; and I am happily not a communist. However, you should be aware that your use of the term "capitalism" is at odds with what it was used to mean by the anti-capitalists who originally coined the term. Among them, Proudhon. It's that conception of "capitalism" that we are addressing in the book, not yours.

> what you have just described is corporatism, and not capitalism If that's the way you want to use the words, you should feel free. But keep in mind that a lot of people who criticize capitalism are very largely concerned with what you call "corporatism" -- that is, with the common practices of actually-existing professional capitalists, and with the system of political privileges that entrenches and safeguards those practices. I certainly have no objection to the claim that the power of very large corporations depends to a great degree on state violence and political privileges. In fact that is rather the point of the book. > let me put it this way - spend the next hour making sandwiches. and i will go out and "freely distribute them." any system that works past problems of exploitation is a workable system, but it does not sound like your system does. It's not "my" system -- I'm not a Communist Anarchist. I'm trying to explain to you that there are Communist Anarchists and their system, as they conceive it, is not dependent on government force. Whether or not it's an ideal or even a minimally tolerable system is a separate question. But keep in mind that most Communists have thought at some time or another about problems like "Well, if everyone can take from the storehouse according to need, what's to stop someone from just taking any damn thing?" and they have a number of answers to that question. (Usually involving a combination of general cultural change, social sanctions like ostracism where necessary, and/or the idea that goods will be so abundant, when the warfare state and its corporatist buddies are no longer skimming their trillions off the top, that people will be able to satiate their needs without causing general hardship.) Maybe these are good solutions and maybe these are inadequate solutions, but they are something more than just "You spend an hour making sandwiches and I'll grab them all for myself."

> what you have just described is corporatism, and not capitalism If that's the way you want to use the words, you should feel free. But keep in mind that a lot of people who criticize capitalism are very largely concerned with what you call "corporatism" -- that is, with the common practices of actually-existing professional capitalists, and with the system of political privileges that entrenches and safeguards those practices. I certainly have no objection to the claim that the power of very large corporations depends to a great degree on state violence and political privileges. In fact that is rather the point of the book. > let me put it this way - spend the next hour making sandwiches. and i will go out and "freely distribute them." any system that works past problems of exploitation is a workable system, but it does not sound like your system does. It's not "my" system -- I'm not a Communist Anarchist. I'm trying to explain to you that there are Communist Anarchists and their system, as they conceive it, is not dependent on government force. Whether or not it's an ideal or even a minimally tolerable system is a separate question. But keep in mind that most Communists have thought at some time or another about problems like "Well, if everyone can take from the storehouse according to need, what's to stop someone from just taking any damn thing?" and they have a number of answers to that question. (Usually involving a combination of general cultural change, social sanctions like ostracism where necessary, and/or the idea that goods will be so abundant, when the warfare state and its corporatist buddies are no longer skimming their trillions off the top, that people will be able to satiate their needs without causing general hardship.) Maybe these are good solutions and maybe these are inadequate solutions, but they are something more than just "You spend an hour making sandwiches and I'll grab them all for myself."

Cool beans. Then, as a mutualist, I could not give one flying fuck for being "anti-capitalist," in your sense of "capitalism," since capitalism is apparently for you anything which is not communist; and I am happily not a communist. However, you should be aware that your use of the term "capitalism" is at odds with what it was used to mean by the anti-capitalists who originally coined the term. Among them, Proudhon. It's that conception of "capitalism" that we are addressing in the book, not yours.

> what is that supposed to mean, exactly? That actually existing capitalists (think: CitiBank, Bank of America, General Motors, General Dynamics, the Fortune 500 in general, Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, the British East India Company, etc. etc. etc.) have largely depended on legalized violence (think: bail-outs, subsidies, government-granted monopolies, government land grants and natural resource monopolies, enclosure land-grabs, government suppression of bottom-up competition, government suppression of non-capitalistic alternatives, etc.; in some cases even the wholesale contracting out of government war and police powers) in order to establish and maintain their positions of incredible economic privilege. In an age of trillion-dollar bank bailouts and a trillion-dollar security-industrial complex, this ought not really to be very controversial. As for Communism, big government is certainly the opposite of Anarchism, but the point of Communist Anarchism is to develop stateless modes of community living based on community ownership of production and natural resources, rather than individual ownership, and based on free distribution rather than a monetary economy or quid-pro-quo exchange. The idea is, usually, that communities established along these lines will be so obviously preferable to market-based alternatives that anyone, given the option, would choose them freely; it is certainly not that a state or a committee will force people to join. I don't agree with them that it would be obviously preferable (that's why I'm not a Communist Anarchist). But it seems positively silly to me to describe it as "the opposite of anarchism." People can disagree over what the best sort of free community would be, and as long as they don't start shooting each other over it, it's likely that an Anarchist society would involve all kinds of different social and economic experiments growing up in different places, or within different social networks.