is scanning early issues of The Liberator today. (The Garrison one, not the follow-up to The Masses.) Inspiring moments include the famous “To the Public,” “Questions on War,” etc. Less inspiring moments: “drunken Scotchman” jokes on the “Literary, Miscellaneous, and Moral” page in the back.

Telling the non-libertarian left you are against “capitalism” when you mean you are against “a social condition caused by corporatism” is just as much a bait-and-switch …

But Danny, the FMAC usage of “capitalism” is certainly not a matter of using it to mean “a social condition caused by corporatism,” as if any old socio-economic condition would qualify, so long as, or insofar as, it is caused by corporatism.

When I say that I am opposed to capitalism, I am saying quite specifically that I oppose a certain set of social and economic conditions. In particular (1) the dependence of most workers on employer-employee relationships, (2) the concentration of ownership of the means of production primarily into the hands of professional capitalists and centralized corporations, and (3) the predominance of a fairly totalizing sort of commercialism and a fairly narrow sort of profit-motive in social relations. Not (only) because I think that (1)-(3) are effects of political corporatism, but because I think these conditions are fragged up in their own right.

You may of course disagree that (1), (2) or (3) is really a social problem; you may even deny that some or all of them are social realities at all. But neither FMAC’s dispute with non-libertarian leftists, nor our dispute with non-leftist libertarians, has any basic dependence on a dispute about the definitions of words. It has to do with questioning a specific causal claim about the relationship between private property and markets, on the one hand, and capitalistic social relationships, on the other.

As I commented elsewhere:

… when some of our fellow libertarians go around defending (for example) giant corporations or third-world sweatshops … it’s not clear that the difference between those libertarians’ defense of “capitalism,” and their critics’ opposition to “capitalism” is just a matter of differences in the use of words. It’s not just that sweatshop-defending libertarians are using the word “capitalism” to mean “free markets,” and defending that. Rather, what they have in mind seems to be a particular kind of causal claim. They think that they are for free markets. And they think that free markets will (among other things) inevitably tend to produce giant corporations and sweatshop labor conditions in very poor parts of the world. So they think that they need to defend that, in addition to defending free markets, on the principle that if you endorse a system you need to take what comes. But the thing to do here is not to back up and say, “Well, they should keep defending what they are defending, but they should stop calling it ‘capitalism,’ and call it something else instead.” Rather what they need to do is see that the central causal claim about free markets is false.

As for this:

Whereas the classical meaning of capitalism is unmistakable: “private ownership of the means of production.”

… I see your completely unsourced declaration that this is “the classical meaning of capitalism,” but I don’t see your argument, or any indication of what “classics” you have in mind. There are other uses of the term that go back to the 1840s, and sources today are not at all unanimous on what they mean by it either. In any case, though, if we are going to stick with “private ownership,” that doesn’t help settle the question, either.

And as for the vibes that these things give off, what non-libertarian leftists really do or really do not hate, etc., well, really, who cares? I’m not particularly interested in the emotional life of the non-libertarian left; I am interested in what they mean by what they say, what they can argue for themselves, what kind of arguments they might be given reasons to accept, and what those reasons might plausibly look like.

Telling the non-libertarian left you are against “capitalism” when you mean you are against “a social condition caused by corporatism” is just as much a bait-and-switch …

But Danny, the FMAC usage of “capitalism” is certainly not a matter of using it to mean “a social condition caused by corporatism,” as if any old socio-economic condition would qualify, so long as, or insofar as, it is caused by corporatism.

When I say that I am opposed to capitalism, I am saying quite specifically that I oppose a certain set of social and economic conditions. In particular (1) the dependence of most workers on employer-employee relationships, (2) the concentration of ownership of the means of production primarily into the hands of professional capitalists and centralized corporations, and (3) the predominance of a fairly totalizing sort of commercialism and a fairly narrow sort of profit-motive in social relations. Not (only) because I think that (1)-(3) are effects of political corporatism, but because I think these conditions are fragged up in their own right.

You may of course disagree that (1), (2) or (3) is really a social problem; you may even deny that some or all of them are social realities at all. But neither FMAC’s dispute with non-libertarian leftists, nor our dispute with non-leftist libertarians, has any basic dependence on a dispute about the definitions of words. It has to do with questioning a specific causal claim about the relationship between private property and markets, on the one hand, and capitalistic social relationships, on the other.

As I commented elsewhere:

… when some of our fellow libertarians go around defending (for example) giant corporations or third-world sweatshops … it’s not clear that the difference between those libertarians’ defense of “capitalism,” and their critics’ opposition to “capitalism” is just a matter of differences in the use of words. It’s not just that sweatshop-defending libertarians are using the word “capitalism” to mean “free markets,” and defending that. Rather, what they have in mind seems to be a particular kind of causal claim. They think that they are for free markets. And they think that free markets will (among other things) inevitably tend to produce giant corporations and sweatshop labor conditions in very poor parts of the world. So they think that they need to defend that, in addition to defending free markets, on the principle that if you endorse a system you need to take what comes. But the thing to do here is not to back up and say, “Well, they should keep defending what they are defending, but they should stop calling it ‘capitalism,’ and call it something else instead.” Rather what they need to do is see that the central causal claim about free markets is false.

As for this:

Whereas the classical meaning of capitalism is unmistakable: “private ownership of the means of production.”

… I see your completely unsourced declaration that this is “the classical meaning of capitalism,” but I don’t see your argument, or any indication of what “classics” you have in mind. There are other uses of the term that go back to the 1840s, and sources today are not at all unanimous on what they mean by it either. In any case, though, if we are going to stick with “private ownership,” that doesn’t help settle the question, either.

And as for the vibes that these things give off, what non-libertarian leftists really do or really do not hate, etc., well, really, who cares? I’m not particularly interested in the emotional life of the non-libertarian left; I am interested in what they mean by what they say, what they can argue for themselves, what kind of arguments they might be given reasons to accept, and what those reasons might plausibly look like.

 3.In any case, the low-altitude firebombing of Tokyo, and the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not
“military operations aimed at military targets,” unless your notion of a
“military target” is so expansive that it could encompass entire urban
centers encompassing hundreds of thousands of people in residential
neighborhoods. In reality, all three targets were deliberately chosen in
order to inflict the most damage and the greatest number of deaths
among ordinary people. The idea was that this would break “enemy”
morale. Which no doubt it did — but by methods no different from those
of the Condor  Legion in Guernica, or of the Japanese air force in Shanghai, or, for that matter, the Einsatzgruppen SS in their wartime
round-ups and massacres throughout the eastern front. (I hope that you
don’t intend to argue that deliberately massacreing civilians in
wartime, if there is some war aim to be advanced by it, is itself
morally different in some significant way from, say, the Gulags, or
Auschwitz. But if you do intend to argue that, I’d certainly need to know why.)

4. I don’t want to get into a long argument about different methods of
estimating of the civilian death toll of the Vietnam War, but the number
I cited is one of a range of commonly-printed estimates of the total
civilian death toll from the war. It is at the high end of the range,
but most other estimates are of the same order of magnitude, ranging
between about 1,000,000 and 4,000,000 total deaths (*).  It is not an
estimate of the death toll (only) from bombing North Vietnam. I may have made this less clear than I could have by including the Vietnam War death toll alongside the death toll of specific bombing raids. But in any case, by more or less all estimates, the U.S. military and allied governments killed several times more civilians in their ground combat, napalm “air support,” etc. for their “counterinsurgency” war in South Vietnam, than they did during their bombing of North Vietnam (as horrible as that bombing was).

(* This particular one was published by a the Vietnamese government
ministry in 1995. That might be a reason to worry that they are
exaggerating for political purposes, but at the time the Vietnamese
government was actually seeking normalized trade relations with the
U.S., and the publication of the figures required them to admit that
they had been lying about death tolls throughout the war, in order to
minimize the totals and to preserve morale. Hirschman et al.’s
“Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New
Estimate” (1995) used demographic methods to get an estimate of just
under or just over 1,000,000 from 1965-1975, Robert McNamara published
an estimate of about 1.2 million civilian deaths 1960-1975, etc. Lowball
estimates like Lewy’s claim only about a quarter million civilian
deaths, but without getting into the problems with their methods, I’d
like to let the “only” there stand in all its horror.)

 3.In any case, the low-altitude firebombing of Tokyo, and the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not
“military operations aimed at military targets,” unless your notion of a
“military target” is so expansive that it could encompass entire urban
centers encompassing hundreds of thousands of people in residential
neighborhoods. In reality, all three targets were deliberately chosen in
order to inflict the most damage and the greatest number of deaths
among ordinary people. The idea was that this would break “enemy”
morale. Which no doubt it did — but by methods no different from those
of the Condor  Legion in Guernica, or of the Japanese air force in Shanghai, or, for that matter, the Einsatzgruppen SS in their wartime
round-ups and massacres throughout the eastern front. (I hope that you
don’t intend to argue that deliberately massacreing civilians in
wartime, if there is some war aim to be advanced by it, is itself
morally different in some significant way from, say, the Gulags, or
Auschwitz. But if you do intend to argue that, I’d certainly need to know why.)

4. I don’t want to get into a long argument about different methods of
estimating of the civilian death toll of the Vietnam War, but the number
I cited is one of a range of commonly-printed estimates of the total
civilian death toll from the war. It is at the high end of the range,
but most other estimates are of the same order of magnitude, ranging
between about 1,000,000 and 4,000,000 total deaths (*).  It is not an
estimate of the death toll (only) from bombing North Vietnam. I may have made this less clear than I could have by including the Vietnam War death toll alongside the death toll of specific bombing raids. But in any case, by more or less all estimates, the U.S. military and allied governments killed several times more civilians in their ground combat, napalm “air support,” etc. for their “counterinsurgency” war in South Vietnam, than they did during their bombing of North Vietnam (as horrible as that bombing was).

(* This particular one was published by a the Vietnamese government
ministry in 1995. That might be a reason to worry that they are
exaggerating for political purposes, but at the time the Vietnamese
government was actually seeking normalized trade relations with the
U.S., and the publication of the figures required them to admit that
they had been lying about death tolls throughout the war, in order to
minimize the totals and to preserve morale. Hirschman et al.’s
“Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New
Estimate” (1995) used demographic methods to get an estimate of just
under or just over 1,000,000 from 1965-1975, Robert McNamara published
an estimate of about 1.2 million civilian deaths 1960-1975, etc. Lowball
estimates like Lewy’s claim only about a quarter million civilian
deaths, but without getting into the problems with their methods, I’d
like to let the “only” there stand in all its horror.)

2. I don’t think that the line between prison-camp atrocities and
wartime atrocities is really as easy to draw as you seem to think it is. You
write as if there were “military operations aimed at military targets,”
which juon the one hand, and (non-military?) operations aimed at
civilian targets, on the other. Many of the most inhuman crimes and
conditions inflicted on prisones at Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. were
specifically justified by Nazi war aims and military decisions. The U.S.
military, for its part, certainly repeatedly used “military operations”
in war and counterinsurgency as a basis for rounding up and
“reconcentrating” civilians in barbaric and lethal conditions (see for
example the extensive use of “reconcentrados” by the “Constabulary”
during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines).

2. I don’t think that the line between prison-camp atrocities and
wartime atrocities is really as easy to draw as you seem to think it is. You
write as if there were “military operations aimed at military targets,”
which juon the one hand, and (non-military?) operations aimed at
civilian targets, on the other. Many of the most inhuman crimes and
conditions inflicted on prisones at Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. were
specifically justified by Nazi war aims and military decisions. The U.S.
military, for its part, certainly repeatedly used “military operations”
in war and counterinsurgency as a basis for rounding up and
“reconcentrating” civilians in barbaric and lethal conditions (see for
example the extensive use of “reconcentrados” by the “Constabulary”
during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines).

I think there is an obvious difference between civilians killed in the
course of military operations aimed at military targets, and civilians
rounded up in concentration camps, deliberately starved to death, and
the like (as under communist regimes).  That’s not to say the former are
always justified; merely that it is not nearly as bad as the latter.

Well. A few things.

1. I know this is a popular opinion, but if you’re going to insist on it, I’d like to know why you think this is the case. War atrocities leave their victims quite as dead as prison-camp atrocities, and I can’t see even a prima facie why the victims of one suffered less evil than the victims of the other. Do you? Why?

I think there is an obvious difference between civilians killed in the
course of military operations aimed at military targets, and civilians
rounded up in concentration camps, deliberately starved to death, and
the like (as under communist regimes).  That’s not to say the former are
always justified; merely that it is not nearly as bad as the latter.

Well. A few things.

1. I know this is a popular opinion, but if you’re going to insist on it, I’d like to know why you think this is the case. War atrocities leave their victims quite as dead as prison-camp atrocities, and I can’t see even a prima facie why the victims of one suffered less evil than the victims of the other. Do you? Why?

In the real world, it’s obviously not – especially since many of the US’ “endless wars” actually were against brutal totalitarian regimes. . . .

Shame how all those dead civilians kept getting in the way of the brutal totalitarian regimes the U.S. government was fighting wars against.

U.S. bomber wings show up over Tokyo, planning to firebomb a “brutal totalitarian regime,” and somehow instead they end up killing 100,000 men, women and children in a single night, who were not part of the regime and had no control over it. They show up over Hiroshima, and in Nagasaki, expecting to drop atomic bombs on a “brutal totalitarian regime,” and somehow instead they end up dropping them on cities of hundreds of thousands of people, wiping out about a quarter million civilians in the process over the course of just over 72 hours. Years later, the U.S. government comes to Viet Nam, intending to wage war against a brutal totalitarian regime, and somehow by the time they leave, the brutal totalitarian regime is still flourishing there, but 4,000,000 other Vietnamese no longer are. A man with less perspective might think that this sort of thing was a sign that the U.S. government, like every other government, doesn’t actually wage war against “regimes;” rather that it wages wars on countries and peoples who are inevitably become the overwhelming majority of the victims of the war. Perhaps this was done in the hopes that by doing it, they might somehow get at the regime hiding behind those people in those countries. If so, then the question of justice here certainly turns on something more than just the quality of the ends for which these megamurdering means were deliberately chosen.

But it’s good of you to note that this massacre of millions has, on occasion, every now and then, in spite, of course, of the countervailing considerations, in the full light of objective reevaluation, led to wars which were in some sense unjust, and therefore worthy of condemnation, even if not worthy of being mentioned or remembered in the same breath as the victims of the U.S. government’s geopolitical enemies.