So I am thinking about starting a new series of zines for ALL Distro which is intended to put out interesting and potentially somewhat idiosyncratic writing from within the individualist, mutualist, & market anarchist conversations. Similar in format to the Market Anarchy Zine Series but aiming a bit less at being broadly representative of M@ tendencies and educationally focused, more aiming at putting out idiosyncratic views that any given individualist will hopefully find interesting but also will be as likely as not to disagree / want to argue with, and certainly where it will be presumed that I as editor probably disagree with at least something in everything that I am publishing. Occasionally historical, probably mostly contemporary material. Here’s a question I’ll throw out to y’all: (1) is this the sort of thing you’d be likely to be interested in checking out? (2) Any awesome ideas for a good name for the series? Something like “Individualist Perspectives” or “Individual Liberty” would be an accurate title for the series but I am trying to think of things that don’t you know sound totally fragging boring.

I see that my introductory post on “Libertarian Anticapitalism” has been re-posted over at Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS):

Libertarian Anticapitalism

“Well. Whether or not something comes off as ‘ironic’ depends upon your expectations; and on this point, I guess it may not be surprising that my expectations are not the same as those at the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I would say that a story like that of the Times Square zoning code is not only not especially ‘ironic;’ it’s really paradigmatic — a illustratively typical example of how large-scale, in-your-face commerce typically works in these United States, and how it interacts with the corporate economy throughout the world.”

Georgists always want to tell me that all of the absolute worst features of the State would be OK as long as they were accompanied by the Single Tax. “Borders? Oh, they’ll be fine as long as there’s a Single Tax to pay out to those who have been excluded.” “Eminent Domain for urban development? Well of course it will be fine if it comes with a Single Tax to compensate those deprived of their property.” I expect some day I am going to do a post about the bombing of Hiroshima and some Georgist is going to leave a comment saying “Well of course that was horrible, but the real problem here is that the dropped the atom bomb without a Single Tax to compensate the people in Hiroshima for the locational rents that they were deprived of. If locational rents were being collected from the non-atom-bombed parts of the world, there’s nothing you could object to, right?”

I agree that those would be bad reasons for abandoning "secularism," "anarchism," or "capitalism" as labels.

My reasons for rejecting "capitalism" as a label for individualist, laissez-faire economic views have nothing in particular to do with the fact that critics of libertarianism happen to associate the term with bad things.

My reasons for rejecting "capitalism" as a label for individualist, laissez-faire economic views (at least, on the version libertarian economics that I have an interest in defending) are given in the passage beginning " In conventional debates over capitalism, we are usually offered two major positions — the position of the pro-capitalist Right, and the position of the state socialists…." and runs through to the end of the article. See especially the note on how both the advocates of "capitalism" and also anti-propertarian and state-socialist opponents of "capitalism" tend to obscure the fundamental causal claim that they are both taking for granted. My purpose in talking about the meaning of "capitalism" is to highlight that obscured, presupposed causal claim; and to expose it to some serious questioning and debate.

Of course, maybe you have a complaint about that argument too. But you'd have to actually let me know what it is.

HTH.

My recent post On Being Pretty Much O.K. With That. (Factories, Corporate Secrecy, and Free-Market Anti-Capitalism Edition.)