1. For the record, in the article above, I am not in the first place "discarding" the word "capitalism" or throwing the word "into the trash bin." I am in fact using the word capitalism, fairly extensively. For instance, in the title of this post: "Libertarian Anticapitalism." I have often used this term elsewhere as well — for example, in the title of the anthology I co-edited, Markets Not Capitalism.

What's going on here is not "discarding" the term; what's going on here is making clear that while I reject one use of the term — the usage of "capitalism" that attempts to make it synonymous with free markets or, say, a "free enterprise system" — I am happy to use the term according to another usage — one which is no more novel, no less legitimate, and at least as congruent with common usage. Specifically, the use of "capitalism" to refer to the wage-labor system, or to profit-dominated society, as described above.

2. You might say that this is not the "real" definition of the term, but merely the "misunderstanding" of "socialists" and "misinformed capitalists." But I would then ask you where exactly you got the "real" definition of the term. If you want to contest the claim that "capitalism" has ever been defined, or could ever be used, with any of the three alternative definitions I discussed above, then I can only ask you to read a bit more about this subject before you hold forth on it.

3. If you want to admit that people have used those other definitions but that they were somehow wrong to do so, and that your preferred definition is the correct one, then I can only say that in my view there is no Real Definition of the word "capitalism;" the definitions of words are not written by God in letters of fire, but rather human artifacts, which we make in the course of communicating with each other, and no word has any meaning independently of the communicative use to which it can be put. And in this case, my reasons for preferring the use I put the term to, have nothing to do with some kind of fear of using unpopular words. If I was afraid of using unpopular or controversial words, then I'd hardly be using the terms "free market" or "laissez-faire" or "private enterprise" either; outside of libertarian circles, those words aren't any more popular than "capitalism" is.

The reasons I do have, have to do with the specific communicative purpose that I explained in the article. It's not because people think of bad things when they hear the word "capitalism," it's because making a sharp terminological distinction between (1) market forms, on the one hand, and (2) capitalist patterns of ownership and control, on the other, helps me to achieve a specific communicative goal when I am talking with people about economics. The goal, as I describe in the article, is to highlight a particular causal claim about economic outcomes (the claim that freed markets would naturally produce the kinds of outcomes I described under the headings of "the wage-labor system" and "profit-dominated society"), and to raise some questions about what the basis for that causal claim is, and about whether or not that causal claim is actually true. If using the word "capitalism" synonymously with "free markets" or "private enterprise" tends to block that conversation or obscure that underlying Capitalist Causal Hypothesis, then that is a good reason not to use the word "capitalism" that way. If distinguishing the word "capitalism" from "free markets" or "private enterprise," and using it instead to refer to something else that I want to question or to condemn (such as the wage-labor system, or profit-dominated society), helps to get that conversation started, and helps to bring out the underlying Capitalist Causal Hypothesis, then that is as good a reason as any to use the word "capitalism" in that way instead.

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

Then why can't you choose to form cooperative relationships and communities on the basis of race without violating individualist principles?

I'm not sure what you're asking here, because I'm not sure what you mean by "can" or "can't" in this context. If you're asking why you don't have a right to organize or support or join deliberately racially segregated apartheid communities, then my answer is that you do have a right to do that: you have the right to be an idiot in many ways, and to do many brutally stupid things, including this one. I certainly wouldn't dream of using force to stop you.

If you're asking why you cannot organize or support or join apartheid communities that without facing severe social repercussions, ostracism, condemnation, etc., including from other people who are professed individualists, then the answer is that just as you have a right to organize or join a community based on something so brutalizing and idiotic as racial identity and ethnic segregation, other people have a right to call you an idiot, and possibly to sever social and economic ties with you, or to nonviolently protest you and your stupid racist community for doing so: they are exercising their rights to participate in consensual social cooperation, and dis-cooperation, just as you are.

If you're asking me why you should not organize or support or join apartheid communities then my answer is that you should not support them because if you do that, then you are deliberately and profoundly shaping your interpersonal interactions on a basis which is by definition brutally collectivist, judging people by the unchosen, completely worthless status of the ethnic group they were born into not by their individual qualities as unique human beings, their personal choices and actions, their chosen affiliations or their earned merits. This is stupid in obvious ways: I have much more in common in every way that is significant to my life as an intelligent and creative human being with fellow anarchists, philosophy students, former pizza-shop workers, Auburn alumnae, hackers, comic book nerds, Western swing fans, Trekkies and archivists than I have in common with some randomly selected jackass who just happens to share the same pigmentation level I do. But the reasons it is stupid are also intimately connected with the reasons it is anti-individualist: because it proposes to found individual identity and relations social solidarity on a set of unchosen, unchangeable, inherited and anonymizingly generic traits that have a great deal to do with historical systems of fairly brutal collectivist privilege, but nothing in particular to do with the individual personality. Now perhaps I am mistaken about the importance of individual personality; or perhaps I am wrong about the importance of chosen, idiosyncratic and personalizing social connections over unchosen, inherited and anonymizing social connections. But it should be relatively straightforward why as an individualist I am concerned about them. Perhaps I am wrong to attach so much importance to individualism; but then, what you asked is why an individualist would care about such things.

You may think racialism is idiotic, but I fail to see how it must be condemned on individualist grounds, seeing as it's just a way of organizing communities.

If you thought that the point of this article was to argue that any and every (non-invasive?) "way of organizing communities" is equally good, from an individualist standpoint, as every other (non-invasive?) "way of organizing communities," then I am afraid you have rather badly missed the point of the article. Certainly that claim was never made in it, and if you're now asking, I absolutely deny it.

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