MDHinton,

If you want to lay down a precisifying definition for “capitalism” then of course you’re free to do so. My claim is merely that there are at least three major senses in which the word “capitalism” is commonly used which have more or less equally good claim to being “the” meaning of the word. So if you’re trying to understand what someone else is saying about “capitalism,” then it’s usually best to start by figuring out which of these things they mean. (Or, as is sometimes the case, whether they slide back and forth between meanings without acknowledging the change.) And if you are trying to make a point to someone else about any of the three things covered by the term, then it may be best to either use a modifier to make it clearer what you mean (e.g. “state capitalism,” “laissez-faire capitalism,” etc.), or simply to pick another term that doesn’t create the potential for confusion.

As for the definition you offer — “a process which I would define simply thus: investing one’s resources in order that they may grow” — seems to be an attempt to connect the word closely with the common use of the word “capitalist” (as applied to individual economic actors). That’s fine, but I think that you’ve made the definition too broad to quite line up with common usage. The textbook definition of “investment” is expenditure on capital goods, so if a “capitalism” is any process of investment aimed at profit, then that would include not only the factory-owner buying machines for her shop or the banker loaning money to businesses at interest; it would also include a subsistence farmer buying seed, a self-employed craftswoman potter buying a wheel, or a workers’ syndicate buying machines for their worker-owned co-operative factory. (In fact it would cover absolutely any form of economic activity whatsoever other than immediate consumption, anywhere, throughout all of history.) I think this is a mistake. As the term is commonly used, one of the distinguishing features of the capitalist is not just that she invests resources in acquiring capital goods, but that she then employs others to do some of the labor with those capital goods. Otherwise what you have is not capitalism per se, but investment simpliciter.

I’m well aware that individual capitalists often do lose out from government intervention. My claim isn’t that intervention produces net benefits for all capitalists everywhere; only that it tends, on balance, to produce net benefits for most capitalist enterprises. I mention some of my reasons for thinking that in my Fellow Workers articles; for more, I’d recommend Roy Childs’s Big Business and the Rise of American Statism, Gabriel Kolko’s book The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1915, and Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. The basic idea is that capitalists as a class, and especially the largest industrialists and financiers, have played a decisive role in the formation and the direction of the regulatory state in the U.S. (as well as Western Europe and non-Communist East Asia). They did so because they expected to profit from it, by using State intervention to create and enforce a system of subsidies and bailouts for big businesses, interlocking cartels, regulatory barriers to competition, and captive markets. This happened through new licensing requirements, new trade boards, new federal commissions, etc. They also availed themselves of State power to capture, bureaucratize, and bring under control the rising union movement, with the radical unions destroyed through imprisonment, murder, and deportation, and the conservative unions established through State privileges as a junior partner in the “tripartite” system of Cold War economic planning, alongside Big Government and Big Business. The main winners from this process were not mainly the idle rich, but rather the chief investors in behemoth corporations such as Ford, GM, GE, Standard Oil, Bell, etc. It actually shouldn’t be surprising that they would be the winners, either: if going into a line of business means facing down a byzantine maze of licensing requirements, regulations, red tape, bureaucracy, etc., then a big corporation with a lot of money and a lot of credit and a lot of lawyers will have the resources to bulldoze through that barrier to entry. A little start-up or a group of independent workers won’t.

P.S. “Charles” is fine, if that’s what you prefer.

Alex,

Anarquistas por La Causa has the most sustained discussion of this question that I’ve so far printed. I’ve thought for a while now that the term “capitalism” is systematically ambiguous, in a way which is likely to be misleading and to lead to just the sort of talking past each other that you worry about; I tend to think that the word should mostly be qualified or simply avoided in favor of more felicitous terms — “free markets” or “private property in the means of production” or “political patronage for big business” or “the alienation of labor” or whatever it is you mean.

Unlike the word “capitalism,” I don’t think that the same ambiguity attaches to the word “capitalist,” if you’re using it to refer to individual economic actors. That has a pretty well-defined meaning, i.e. a rentier of means of production, and I usually think very little of people who make their living that way. I don’t think that the existence or even the flourishing of capitalists is ipso facto an injustice or that it is incompatible with anarchy, but I do think that their ability to extract rents would quickly evaporate in the face of free labor, and that they are (not coincidentally!) among the most powerful allies of, and the most well-entrenched profiteers from, regimentation, bureaucracy, and systematic State violence.

Alex,

I’m not sure the drowning-rescue case is the best hypothetical for the principle you want to prod me on, because the loss inflicted on the owner of the life-preserver is likely to be nearly zero, and the owner is unlikely to demand any compensation for it. Even if she does, it would be unjust of her to demand a level of compensation that’s disproportionate to the trifling loss imposed by taking the life-preserver. But here goes, anyway.

On my view taking the life-preserver entails taking on a debt to the owner of the life-preserver. As with any debt, you need not be able to repay the debt in full immediately; you just need to be willing to make a good-faith effort at repaying it as quickly as you can. Presumably the stranger that you saved from drowning might also chip in for the compensation—although whether she can be compelled to do so may depend on whether she was aware that you took the life-preserver without permission from the owner. In the case of something as trifling as taking a life-preserver that’s not otherwise in use,

Now, if you realistically expect that you and the drowning stranger together will still never be able to repay a substantial amount of the debt to the owner, then I suppose it would be wrong to take the whatever you’re taking, but I can’t imagine how that would come up in the drowning-rescue case. But in those other cases it may not be so obvious that it’s permissible to take the more precious property without permission.

In any case, I think that if you’re not willing to accept a financial burden, if necessary, as the cost of saving someone from drowning, then what you’re doing doesn’t deserve the name of virtue.

Alex,

Well, my own view is that pragmatic concerns play a role in specifying the correct application of justice to cases where justice alone leaves the question vague. It’s not that they can trump the demands of justice, but rather that they offer some guidance as to what the demands of justice in a specific case are, in that subset of cases where reflection on justice alone would underdetermine the answer.

I do think that some of the emergency cases you have in mind are morally permissible — including grabbing a life-preserver without prior permission from the owner in order to save drowning stranger, or, say, breaking into an empty cabin to survive overnight during a blizzard. But I think it’s a mistake to treat these cases as cases where some other duty or right overrides the duty to respect property rights. Property rights are not simply erased by emergency conditions, but rather the application of them is altered; so, for example, it’s permissible to break into the cabin, but only if, and to the degree that, the person doing so accepts responsibility for paying compensation to the owner, for the use and for any damage inflicted, later on.

Alex,

You’re right that some of the factors I listed in settling abandonment conditions for a given species of property sound a lot like conditions derived from pragmatic concerns. That’s because they are partly derived from pragmatic concerns.

My point of disagreement with the utilitarian position I’m criticizing is not that I think pragmatic concerns never play any role in deliberation about justice (as concerns property rights). Rather, it’s over the role they can properly play. For one, I don’t think that all of the factors to be taken into account in making judgments about abandonment are pragmatic concerns; I would argue that some have to do with agent intent, others are purely conventional, and still others have to do with the content of other virtues, e.g. courage or fairness. More importantly, my view is that the virtue of justice imposes some duties that have vague boundaries; you can justly lay claim to abandoned property, but doesn’t fully specify the exact conditions under which a particular piece of property counts as being abandoned. Precisifying that boundary in order to make judgments in particular cases can take things like calculations of aggregate pleasure, etc. into account. But the fact that conventional and utilitarian considerations play a role in fixing the boundaries of justice does not entail they determine the whole content of justice, or provide the sole reason for being just.

Alex,

Thanks for the replies. For what it’s worth, when I was complaining about top-down ideas of “distribution,” I had most establishment economics in mind, and not just Marxist-Leninist-style command economies. I think it causes a great deal of evil in its state capitalist and managerial forms as well as in its state communist forms. I agree that the people who do it sometimes achieve the aims they set out to achieve (although they often achieve much less than you might expect); but I dispute that those aims are worth achieving at the cost of coercing any single person.

As for air, that’s a fair question; I think the answer to it is that all forms of property ownership allow for constructive abandonment of that property, but the concrete application of the principle for one kind of property doesn’t need to be the same as the concrete application for other kinds. Some things (land) can be left for long periods of time without being abandoned; others (air) can’t really be left at all without being abandoned; and most things (tools, chairs, books, etc.) are somewhere in between. There are lots of things that enter into a judgment about what constitutes abandonment in a given case; some of the salient issues include how easy it is to identify a good as previously owned, how easy it is to identify the owner of it, how much of a coherent separate existence it retains when you leave it, to what extent it could be recovered intact, how fungible the good is, how cheaply replaceable it is, what state it’s in when it’s left, etc. Since exhaled air immediately dissipates into an immeasurably larger atmosphere, from which the individual exhaled molecules become indistinguishable and in which they undergo transformative chemical reactions soon after they enter it, and since the molecules in air are fungible and almost costless to replace, and since the air exhaled is actually, unlike the inhaled air, biological waste that you’re trying to get rid of, air ends up holding up the extreme quick-abandonment end of the continuum. But being subject to instantaneous abandonment is not the same thing as being unownable; it just means that the conditions of ownership are of an especially flighty kind.

As for patents, I actually don’t know whether “owning a patent” is conceptually coherent or not; I think that advocates of patents have said things that are either conflicting or ambiguous about what constitutes owning a patent. If it just means “having the privileges conferred by patent laws or something sufficiently like them,” then that doesn’t answer the question of whether there’s actually any legitimate proprietary interest or not; you still have to determine whether the word “owning” is being used in a literal sense or a merely analogical sense. If it means owning an abstract object such as a scientific or technical discovery, or a multiply realizable set of structural properties, then I don’t know what that means any more than I know what owning the number 2 means. If it means owning a limited set of instances of that abstract object (such as the token of the fact in your own mind, or the tokens of it you wrote down in your notebook), I don’t dispute that you can own those, but that confers no right to determine how other people can or cannot use the token instances in their minds or in books that they own. If it means owning all the instances of the abstract object (including the contents of other people’s minds), then the claim amounts to slavery and is illegitimate as such.

I don’t actually think that the epistemological question here is as simple as foundationalism vs. coherentism. I do think that many philosophers are prone to make errors in a foundationalistic sort of direction, so moving them in a more coherentistic sort of direction may be dialectically useful. But I think the orthodox way of expressing both views ends up making a serious methodological error. There are points in moral deliberation where I think that the “mutual adjustment” going on is a matter of moral reality directly entering into deliberation, and cases where it’s appropriate to make foundationalist-looking appeals in light of that direct awareness (hence my interest in moral intuitionism).

As for the specific second-order intuitions that you’re discussing, I think that the view probably combines some genuine insights blown out of proportion, with some outright errors. As an example of the former, I think it’s true that there is a certain amount of reasonable variability in some of the rules between different species of property and that there may be elements of convention involved which can reasonably differ from case to case or community to community, but that many people make the error of drawing the conclusion that everything to do with property is purely conventional and can reasonably be infinitely varied. (The propensity is related to the sort of errors of inappropriate generalization and rigorization that Wittgenstein exposed in his later work.) As an example of the latter, I think that that sort of view is often reinforced by things such as the utilitarian willingness to subordinate all other forms of virtue to instrumental considerations about general benevolence, which I think is simply a serious mistake about the nature of virtue.

Alex,

Properly speaking, I don’t think it is a matter of “distributing material goods” at all. (It is not as if there were some central depot whence everything is passed out. If there were, we would be in an even worse state than we are now in.) The issue has to do with production and transfer; and the question is properly addressed by looking at individual people putting their labor into making stuff, and asking yourself whether they should be able to keep what they make, under what conditions they should be able to transfer it and to whom, etc. Starting from some set of prior top-level conclusions about the sort of “distribution” you want and then using that to derive the conditions you’ll impose on individual people’s livelihoods seems to me to be the root of a great deal of evil.

You’re correct that I believe that some things can be owned and others can’t, but I’m not sure you’ve chosen the right cases to lean on. I think that air can be owned, under the right circumstances; you own the air in your own lungs, and if you were to capture some air in a bottle (say for use underwater, or in space travel) you’d rightfully own that, too. I’d argue that the “abstract objects” you mention — shapes, numbers, ideas (in the sense in which two people can have the same idea), etc. — cannot be owned because the notion of “owning” an abstract entity doesn’t rise to the level of conceptual coherence. If you have some idea of what it would mean to own the number 2, say, feel free to let me know what that would be; but until I have some explanation in hand of what I’m supposed to argue against I can hardly be expected to give an argument against it.

A better case for you to ask about might be one where something is at least in the same ontological category as the things I think can be owned. Importantly, I deny that you can own people under any circumstances, even though people are concrete particulars like tables, coins, plots of land, etc. But I certainly don’t regard the distinction as arbitrary — anybody who suggests you can own people is wrong, and gravely so — and I don’t think that the reasons for making it are instrumental reasons, either. (In fact I’d argue that any moral theory which could countenance enslaving another rational creature is therefore wrong; slavery is more surely evil than any moral theory is surely correct.) The reasons that I would offer have nothing to do with the effects of slavery (bad though those may be); rather, they have to do with the intrinsic demands of justice. The point being that justice is something valuable for its own sake, not merely for its consequences. But I don’t think that understanding the injustice of slavery is a matter of listing a number of premises that have nothing to do with slavery, and then deriving the injustice of slavery from those premises. As an Aristotelian, I think it’s more a matter of having a number of interlocking ideas that mutually reinforce each other and mutually adjust one another in the course of deliberation. Some (a person’s right to control her own labor and to enjoy the fruits of it; the wickedness of tyranny) may be more obvious than others in a given dialectical context; so you start with the ones that are familiar to your audience and work your way out to those that are less familiar.

As far as “permission” goes, I don’t think your clarification of the point undermines what I argued. If there is a mob out to burn down your house for posting to your blog and I turn them aside — with or without your asking me to do so — I hardly think that amounts to my “permitting” you to post to your blog in any substantial sense. (At best, I permit or do not permit you to post in the sense that weather permits or does not permit a football match.) Again, “permission,” in the primary sense of the word, is only something that it makes sense to give where you the rightful authority to forbid as well as permit; otherwise it is mere imposture. This point has little to do with a distinction between acting and omitting action (although I do think such distinctions are morally relevant); it has a lot more to do with a distinction between offensive and defensive uses of force.

I also don’t think that all instances of resolutely fighting back against aggressors despite overwhelming odds are acts of courage. Sometimes, perhaps even often, doing that is rash, not courageous. In fact I don’t think there is any way of non-trivially spelling out which acts exhibit the virtue of courage and which acts do not without either smuggling in terms that already connect with virtue by definition, or else by engaging in a process of deliberative adjustment like what I mentioned before in connection with justice.

What if one thinks (1) that property rights are neither arbitrary nor contingent on extrinsic standards such as aggregate utility, but also (2) that “our [actually existing] property system” is in many ways systematically wrong and unjust? Surely if my position allows for people to be mistaken about the norms to have regarding property, it also allows for me to think that a lot of people actually are.

I don’t think we live in a world where the correct theory of property rights is very widely accepted, or where property rights are in practice taken very seriously—least of all the property rights of the poor and marginalized. I’d submit that if we did, there wouldn’t be an IRS for me to complain about. Sometimes property rights are trashed in the name of “compelling State interests” such as government regimentation of the economy, taxation, government law enforcement, militarism, and anti-terrorism. Other times they are trashed in the name of political privileges masquerading as property rights, and passed off as “the market at work” by the plutocrats and their intellectual bodyguard (e.g. copyrights and patents, government granting and enforcement of unearned land titles, most so-called “privatization” schemes, etc.).

And the idea that the government permits the super-rich to visit space by not taxing them 100% of their wealth is, on my view, on a par with the idea that I am giving you permission to post on your blog by not tracking you down and bashing your head in order to make you stop. The term “permit” is an obfuscation when it is not within the “permitter’s” rightful authority to forbid what she is “permitting.”)

On quite another subject, I take it that “courage is a virtue” is actually true by definition; one of the virtues is what “courage,” in the English language at least, names. The interesting question is what can properly be said to constitute courage.

Alex: “Involuntary dependence, of course, may be a different matter – but some people (indeed, perhaps most) may indeed want to be dependent on the police for their safety, simply because they don’t want to have to do it themselves, and have more trust in those forces than you do.”

That’s fine. Under a laissez-faire system anybody who doesn’t want to carry a gun is free to deputize other people to do the gun-toting for him.

But it perhaps doesn’t need to be pointed out that gun control laws — by their nature — require involuntary dependence on the armed forces for anyone who wanted to carry a gun but isn’t allowed to under the terms of the gun control. So the objection stands, on this point at least.

Alex: “However, I suspect you’re actually making the claim that people ought not to depend on the police forces for protection, regardless of whether they want to or not: because we can’t trust them not to abuse their power to pick on certain minorities (at least that seems to be roughly what you say in your post on Condoleeza).”

Well, there are two separate claims. (1) Depending (voluntarily or involuntarily) on professional armed police forces may be foolish, in that it exposes you to abuse or neglect by the pigs, because you have little opportunity for redress or self-defense. (2) Enforced dependence on professional armed police forces is dangerous, in that it corrodes freedom and contributes to domineering and abusive pigs, because you have no way to opt out of the system and no other choices about how to defend yourself. I think both are probably true but that (2) is much more certain than (1); also that if you knock out (2) then the dangers involved under (1) will be correspondingly reduced (because if the pigs aren’t protecting you, or are themselves part of the problem, then you can always take steps to get your self-defense from other folks or by other means.

Alex: “As I said before, at there are at least some checks on how police/military use firearms.”

I think even a casual review of how the military and police act would show that these aren’t even remotely effective. Why would they be? The checks are set and enforced by the police and military’s commanders, not by the people directly affected by their actions, so they curtail only the abuse or neglect that tends to embarass or undercut the existing structure.

Alex: “Generally, if you think that the police/military will pick on minorities, why won’t the civilian population if they have access to guns?”

Well, I take it that what you’re asking is why won’t the non-minorities in the civilian population pick on the minorities if they have access to guns. One answer is that the minorities will have access to guns too under a system with no gun control laws. (As a matter of historical record, the idea that gun control laws could protect minorities by disarming racial terrorists is an exact inversion of what actually happened, in the United States at least.) Another answer is that one of the issues with the police (the failure to defend people who need help) will be irrelevant when those people can defend themselves, and the other (active aggression and abuse of innocent people) is likely to be undermined to the degree that State-deputized professional police stop being the sole enforcers. The pigs can much more easily get away with gross abuse of other people’s rights in part because their special position, as the deputized enforcers of the State, tends to be used as an excuse, or a justification for, all kinds of violence that would never be tolerated by the courts or by your neighbors if it were being committed by private citizens without a badge. If you take away the privileged position that allows cops to frequently get away with murder, in the most literal sense, then I think there’s a corresponding decrease in worries about abuse of arms.

Alex: “I suspect that there is some reason to have a military force with guns for self-defence against outside agression (not sure on humanitarian intervention) – but I’m not convinced that you couldn’t introduce more checks on the goverment so as to prevent the use of the army against the civilian population. That would ideally lead to no gun ownership within a state.”

I’m not sure what you’re suggesting here. A system in which domestic police don’t carry guns, and the only people who do are regular military who can’t carry except when deployed in a foreign theater?

If so, then as long as that lasts you wouldn’t have (legal) gun use within the state, but it would remain the case that all the (legal) guns remain in the hands and under the control of the political classes, which is my primary objection. As a practical matter, it’s also hard to imagine how there wouldn’t ultimately have to be provisions for the use of guns within the borders of the state at some point. To take the extreme case, suppose I start making Kalashnikovs openly in the capital. The government tells me to stop; I keep making them. They send cops without firearms to stop me; I mow them down with my Kalashnikovs. Now what? Either they deploy military forces within the country to stop me, or else they don’t have a viable gun control law.

Alex: “If people like Cheney have access to firearms either way, how does giving them to everyone else at the same time really help anyone?”

I don’t think that Roderick intended his remarks as an argument against gun control legislation (although of course he opposes that). He intended them as a reply to an argument for it that opportunistic advocates might make in light of the recent events. The point being that Cheney, as one of the most powerful members of the political class, would have access to guns with or without stricter gun control legislation, so his recent misadventures don’t prove anything one way or the other about gun control.

That said, it does point the way toward one of the arguments against gun control legislation: advocates often act as if it just abolished guns from society. But it doesn’t: what it does is to mandate that the men of the political classes, or their deputized enforcers, have guns, and that nobody else does, as far as the State can reliably enforce its will. That is to say, that military or paramilitary forces under the command of the State will be armed, and resourceful outlaw gangs may be armed, and the rest of us will be almost entirely depend on the former (thus on the good graces of both the enforcers and the political class) for our own bodily safety. I can’t see how that’s a humane or reliable plan for greater autonomy and freedom.

I should note that I’m not actually concerned with (as you’ve worried here and worried elsewhere) the prospects of using widespread gun ownership to mount a successful insurrection against tyrannical governments. I don’t think that prospect is as easy to discount as you seem to think it is (lots of ad hoc guerrilla forces armed mostly with Kalashnikovs and rudimentary explosives have seriously contested, or even defeated, the armed force of world powers in recent history). But that’s not my primary point here; my primary point is about the way in which the situation created by gun control requires ordinary people to be dependent on a professional class of military and paramilitary “enforcers” and “defenders,” and the way in which that dependence is corrosive of freedom and conducive to rampant abuses by the contemptuous pigs. Cf. GT 2004-11-30: Condoleeza’s Right and especially my clarificatory comment to Fred Vincy for more on the theme. The basic idea is that gun control contributes to the conditions that sustain the perceived need for large standing armies, large regimented professional police forces, etc., and that those are corrosive to freedom and dangerous to us “civilians.”

I don’t think this quite comes under the heading of either 1 or 2. I do endorse 1 (as I’ve mentioned) and I don’t really care much about 2 one way or the other. But this seems to me to be a different argument from either.