Of course there is the matter of definitions. To me the agorist/left-libertarian definition of market and the anarcho-capitalist definition of capitalism are utterly indistinguishable. I understand a capitalist to be someone who owns and/or operates a for-profit business (scale is irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned), and capitalism to be the practice of being a capitalist. I understand the skill set of capitalism to be the same for both large and small concerns: run a tight enough ship to avoid “inventory shrinkage,” be a tough enough customer to keep expenditures low, an aggressive enough marketer to move enough merchandise to cover expenditures. There is definitely an upside in that successful satisfaction of customer wants is rewarded. Penalties dished out by a capitalist economy include failure to satisfy customers, but also include failure to drive a harder bargain than competitors with employees, vendors and other stakeholders. With or without the state, capitalism, I think, definitely has a “meek shall inherit the dust” aura about it.
My views on personality theory are largely influenced by the Three Stooges. Moe and Larry represent dominance and submission, respectively. Moe is a bully and Larry is a nebbish. Curly is a neither-of-the-above. He gets away with it because he is physically indestructible. He says “ooh, look!,” pointing at whatever sledgehammer or crosscut saw or other implement has been used to attack him. Self employment strikes me as an attempt to be Moe and Larry combined into one person. I don’t blame people for using it as a strategy for adapting to current conditions, but I emphatically don’t see it as a solution to “the labor question.”
]]>capitalismas a maximally-broad synonym for
laissez-faire,or whether they’re going to pack in a lot of stuff closely connected to the way that existing businesses operate; and whether they’re going to take Leftist concerns about capitalist modes of production seriously, or whether they are going to address them only to the extent that businesses collude with or profiteer off of the state, in fairly deliberate and direct ways. After all, I’m not an anarcho-capitalist; so of course I disagree with them about capitalism.
That said, questionable or not, Hess’s conception of capitalism
is Hess’s; and if we’re going to make statements about the motives behind, or the origins of, anarcho-capitalism,
as a political identity, then Hess is an important part of that story, given his role in coining and popularizing the term. And we’d have to take a close look at the details of what he’s saying, even if we think that he is, at the end of the day, mistaken.