@CamelCase: re: “The basic feature of capitalism is private property.” – I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that line all by itself. There's some ambiguity there. – Brad S. @ 7:58 PM Central, 9/24/07
I felt like your definition was too vague. Just trying to get some feel for what capitalism is about. Seemed like a good place to start. Perhaps the sentence that I added shouldn't just go there at the end but I wasn't sure where else to put it. — camelCase 2007/09/24 22:06
Okay. In truth, I had intended it as just the beginning of what would go there. However, I gave two definitions. Insofar as we're talking about capitalism-2, the present corporatist economic order, wouldn't you say that it is dependent on systematic violation of property rights? - Brad S.
I suppose… My problem was that the starting definition had no mention of property and that seems to me, what sets capitalism apart. - cC
Well, there's a terminological knot here tied around terms like “capitalism”, “socialism”, “property” and “private property”. I don't know if you've been following the ongoing discussion on a few of the blogs for the past couple of years or so, but let me try to briefly illustrate… If “private property” is simply legitimate property held by non-state entities (i.e. it's all property not considered “public”, or *state*, property), then you're faced with trying to tell advocates of building Bakuninist anarchist collectives that the jointly held property of their collective (potentially a perfectly legitimate voluntary association in and of itself in a free market milieu) is “private property”. The thing is, though, that in their ideological framework the term “private property” has more specific connotations of injustice than simply “property”. The thing is, we have a panarchistic framework to offer our fellow anarchists. With just the tiniest amount of tweaking, we all get to “win”. Making that point successfully, requires a very careful honing of the advocates rhetoric… –Brad S.
re: “a free market economy with private property” – Unfortunately, phrasing it that way sort of begs people to ask the question “what would a free market economy without private property look like?” That, in turn, depends on how one defines “private property, as I alluded to above. A free market “without private property” would either be impossible (in that no exchange could possibly occur if nobody individually or jointly owned anything to exchange with each other) or else one is using flawed definitions of either “private property” or “free market”. Perhaps you should write more extensively about property in page on what “free market” and “property” means. – Brad S.
I've added text about property, including a link to a property page that hasn't been created yet, to the page on “free market” and removed the text on property from this page (as it's currently set up to serve in a disambiguation role between different concepts that have each been referred to as “capitalism”). – Brad S. 9/26/07 8:01 AM Central
I think something should be added to the effect that using capitalism with fellow described “anarchists” should be avoided due to the antagonistic nature of the word. Adding a disclaimer about the differences is nice, but does it address the issue of how “capitalism” relates to Agorist philosophy and left libertarianism?
- Nic