Capitalism

The word “capitalism” is an antagonym, meaning that it has at least two commonly used definitions that are completely at odds with (antagonistic to) each other:

1. A free market economy.
2. The present state-subsidized corporatist economic order or its features (e.g. the prevalence of absentee-ownership and wage-labor).

Both zealous advocates and opponents of “capitalism” tend to overlook, downplay, ignore, deny or be unaware of the difference.

Most agorists tend to use the second definition of “capitalism.”

In An Agorist Primer (p. 30), Samuel Edward Konkin III wrote

Sometimes the terms “free enterprise” and “capitalism” are used to mean “free market.” Capitalism means the ideology (ism) of capital or capitalists. Before Marx came along, the pure free-marketeer Thomas Hodgskin has already used the term capitalism as a pejorative; capitalists were trying to use coercion — the State — to restrict the market. Capitalism, then, does not describe a free market but a form of statism…

Konkin never opposed wage labor on principle, but he was not entirely comfortable with it. In a foot note of New Libertarian Manifesto, he wrote that “the whole concept of 'worker-boss' is a holdover from feudalism…”

In J. Neil Schulman's novel Alongside Night (pp. 249-250), the character Dr. Merce Rampart declares himself a “foe of the corporate capitalists” and states that

Agorist theory recognizes that most of the evils attributed to capitalism were true of it—but caused by its historic role of private industry working hand in hand with governments. An extreme form of this is fascism.

When using the word capitalism in context with agorism, left libertarianism, or any form of market anarchism, one should be careful with the way the word is portrayed and conscious of the audience one speaks to.

To appeal to a more “left” based audience, the use of the word might defeat any chance of valuable alliances before a real relationship ever begins.

There is a clear and blatant difference between capitalism in the free market sense and capitalism in the corporatist sense.