The following article was written by Charles Johnson and published on his Rad Geek People’s Daily, February 6th, 2013.

All of the original work on this website is free content. It’s free content because I am against copyright, and indeed all forms of so-called intellectual property. Copying is not theft, and when you reprint, duplicate or imitate you don’t deprive anyone of the work or the ideas that they had. If you like it, or you’re interested by it, or you want to single it out for mockery, you can feature it on your web page, you can print it in your newsletter, you can hang a copy on a bar wall and throw darts at it. If you do any of that, I’d love to hear about what you’re doing, but you don’t need to ask permission. Copy, reprint, translate, make derivative works as you please. If you want to support the work, you can do that. But anyone found copying the content on these pages without permission, will be a real good friend of mine.

Several years ago, when I first put this website together, I dealt with these issues by means of copylefting notices and policy statements intended to make my writing freely available through a Creative Commons license. If you want to reprint this stuff under a Creative Commons license, you can still do that, all you want. But I don’t care anymore. It’s not enough to try to kludge the legalities of copy-monopolies from within. So-called intellectual property is in fact nothing more than a legally fabricated monopoly, suppressing competition and emulation, constraining creativity, confining culture, science and technology to captive, capitalist-dominated markets, and violently depriving many of the poorest and most marginalized from access to critical resources for education and life-saving medicines. The legal fictions of copyright and patent are despotic attempts to monopolize the human mind; power-psychotic burdens crippling and destroying individual ownership and the progress of grassroots culture and technologies; outrageous constraints on human intelligence and creativity; and a destructive and desperate protectionist scheme for the profit of powerful corporations. This web project is, in spirit and in letter, at war with every aspect of Intellectual Protectionism, in its principles — of monopolizing power, entitlement, social control and economic privilege — and in its operation — through increasingly invasive government policing and legal coercion — and in the disastrous global effects of patent and copyright restrictions.

This machine kills intellectual monopolists.

“Anticopyright” on C4SS Media.

As a libertarian feminist, I am glad to see that discussion of rape culture is coming up in libertarian circles. Shawndell Hoyt and Tiffany Thorne, two of my fellow organizers with SlutWalk SLC, recently talked with libertarian Jake Shannon on his show Mental Self Defense Radio. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence, as well as tons of misogynistic male callers who apparently think bringing up rape is “man hating.”  Such allegations are a common response to any discussion of gender violence, and have been pervasive in comments on previous blog posts and articles I’ve published here at C4SS.

C4SS Media would like to present Darian Worden’s Gun Control: Who Gets Control?, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“While we make society more compassionate — which cannot be done without cultivating respect for liberty and autonomy — we should respect the gun rights of all responsible individuals. It is amazing that an 18-year-old can vote and serve in the military, but cannot legally buy a handgun for personal defense, especially since it was once common for rural students to bring guns to school and leave them in the principal’s office so they could go hunting before or after school. If guns are viewed as familiar but dangerous instead of as mysterious sources of forbidden power, they will probably be handled more responsibly.” –Darian Worden

The following two comments were written by Charles Johnson in response to questions, concerns and misreadings regarding his article Libertarian Anticapitalism.

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 goalwhen 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.

—————

From a discussion of the article at /r/Anarcho_Capitalism:

Author here.

He didn’t even address the actual definition of capitalism, which is an simply economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Anything else is just a redefinition.

You know, part of the reason I put up this post is because I’m getting tired of seeing people throw out these completely unsourced declarations about “the actual definition of capitalism,” “redefinition,” etc., as if they had in front of them some stone tablets where God Himself wrote out the Real Definition of the term in letters of fire. If you think this is The Real Definition of the term, you need to realize that it’s not necessarily obvious to everyone else that it is, and you’ll have to tell me at least where you got that definition from and why you think that that source is so especially definitive, compared to all the others that I’ve reviewed from 1840 to the present. Because that definition may or may not (on which, see below) be the definition given by Louis Blanc, when he used the term in 1840 (in the Organisation du Travail); it’s certainly not the definition given by, e.g., Proudhon (in La Guerre et la Paix) in the 1860s, etc. If you’ve got the Actual Definition and these other usages are “just redefinitions,” then they are “redefinitions” that are as old as, or older than the Actual Definition you’ve got. Which would seem odd.

Anyway, that said, I probably should have included a note about the definition of capitalism as (say) “private ownership of the means of production;” my excuse for omitting it (not necessarily a good one) is that the piece already clocks in at about 3,000 words as it is, and my take on the P.O.O.T.M.O.P. definition, if I had included it, is that the definition is itself subject to the same confusions as the term “capitalism” is.

Here’s what I mean: “private ownership” may be used to mean one of two things. First, “private” may be used to mean ownership which is private in the sense of being civil rather than governmental. If that is the case, than private ownership of the means of production is simply encompassed by the meaning of my first definition, “capitalism” as meaning simply “the free market.” (What it is for a market to be free is, in part, that people are free to earn and keep property, without any de jure limits except those imposed by the need to respect the equal liberty of others. Government ownership, to the extent it happens, undermines the free market to that same extent, because government as such is a coercive monopoly, and what it takes, it takes at the expense of peaceful people’s property rights.) This is, importantly, the sense of “private ownership” that libertarians usually mean when they talk about the importance of private property, etc.

But on the other hand, “private ownership” may be used to mean private in the sense of solitary rather than common, or personal rather than social, meaning that the titles and the profits accruing from ownership go to a relatively few people, rather than being widely dispersed. But there are many senses of “social ownership of the means of production” which are perfectly compatible with free markets — worker and consumer co-ops, for example, are a sort of distributed social ownership, and non-governmental common or public property (of the sort discussed by Roderick Long in, e.g., “A Plea for Public Property”) are perfectly possible — and, historically, perfectly common — exercises of free association and individual property rights, just as much as are personal property, sole proprietorship, corporate ownership, et cetera. For a number of anticapitalist writers (including pro-market anti-capitalists, such as Proudhon), the specific reason they spend a lot of time writing against “private ownership of the means of production” is because they are concerned about the social and economic effects of ownership being concentrated in a few hands, rather than broadly distributed, so that, e.g., the people who work in a shop are generally not the people who own it, the owners of a hospital are generally not the people who depend on its services, etc. — that is to say, they are concerned about something that they call “private ownership” not necessarily because they’re opposed to free markets (most are, but many aren’t), but because they’re opposed to “capitalism” in my third sense, to the wage-labor system and closely related phenomena like landlordism and the predominance of corporate ownership in general. A free market with ownership that is non-governmental, but widely distributed rather than concentrated would satisfy their stated “anticapitalist” norms — although only some (Proudhon, Tucker, Swartz) explicitly recognize this, and others (Marxists, Progressives) do not, generally because the former understand something about market economics and the latter do not.

Anyway, if “private ownership” means capitalism-1 in some mouths, and capitalism-3 in others, and is often (as I think it is) used confusingly to conflate the two and try to take a position for against the conflation, then it suffers from the same basic problems as the term “capitalism” itself, and does not help as a clarification of it. Hence, I didn’t offer it as one of the meanings to be distinguished; but I probably should have added a note explaining why.

For more on the same issue, cf. Roderick Long’s Pootmop! and Pootmop Redux! posts.

Hope this helps.

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

A few days ago, I heard Greg Gutfeld — a self-styled libertarian and host of Fox News’ Red Eye — grieve the “death of private property” in his comment on homeless people squatting in Bank of America-owned houses. As a free marketer, defender of private property, and a libertarian, I’m always offended, or at the very least peeved, at the predisposition of ostensible libertarians like Gutfeld to make common cause with the likes of Bank of America, member of “the brotherhood of thieves who prey upon labor.” Given many self-identified libertarians’ instinctive reactions about private property, the subject is observably susceptible to all of the difficulties that attend hazy definitions and even more confused applications of the definitions we actually have.

And if “private property” is simply — in A.H. Simpson’s words — “defined as the sum of legal privilege,” then Gutfeld is certainly correct in making B of A the paragon of property. As an individualist anarchist, however, I define it as something rather different, as nothing more than one of the ways we ensure the law of equal liberty in practice. Of course I take it for granted that such an explanation doesn’t by itself move the ball forward very much, but it is — even without more — a stark contrast to a mere defense of monopolists. Anarchists ought to take no issue with title to land, with ownership based on cognizable and concrete labors to improve and cultivate it. That kind of “private property,” put into practice as opposed to the system of coercive class rule that we have today, wouldn’t and couldn’t abide a real estate market that puts institutions such as B of A in the driver’s seat.

Developers and mortgage-lending banks sit behind high barriers to entry and enjoy relationships with governments (from the local, to state, to national levels) that ensure their dominance of real property. Further, banks’ monopolization of credit guarantees that the only way most people will ever own real property is through hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgage loans. All of this, apparently, is the “private property” that Gutfeld supposes we libertarians ought to be defending against the likes of squatters. Well, if this is “private property” and “libertarianism,” then I haven’t much use for either and will busy myself debunking them. I don’t, though, think that we ought to cede the terminology so easily, and neither did libertarians like Benjamin Tucker and A.H. Simpson.

C4SS Media would like to present Voltairine de Cleyre’s Our Present Attitude, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“This is the time to stand up boldly and say, ‘Yes, I believe in the displacement of this system of injustice by a just one; I believe in the end of starvation, exposure, and the crimes caused by them; I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there never will be peace, so long as man rules over man; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an Anarchist, and if for this you condemn me, I stand ready to receive your condemnation.'” — Voltairine de Cleyre

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, my old friend and a top-notch economist, historian, and authority on money and banking, sat down with Nick Gillespie of Reason TV for an illuminating interview on what to expect regarding the federal government’s fiscal bog. In accessible language Hummel explains why the government will have no choice but to repudiate its debt (inflation, taxation, and spending can’t balance the budget) and why repudiation will be a good thing. I highly recommend this video.

C4SS Senior Fellow and Trustee, Gary Chartier, recently participated in an extensive interview with James Corbett of The Corbett Report. Their topic of discussion was the life, trials and anarchist thought of the individualist-abolitionist anarchist Lysander Spooner.

Gary Chartier’s interview (37:54) is a part of The Corbett Report’s nearly hour long, Shoulders of Giants: Lysander Spooner, exploration of the life of Lysander Spooner.

http://youtu.be/aDfWCX5O-oo
From the show notes: While statists across America (and around the world) were celebrating the inauguration of Obama last weekend, anti-statists celebrated a festive occasion of their own: the 205th birthday of Lysander Spooner. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we explore the life, works, and thought of Lysander Spooner, lawyer, entrepreneur, Deist, abolitionist, freethinker, and one of the giants of the American anarchist tradition.

So long as one uses the Marxist propaganda term “capitalist” (other than in quotes to refer to the term rather than use it) one is surrendering the language to the statists. –Fred Foldvary

Au contraire. Definition: Capitalism is state rule by and for those who own large amounts of capital. Corollary: the purpose of such rule is to restrict innovation, arbitrage and re-allocation of investment, i.e, to eliminate Enterprise (that which entrepreneurs do).

Definition: Free Enterprise is unobstructed, unregulated and unintervened entrepreneurial human action, which, by its nature, cannot have any form of Statism, including Capitalism, present.

Anarcho-Capitalism should mean a social system wherein large holders of capital exist but do not attempt to use the State to capture or maintain their predominance; that’s legitimate if you also accept anarcho-communism to mean a system where Communists do not attempt to create or use a State to have everyone ruled by Communes, and Anarcho-Syndicalism to be distinguished from State Syndicalism (aka Guild Socialism or Fascism) accordingly.

Remember, the term Capitalist was invented as a pejorative by free-market advocate Thomas Hodgskin back in the 1830s and then picked up by Marx (who admired Hodgskin for inventing schools for labourers).

Freely as ever, SEK3 (Samuel Edward Konkin III) [July 24, 2000].

The most important thing in trying to establish Anarchy is to rid the minds of my fellows of the belief in the necessity of government. The next thing in point of importance is to get them to do something to help on the propaganda; to cease advocating and upholding law; to stop patronizing legal institutions when by association the necessity for so doing can be removed; to openly defy, or to ignore such laws as interfere more directly with their personal liberty.

— Henry Addis, “How to Get Anarchy”, THE FIREBRAND (Feb. 23, 1896)

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson’s Libertarian Self-Marginalization, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

We hope to improve our presentation and production value, but in the meantime: Release Early, Release Often!

Individualist anarchist, guerrilla abolitionist, insurgent against state monopolies, anti-constitutional legal scholar… Happy Birthday Lysander Spooner!

What could be said about Lysander Spooner that would not be hopelessly inadequate at capturing his spirit, intelligence, generosity or tenacity? Here is just a sample of Lysander Spooner:

Forced Consent

Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer. When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent – that is, of submission to its will – it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others. And these are the uses to which most governments, our own among the rest, do put their people, whenever they have once reduced them to a state of consent to its will. Andrew Jackson said that those who did not consent to the government he attempted to administer upon them, for that reason, were traitors, and ought to be hanged. Like so many other so-called “heroes,” he thought the sword and the gallows excellent instrumentalities for securing the people’s consent to be governed. The idea that, although government should rest on the consent of the governed, yet so much force may nevertheless be employed as may be necessary to produce that consent, embodies everything that was ever exhibited in the shape of usurpation and tyranny in any country on earth. It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty. It can have no place except as a part of a system of absolute military despotism. And it means nothing else either in this country, or in any other. There is no half-way house between a government depending wholly on voluntary support, and one depending wholly on military compulsion. And mankind have only to choose between these two classes – the class that governs, and the class that is governed or enslaved. In this case, the government rests wholly on the consent of the governors, and not at all on the consent of the governed. And whether the governors are more or less numerous than the governed, and whether they call themselves monarchists, aristocrats, or republicans, the principle is the same. The simple, and only material fact, in all cases, is, that one body of men are robbing and enslaving another. And it is only upon military compulsion that men will submit to be robbed and enslaved, it necessarily follows that any government, to which the governed, the weaker party, do not consent, must be (in regard to that weaker party), a merely military despotism. Such is the state of things now in this country, and in every other in which government does not depend wholly upon voluntary support. There never was and there never will be, a more gross, self-evident, and inexcusable violation of the principle that government should rest on the consent of the governed, than was the late war, as carried on by the North. There never was, and there never will be, a more palpable case of purely military despotism than is the government we now have.

Most of Lysander Spooner’s writings can be found, lovingly maintained, throughout the internet. If you are interested in owning a physical copy of his No Treason; The Constitution of No Authority or other classic essays, follow the links below. Purchases also go towards supporting The Center for a Stateless Society through our partnership with the Distro of the Libertarian Left.

Check out David de Ugarte’s latest and incisive blog post on the recent French military intervention in Mali:

“…the worst is yet to come. What begins with a military escalation of France’s own, today, will eventually end with the region in the hands of private military businesses and warlords, following the US model. Decomposition is characterized by fragile alliances, and if the Tuareg, who were recently allies of AQMI, offer their help to the French army, tomorrow, some of them might break away into local feifdoms that happen to be tempting to those occupying them.”

C4SS writer and Senior Fellow, Darian Worden, presents for Alt Expo “A Left Libertarian Approach to Politics”.

Also available as a “ready to print” zine (PDF)!

With the continued success of the Distro of the Libertarian Left and C4SS partnership, we would like to offer similar referral-donation services to our Homebrew inspired supporters.

A supporter and friend of C4SS, has put together a “small batch” screen print of the C4SS “box” logo with a DIY finish.

If you decide on purchasing one of Ian’s shirts, let him know that you also want to support C4SS with your purchase and C4SS will get a 10% of purchase price donation.

If you think this kind of partnership or something similar would be helpful to your Homebrew (ad)venture, then let C4SS know. We are happy to work out details and provide graphics. Email C4SS with the title “Support-Donations” to faq@c4ss.org 

In probably the most unbelievably smug move the state could have taken in the wake of Aaron Swartz’s death, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz dropped the case against Swartz in a US District Court in Massachusetts late Monday.

“Pursuant to FRCP 48(a), the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, hereby dismisses the case presently pending against Defendant Aaron Swartz,” Ortiz wrote in a submission to the court on Monday. “In support of this dismissal, the government states that Mr. Swartz died on January 11, 2013.”

Despite Swartz’s family literally placing the blame for his death on the state, and both MIT and JSTOR releasing public statements that were largely positive in how they portrayed him, a spokesperson for Ortiz told the Los Angeles Times, “We want to respect the privacy of the family and do not feel it is appropriate to comment on the case at this time.”

After a year and a half of state harassment, the threat of over 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine hanging over Swartz’s head, after both JSTOR and MIT dropped their criminal charges (though MIT still wanted to go ahead with their civil suit), the government went after Swartz like a rabid dog – and got a kill.

And now it is gloating.

I highly recommend this new video from Dan D’Amico and Learn Liberty on how America’s criminal justice system promotes racial inequality.  D’Amico does an excellent job explaining the enormous racial inequalities in who the state cages. But, perhaps even more importantly, he makes it clear that this isn’t just an issue about individual racist cops, judges, or jurors. Rather, perverse incentives and laws that appear colorblind have created a structural problem of racism.

http://youtu.be/Hfie5bHG1OA

Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory To Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson’s Authority is the Enemy of Rationality, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

We hope to improve our presentation and production value, but in the meantime: Release Early, Release Often!