I really like this thinking. I don’t necessarily like the assignment of labels to concepts in this post. E.g.: I use capitalism in a manner mutually exclusive with slave labor because it requires self-ownership. And I don’t think a definition of “exploitation” should require a strategic element; I would say that not allowing an employee to read mystery novels when customers aren’t around is exploitative. But this idea of using an asymmetry of power to deepen the asymmetry is a clearly useful concept.
I use capitalism in a manner mutually exclusive with slave labor because it requires self-ownership.
This seems like a sort of definitional gimbal lock; it makes it harder to describe the world because two potentially-separate degrees of freedom are collapsed into one. While I’m reluctant to argue definitions, I think it’s worth using terms in ways that allow us to describe the world in more detail rather than ones that collapse distinctions.
I expect to see this usage of “capitalism” not in history or economics, but in the sort of political doctrine where it’s intended to lock those concepts together; to imply that capital markets and individual freedom are either the same thing, or closely related — more closely, I think, than history and contemporary events really support.
It would seem weird to me, for instance, to claim that a publicly-traded company that is discovered to have done something to violate individual freedom is thereby no longer a participant in a capitalist economy. The New York Stock Exchange doesn’t ask “does this company infringe individual freedoms anywhere in the world?” before letting a company be listed. (To be clear, I’m not proposing that it should; I’m saying that it’s useful to talk about “participation in a capital market economy” and “fully respecting some set of individual freedoms” as distinct axes.)
(For what it’s worth, I think “self-ownership” is a pretty odd expression, because one of the central traits of ownership is that it can be transferred, and one of the central traits of selfhood is that it cannot. Your relation to yourself is distinct from property ownership in that you can sell any piece of your property, but you cannot sell your self; no matter what obligations you may have signed up for, you always retain possession of your self.)
Mostly agreed with what you say about the word “capitalism.” But with the NYSE example, I think it would be natural to say that the company did something not particularly capitalist. Is the CCP-owned Air China a capitalist entity? It’s certainly less capitalist than Southwest.
I think there’s at least two ways meanings can be combined. The easy one is words with multiple meanings. For example, “capitalist” has two meanings: someone who believes in free markets, and someone who owns a lot of capital. Some rhetorical tricks are played by trying to dance from one to the other, usually by denouncing libertarians as greedy corporates who benefit from the system. The second is concepts that include multiple constituents. For example, “capitalism” is a major concept that includes the things you brought up.
Inasmuch that capitalism is a centuries-old concept with a lot of philosophy behind it, I think it’s worth keeping “capitalism,” in its sense as an organization of political economy, to its broader meaning which contains both freedom of labor and market-based allocation. They are correlated enough to be a sensible cluster. We can use other terms for the constituents.
For comparison, “security” contains many concepts, such as integrity (untruster party can’t influence trusted output) and confidentiality (untrusted party can’t read input from trusted party). But we can talk about security as a whole, with other terms for its individual dimensions.
Perhaps it was a mistake to trust ChatGPT, but (my short summary of) its opinion is that Ayn Rand always gained her money by writing, i.e. selling her products directly to the market, while Adam Smith was employed at a university, in addition to gaining money from his books (especially the Wealth of Nations), and only gained a passive income from investing later in life.
(It’s not important; I am just sharing my data.)
EDIT:
I guess we need to distinguish between even more meanings of “capitalist”. Consider the following examples:
Person X buys a lottery ticket on their 18th birthday, wins a few millions, puts all the money in passively managed index funds, and spends the rest of life collecting generous passive income, watching anime, and debating online.
Person Y builds a small company and hires a few employees… the business is so-so, it pays the bills but is often at the verge of bankruptcy, fifty years later it finally goes bankrupt.
Which one of these is more of a “capitalist”? The latter spent more effort capitalisting, but the former had more capital and more profit.
A major sense of “capitalism” is the historical economic sense; the sense in which we can say that there was a pre-capitalist period of human history; that most agree that we now live in a capitalist period; and we can speculate about a possible future post-capitalist period. The characteristic of capitalism in this sense is that capital is allocated to ventures via capital markets, rather than (for instance) by the decision of a monarch, workers’ council, or AI singleton.
Selling products in markets is much older than capitalism in this sense. The butcher and baker and candlestick-maker did that in the pre-capitalist period. Eā-naṡir was selling dubious copper a long time before capitalism; he just wasn’t doing it to please the shareholders with a pepped-up quarterly earnings report.
I wondered, what if you don’t use other people’s money. Are you not a capitalist then? Even if you build dozens of factories and employ thousands of people, as long as you started with your personal savings, and then grew without ever taking a loan.
But I guess the answer is that in such case, you are still using your own capital. Capital doesn’t necessarily mean other people’s money—that’s just the popular way to get started.
The fundamental difference compared to a successful pre-capitalist baker is that… he couldn’t expand his business? Like, he probably could build a bigger bakery, hire more people, bake more bread, but he couldn’t… what exactly? Separate ownership from management? Like, he couldn’t retire and hire someone else to manage the bakery, paying them a salary but keeping the rest. Or start a second bakery in another city, without personally overseeing it.
(I suspect, more realistically, if the bakery got too big, the local feudal simply found a way to take his money, so that was the practical limit: don’t stick out. Or maybe I’m too pessimistic about the property rights in the past.)
I really like this thinking. I don’t necessarily like the assignment of labels to concepts in this post. E.g.: I use capitalism in a manner mutually exclusive with slave labor because it requires self-ownership. And I don’t think a definition of “exploitation” should require a strategic element; I would say that not allowing an employee to read mystery novels when customers aren’t around is exploitative. But this idea of using an asymmetry of power to deepen the asymmetry is a clearly useful concept.
This seems like a sort of definitional gimbal lock; it makes it harder to describe the world because two potentially-separate degrees of freedom are collapsed into one. While I’m reluctant to argue definitions, I think it’s worth using terms in ways that allow us to describe the world in more detail rather than ones that collapse distinctions.
I expect to see this usage of “capitalism” not in history or economics, but in the sort of political doctrine where it’s intended to lock those concepts together; to imply that capital markets and individual freedom are either the same thing, or closely related — more closely, I think, than history and contemporary events really support.
It would seem weird to me, for instance, to claim that a publicly-traded company that is discovered to have done something to violate individual freedom is thereby no longer a participant in a capitalist economy. The New York Stock Exchange doesn’t ask “does this company infringe individual freedoms anywhere in the world?” before letting a company be listed. (To be clear, I’m not proposing that it should; I’m saying that it’s useful to talk about “participation in a capital market economy” and “fully respecting some set of individual freedoms” as distinct axes.)
(For what it’s worth, I think “self-ownership” is a pretty odd expression, because one of the central traits of ownership is that it can be transferred, and one of the central traits of selfhood is that it cannot. Your relation to yourself is distinct from property ownership in that you can sell any piece of your property, but you cannot sell your self; no matter what obligations you may have signed up for, you always retain possession of your self.)
I really like this phrase. :)
Mostly agreed with what you say about the word “capitalism.” But with the NYSE example, I think it would be natural to say that the company did something not particularly capitalist. Is the CCP-owned Air China a capitalist entity? It’s certainly less capitalist than Southwest.
I think there’s at least two ways meanings can be combined. The easy one is words with multiple meanings. For example, “capitalist” has two meanings: someone who believes in free markets, and someone who owns a lot of capital. Some rhetorical tricks are played by trying to dance from one to the other, usually by denouncing libertarians as greedy corporates who benefit from the system. The second is concepts that include multiple constituents. For example, “capitalism” is a major concept that includes the things you brought up.
Inasmuch that capitalism is a centuries-old concept with a lot of philosophy behind it, I think it’s worth keeping “capitalism,” in its sense as an organization of political economy, to its broader meaning which contains both freedom of labor and market-based allocation. They are correlated enough to be a sensible cluster. We can use other terms for the constituents.
For comparison, “security” contains many concepts, such as integrity (untruster party can’t influence trusted output) and confidentiality (untrusted party can’t read input from trusted party). But we can talk about security as a whole, with other terms for its individual dimensions.
Examples:
capitalist pro-capitalist: Ayn Rand
capitalist anti-capitalist: Friedrich Engels
non-capitalist pro-capitalist: Adam Smith
non-capitalist anti-capitalist: Karl Marx
You mixed pro-capitalists: Adam Smith actually made a lot of capital from investment, while Ayn Rand never had much money.
Perhaps it was a mistake to trust ChatGPT, but (my short summary of) its opinion is that Ayn Rand always gained her money by writing, i.e. selling her products directly to the market, while Adam Smith was employed at a university, in addition to gaining money from his books (especially the Wealth of Nations), and only gained a passive income from investing later in life.
(It’s not important; I am just sharing my data.)
EDIT:
I guess we need to distinguish between even more meanings of “capitalist”. Consider the following examples:
Person X buys a lottery ticket on their 18th birthday, wins a few millions, puts all the money in passively managed index funds, and spends the rest of life collecting generous passive income, watching anime, and debating online.
Person Y builds a small company and hires a few employees… the business is so-so, it pays the bills but is often at the verge of bankruptcy, fifty years later it finally goes bankrupt.
Which one of these is more of a “capitalist”? The latter spent more effort capitalisting, but the former had more capital and more profit.
A major sense of “capitalism” is the historical economic sense; the sense in which we can say that there was a pre-capitalist period of human history; that most agree that we now live in a capitalist period; and we can speculate about a possible future post-capitalist period. The characteristic of capitalism in this sense is that capital is allocated to ventures via capital markets, rather than (for instance) by the decision of a monarch, workers’ council, or AI singleton.
Selling products in markets is much older than capitalism in this sense. The butcher and baker and candlestick-maker did that in the pre-capitalist period. Eā-naṡir was selling dubious copper a long time before capitalism; he just wasn’t doing it to please the shareholders with a pepped-up quarterly earnings report.
Great point!
I wondered, what if you don’t use other people’s money. Are you not a capitalist then? Even if you build dozens of factories and employ thousands of people, as long as you started with your personal savings, and then grew without ever taking a loan.
But I guess the answer is that in such case, you are still using your own capital. Capital doesn’t necessarily mean other people’s money—that’s just the popular way to get started.
The fundamental difference compared to a successful pre-capitalist baker is that… he couldn’t expand his business? Like, he probably could build a bigger bakery, hire more people, bake more bread, but he couldn’t… what exactly? Separate ownership from management? Like, he couldn’t retire and hire someone else to manage the bakery, paying them a salary but keeping the rest. Or start a second bakery in another city, without personally overseeing it.
(I suspect, more realistically, if the bakery got too big, the local feudal simply found a way to take his money, so that was the practical limit: don’t stick out. Or maybe I’m too pessimistic about the property rights in the past.)