Why Not Capitalism? The Simple Example
I am going to point to a problem with capitalism and the Non Aggression Principle(NAP). I am going to point to a simple situation that comes from this. The NAP is an idea many libertarians and anarchists build their philosophy upon. It is an idea stemming from Ayn Rand who was a capitalist and abhorred anarchism. It was taken to another level by Murray Rothbard who painted a picture of stateless capitalism. The NAP states that it is wrong to initiate force upon a person or their property. In this property is perceived as an extension of the person. Property is often perceived as a synonym for liberty. Yes, property can be liberty but liberty is not property. Companies are also considered property based on investment, so the capitalist concept of property is ownership of the collective.
The non-initiation of force is something I support. The concept I do not support is that it is justifiable to defend property as dominion with violence.
The situation that divides
The Business owner sit in his office watching the workers down on the manufacturing floor. The boss makes one dollar a day for every worker producing on the floor. Each worker makes one dollar a day also. There are one hundred workers. This means the boss makes 100 dollars a day or five hundred in a work week while the workers make one dollar a day or five dollars in a week. The workers decide they want to keep all the profit they make. The workers claim control of the means of production so they can keep their two dollars a day.
The dividing line is this. The definition of property by the capitalist and the definition of initiation of force the very act of claiming the product of their labor is considered the initiation of force. The capitalist is now justified in the use of force to maintain dominion and control of the working collective he maintains power over. This is property as theft. This is why a state exists, to insure the capitalist maintains property of this sort. This is property as theft, property as dominion and property from a state or a private institution that can take the place of the state.
I am more inclined to support the worker ownership of the means of production, because the workers can claim the full product of their labor. With an authority over a collective we see rulers claiming the product of the workers labor. The capitalist needs the state so that he can continue to claim the product of the workers labor.
12:49 am
If the a workers cooperative puts in the necessary investment to own the means of production, then certainly they should have rights to profit completely from the fruits of their labor (100% of profits divided equitably among them). However, in the case of the capitalist who would have put forth the initial resources to allow for the workers that are hired to produce the goods in question, certainly that person deserves a notable cut of the profits as without the means of production, there would be no finished goods to profit from.
7:26 am
I’m going to have to write about investment as right to dominion over property and property as dominion over the collective very soon.
3:10 pm
So if the capitalist is making one dollar profit from each worker, why wouldn’t there be fellow capitalists willing to accept somewhat smaller profit margins up to the point where the cost of labor were just below the labor’s margin revenue product?
2:24 pm
I think that these situations only existed in the first place because of a prior evil – as an investor you always had to ask permission from the state to build a workplace, and you had to pay the state it’s cut, and then you asked for monopoly privileges over any novel machinery or processes you invented. The state doled these privileges out to the wealthy and well-connected (even getting patents and land in relatively “free market” places like the early United States was an arduous and expensive task outside the reach of common people). Besides that, many people were forced into the factories by the Enclosure movement and similar drives to rob subsistence farmers of their land and independence by the state in order to press them into hard labor for the state’s cronies.
Eliminate the state and a lot of the problem instantly evaporates. Even starting from the presented scenario, suppose some factory workers tire of their arrangements with the factory owner, and the owner won’t sell. They can go build a new factory on some unoccupied piece of land. Hell, they can be building a new factory *while* working for the undesirable capitalist and move in when it’s finished. If he’s as big a shithead as we all assume, he’ll soon be out of business because everyone wants to work for the cooperative down the street; and soon finding himself bankrupt, he’ll be forced to sell – possibly to another collective startup.
Half the reason we have open source and open culture is as a bootstrapping hack to get us out from underneath this system of privilege and patent (the other half being, of course, because we like sharing and hate reproducing the wheel).
But without this state privilege, who’s to say any such thing as a capitalist ever exists? I mean, we have to be honest with ourselves. Many, if not most, of the people who amass vast wealth do so thanks to special privileges and protections granted by the state. Furthermore the necessity of investment capital is predicated on a few things:
1. that land is scarce (because state privilege allows the state itself or individuals to extort people for the use of unoccupied land),
2. that the initial investment is enormous (which is not necessarily the case if you build small and scalable),
3. that most individuals are unwilling to undertake the risks associated with starting a business (debatable, but ultimately unknowable until they’re given a real opportunity).
I hold the state largely to blame for 1 and 2, and I find 3 to be extremely unlikely. I think if you were to create a straight-up Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, complete with this sort of neo-Lockean concept of property (ones labor mixed with resources), ancaps would be surprised by the utter lack of capitalists in favor of cooperatives, sole proprietorships, independent contractors, artisan guilds and associations, etc. I think nearly everyone, including the hardline socialists & communists, would be surprised at the lack of massive industry in favor of decentralized local-scale systems that largely obsoleted their complaints about our very narrow modern approach to work and industry. I think that a lot of these arguments would become irrelevant.