@Jeremy:
My rejection of the term capitalism is simple: I don’t like the emphasis on capital, period.

While my refusal to even use the word anymore (aside from when discussions like this arise) ultimately comes from Roderick Long’s “zaxlebax” analysis, my long-time dislike of the term is partly due to the emphasis on capital as well.

The emphasis on profits also turns me off, although I have no inherent objection to profits as such. A freed market would open the door to alternatives to the profit-maximizing ethos that has thrived under current conditions.

I agree with your comments about BK Marcus. His clinging to the word “capitalism” aside, I’m generally quite fond of him. One additional hang-up though: Hagbard Celine never provided a definition for “political capitalism”. Robert Anton Wilson would not be pleased about this.

*note: I provided a wayback machine link to that Black Crayon page because the site is currently down for some reason.

I still think all parties involved need to re-read Long’s remarks on the matter. If you’re clear about what you mean by any given word, there’s no problem. But people like Marcus (and anti-capitalist leftists, for that matter) aren’t clear about what they mean - they want to use shorthand in lieu of conversation, packaging complex positions up with nice, tidy, loaded labels. Anybody who disagrees with the meta-decisions they’ve taken behind the scenes can go fuck themselves.

My rejection of the term capitalism is simple: I don’t like the emphasis on capital, period. I think there’s better defenses of individual liberty than browbeating people with economic arguments. I think free markets - and lots of other arrangements like co-ops and mutual aid societies - come from free people, instead of springing fully formed from Mises’s head. I don’t think Marcus is intellectually dishonest; I think he’s behaving in a self-righteous, smug manner that downplays ideas in favor of trite categories.

What a shame - he’s an excellent writer; why demand monopoly over a word?

Specifically, I think he means to suggest that the feudal system was an example of quasi-private protection, provided by voluntarily-funded landlord armies that protected the employer’s property and dependents.

I don’t find this example either believable or embarrassing, because feudalism depended so much on original and ongoing coercion that it’s pretty easy to separate the trace amounts of anarchy from the statist context.

The titles of the landlords in question all originate in conquest that superimposed their manufactured title over the original title holders. Not only did this give them exclusive control of all presently occupied land , but it was reinforced by laws prohibiting the new homesteading of unoccupied land within the lord’s fiefdom (which serfs were not free to leave anyway). Thus it was truly monopoly landlordism, not merely large scale land ownership.

(It’s also interesting how property owners in the U.S. are in a similar situation, in which the State preempts access to “public” land and levies property taxes on everyone living within it’s borders. So we’re all really just tenants to the Great Big Monopoly Landlord in the Sky).

Legally, the serfs’ relationship to their lord was anything but free and contractual. For one thing, they were legally bound to the land; trying to leave incurred death or mutilation. Once violently trapped in that local monopoly, were saddled with all sorts of tithes and taxes for “services” they didn’t want or need. That’s not surprising since, with the exception of the Lex Mercatoria and the English Common Law),law was created and enforced by lords.

(I should note, however, that medieval law were still primarily civil laws. They had no concept of crimes against the state, and treated most things as disputes between between people, legal privilege not withstanding.)

Given that European feudalism was based on conquest and the coercive imposition of a lord’s extortionist rules, even beyond the inhabited farmland that neither he nor his ancestors ever touched or purchased voluntarily, it’s easy to see how his claims to ownership amount to nothing more than statism, and the rent nothing more than taxation.

I don’t think it helps to show voluntary, noncoercive, enforcement of contracts [i]to rob or imprison or kill other people[/i].

However, I’m open to many different edits to the as of now finished copy.

You can reach it here.

http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/IKJPSFrr7qA1KRxLP3to0bkX5sHTH442RWzN4aavGJYxdrCOUm67c8YdRPAtXTfOjz_kzXCsd8e8A3m9fiHP9N5Q1aF4VtxvExmtdA/RevolutionaryRedistribution.pdf

I think there’s a lot to be done with it, but it’s a start.