I wrote this way back on Nov 11th, 2020. This was around a year after I started learning about leftist politics, so brace for baby leftist talking points. I will probably write a critique of my own critique at some point.
If you ever decide to discuss politics online, or even just scroll through political twitter threads or instagram story infographics, you’ll likely find that a good chunk of disagreements and fights come down to definitional misunderstanding and lack of clarity. Some (classical liberals) may think this is because we share the same ends, yet differ on the means. However, I hold that such disagreements occur because, put simply, semantics are easy to argue about.
This kind of definitional vagueness is especially prevalent in the op-ed side of political discourse. It is rare to find articles, especially those written by pundits or pundits-to-be, that define the charged political terminology that they use before doing so. Often, you will find that the arguments these authors make fail to stand up to the slightest definitional scrutiny.
Altman’s article, while it does not claim or attempt to be the be-all, end-all argument for capitalism, is one example of this lack of definitional rigor. She conflates terms that are not “one and the same”, and attempts to use the public’s differing attitudes towards these terms as a contradiction that demonstrates Capitalism is simply misunderstood and distorted.
Altman’s article begins by citing a 2019 Gallup Study in which ‘Free Enterprise’ is viewed positively by 83% of Millennials and Gen Z’ers, while ‘Capitalism’ is only viewed favorably by 51% of the same group. Altman posits that this is a contradiction, and even concludes the article by claiming “free enterprise and capitalism are one and the same”.
This conflation is indicative of a broader problem that I find in online libertarian, conservative, and even liberal discourse: too often capitalist advocates do not understand what capitalism is, let alone critiques of capitalism. Altman’s article, and many others like it, use a definition of capitalism that is left to the reader’s assumption. I understand it here as “an economic system in which all goods and services are traded in a free market and produced by private individuals who have private property without state interference”. That is the only definition of capitalism that could somehow contain all the assumptions, reductions, and conflations Altman makes to claim that “free enterprise and capitalism are one and the same.” To anyone familiar with Marxism, or even classical liberal definitions of economic systems, this definition is woefully inaccurate. For the sake of brevity, I will provide the best brief definition of capitalism that I can, rather than scrutinizing all the factors that are contained within Altman’s own description.
Capitalism is a system of economic production in which the means of production are privately held and owned. That’s it. Markets are a separate method of distribution (see: free-market capitalism, mixed-market capitalism, market socialism). Goods, or rather, commodities, do not have to be traded in a free market, hence the existence of mixed-market economies throughout the world and countries in which the means of production are privately held but the distribution is taken up by the state. Commodities produced under capitalism do not have to be produced by those who own the means of production, hence the emergence of a working class and an owner class. Unlike what Altman believes, this definition does not include “the philosophical foundation for personal autonomy”.
Free enterprise is a feature of an economic system, not an economic system itself. It dictates that commerce be free of state control, and is thus not definitionally equal to capitalism unless you similarly stretch the definition. To claim that free enterprise is capitalism is to deny the existence of systems such as anarchism and anarcho-communism, which dissolve the state altogether. Would a commonly-held company in an anarchist society not also fit the definition of free enterprise?
This definition of capitalism and distinction between economic systems and types of markets was largely agreed upon for a long time, and still remains the predominant academic definition. Yet somehow every few weeks you will see people, like Altman, who dismiss the problems that such a system generates as some aberration. Even prominent left-wing pundit Cenk Uygur maintains that the USA at the moment suffers from “corporatism”, not capitalism. Uygur claims that the outsized control of corporations over the state through lobbying and other corruption has created a different system. US Senator Elizabeth Warren coined the term “crony capitalism”; “our system is broken”, not designed this way, Warren says. Altman herself tells us that chattel slavery, during which humans themselves became commodities, was actually counter-capitalist. Essentially, the United States’ economic system is not true capitalism. This is wishful thinking. Lobbying, the military industrial complex, and capital's other forms of control over the state are logical progressions of a capitalist system. States under capitalism ultimately exist to protect capital, private property, and consequently the interests of the owner class that controls said property. Adam Smith established as much.
For clarity's sake, private property is different from personal property. Generally, private property makes you money because you own it, not because you use it. Personal property is what you use. A good example is that if I have a laptop that I use for freelance work, it's personal property. If I have 100 laptops that I rent out to other people to do work, that's private property.
Maybe deviations in beliefs between people of a relatively similar culture can stem from a disagreement over the meaning of fundamentally contested terms, but this is not the broader issue here. Contemporary proponents of capitalism have stopped defending the system despite the harms associated with it, like Hayek once attempted to do, but have now narrowed their definition of capitalism such that it does not include those harms. At best, they are using a different definition than we might be. At worst, their arguments boil down to “capitalism cannot have harmful effects because real capitalism solves these harms”. It’s the ideology of “market solutions for market problems”.
These kinds of shallow defenses and stretched definitions cannot defend capitalism from attacks that focus on the actual system. If Marxists say “capitalism inherently leads to the alienation of the workforce because of the separation between them and the means of production”, or “a capitalist system of production inherently creates class conflict due to the differing relationship of different groups to the means of production”, or any other critique grounded firmly on what capitalism is, then pro-capitalists’ re-definitions do nothing but obfuscate the discussion.
I believe these attempts at semantic and definitional sleight of hand are a result of a growing number of right-wing or right-leaning youth, who notice the problems currently facing our world due to our economic structure, yet are unable to find satisfactory arguments to defend why this should continue to be. If we wish to have real discussions about economic systems and ideology, we must strive to push past these misrepresentations. A good first step is to clarify or define the charged political terms you use.
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