Musings on the Problems Associated with Capitalist Apologetics and Polemics...

There is an obvious problem with capitalist apologetics and polemics. Capitaist apologists and polemicists, unlike John Locke, don't have an empirically grounded theory of how private property came to be. Historically speaking, private property and notions of private property don't really come into existence, if in somewhat ambiguous form, until the rise of agricultural societies and particularly large-scale agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherer societies, the earliest human societies, had a collective form of property and group notions of property. It must also be remembered that large scale agricultural societies tempered their conception of property with the notion that monarchs or emperors could expropriate a variety of "goods" from peasants on the ideological basis that some god figure gave them the right to do so. Monarchs, of course, were just Mafiosi who provided protection to peasants in exchange for such expropriation.

Locke is clever enough to realise that any theory of property has to be grounded in how property comes into existence. He was an empiricist after all. Locke argues that property came into existence when an individual labourer mixed his labour with the earth creating his/her/their property in the process. He argued that because property was the product of a labourer mixing his/her/their labour with the earth it could not be alienated to someone who did not mix his/her/their labour with the earth to create private property (remember all that talk of inalienable rights in the US Declaration of Independence? It comes from Locke). It thus follows that those who do not create private property through their labours have not created property and do not hold valid property rights.

The problem with so much capitalist apologetics and polemics is that they are grounded in and undergirded by metaphysical belief rather than empirical and ontological reality. Capitalist apologists and polemicists simply assert that private property exists. They don't, in other words, have a historically grounded theory about how private property came into existence in a world that initially was not divided up into private property parcels. In this regard, capitalist apologists and polemicists are akin to the demagogues of religious literalism or fundamentalism. Capitalist demagogues simply believe that private property exists, asserts that it exists, makes it holy, and maintains that those who own property, even if it is not the product of their labours, is theirs. Adam Smith's notion of the free hand, by the way, is grounded in a similar metaphysical deus ex machina and free market liberalism is, as a consequence, grounded in dogmatic assertion rather than in empirical reality. To those, like myself, who prefer empirical to dogmatic approaches, the rhetoric of capitalist fundamentalists is not any more compelling than that of fundamentalists of various sectarian stripe.

 

Thorstein Veblen grounded his arguments about the parasitism of the leisure class who do not have valid property claims in a biological notion, the instinct of workmanship. For Veblen the capitalist robber barons and their progeny, did not work and thus were not creative. Engineers, Veblen argued, did have the instinct of workmanship, did the planning, and built things that were useful to society. The leisure class, who hired engineers, simply, according to Veblen leeched off the creativity of engineers. Additionally, Veblen argues, what the leisure or leeching class bought with the monies and wealth they expropriated from real workers, was not useful. It was simply conspicuous consumption whose purpose and function was to display wealth.

It is possible to contextualise Veblen's argument about the leisure class within Locke's theory of the origins of private property by doing only limited damage to either. Locke argues that property is the product of the mixing of labour and land. Given this, the leisure class, who do not mix labour and land creating property in the process, have no right to the property they have expropriated in some way, shape, or form from those who did mix their labour with the earth creating inalienable property in the process. They thus live off the fruits of others. And that seems to be a useful way to conceptualise the workings of contemporary capitalism.