Source: CounterPunch
by David S D’Amato
“In his 1869 essay Yours Or Mine, the radical American writer and publisher Ezra Heywood argued that capitalists had made stealing a fine art. Heywood had no problem in principle with a competitive market economy. But he saw state power as serving the interests of the capitalists, and he called the state ‘one great embodiment of speculative piracy.’ … Fifteen years later, in the pages of the famous anarchist journal Liberty, Heywood’s former assistant editor, Benjamin Tucker, borrowed Heywood’s phrase, writing, ‘Socialism, practically, is war upon usury in all its forms, the great Anti-Theft Movement of the nineteenth century … .’ … the whole criticism of capitalism advanced by nineteenth century libertarians was that it was a system of state-created legal privilege designed and used to steal labor power, to create a space of difference and monopoly in which the owners of capital could exploit workers.” (06/11/24)