Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Tucker

There is a trapdoor in Tucker's phrasing: "solved it" lands with a faintly sardonic thud, as if Marx's answer is less a breakthrough than a verbal maneuver. Tucker, an individualist anarchist who spent much of his career fighting monopolies and defending a radical version of free exchange, is not neutrally summarizing Marx. He's pointing to what he sees as sleight of hand: redefine "capital" as something categorically separate from "product", then smuggle in a new owner called "society."

The intent is diagnostic and accusatory. Tucker frames Marxism as a politics of classification, where the decisive act isn't organizing workers or building institutions but winning the argument over definitions. If capital is not merely accumulated product (tools, machines, saved goods) but a distinct, quasi-autonomous force, then expropriation can be narrated as restoration rather than seizure. Tucker's subtext is that this redefinition is precisely what authorizes a collectivist state (or "society" as a coercive proxy) to step between producer and what production yields.

Context matters: late 19th-century radicalism was a crowded ecosystem, and Tucker's project competed directly with Marxist socialism for the mantle of working-class emancipation. He wanted exploitation explained not by the existence of private property per se, but by state-backed privilege: land titles, money monopolies, tariffs, patents. So when he caricatures Marx's move, he's defending his own alternative: dissolve the state props and capital's power shrinks without needing a grand seizure. The line works because it reduces a world-historical doctrine to a bureaucratic trick, making Marx's moral certainty feel like a consequence of wordplay.