The notion that because the Individualist Anarchists supported "property" they supported capitalism is distinctly wrong. This is for two reasons. Firstly, private property is not the distinctive aspect of capitalism — exploitation and wage labour is. Thus support of private property does not indicate a support for capitalism. Even use of John Locke's arguments in favour of private property could be used against capitalism. As Murray Bookchin makes clear regarding early American society:
"Unknown in the 1640s, the non-bourgeois aspects of Locke's theories were very much in the air a century and a half later . . . [In an artisan/peasant society] a Lockean argument could be used as effectively against the merchants . . .to whom the farmers were indebted, as it could against the King [or the State]. Nor did the small proprietors of America ever quite lose sight of the view that attempts to seize their farmsteads and possessions for unpaid debts were a violation of their 'natural rights,' and from the 1770s until as late as the 1930s they took up arms to keep merchants and bankers from dispossessing them from land they or their ancestors had wrestled from 'nature' by virtue of their own labour. The notion that property was sacred was thus highly elastic: it could be used as effectively by pre-capitalist strata to hold on to their property as it could by capitalists strata to expand their holdings." [The Third Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 187-8]
What right-libertarians do is to confuse two very different kinds of "property," one of which rests on the labour of the producer themselves and the other on the exploitation of the labour of others. They do not analyse the social relationships between people which the property generates and, instead, concentrate on things (i.e. property). Thus, rather than being interested in people and the relationships they create between themselves, the right-libertarian focuses on property (and, more often than not, just the word rather than what the word describes). This is a strange position for someone seeking liberty to take, as liberty is a product of social interaction (i.e. the relations we have and create with others) and not a product of things (property is not freedom as freedom is a relationship between people, not things). In effect, they confuse property with possession (and vice versa).
And if quoting Karl Marx is not too out of place, we discover that he did not consider property as being identical with capitalism. "The historical conditions of [Capital's] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power." This wage-labour is the necessary pre-condition for capitalism, not "private property" as such. Thus artisan/peasant production is not capitalism as "the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They only become capital under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation of, and domination over, the worker." [Capital, vol. 1, p. 264 and p. 938] We quote Marx simply because as authorities on socialism go, he is one that right-libertarians (or Marxists, for that matter) cannot ignore or dismiss. Needless to say, he is essentially repeating Proudhon's distinction between property and possession. The former is theft and despotism, the latter is liberty. In other words, for anarchists, "property" is a social relation and that a key element of anarchist thinking (both social and individualist) was the need to redefine that relation in accord with standards of liberty and justice.
Thus artisan production is not capitalist. It does not generate relationships of exploitation and domination as the worker owns and controls their own means of production. It is, in effect, a form of socialism (a "petit bourgeois" form of socialism, to use the typical Marxist phrase). Thus support for "private property" need not mean support for capitalism (as shown, for example, by the Individualist Anarchists). To claim otherwise is to ignore the essential insight of socialism and totally distort the socialist case against capitalism.
Secondly, and more importantly, what the Individualist Anarchists meant by "private property" (or "property") was distinctly different than what is meant by theorists on the libertarian right. Basically, the libertarian right exploit, for their own ends, the confusion generated by the use of the word "property" by the likes of Tucker to describe a situation of "possession." Proudhon recognised this danger. He argued that "it is proper to call different things by different names, if we keep the name 'property' for the former [individual possession], we must call the latter [the domain of property] robbery, repine, brigandage. If, on the contrary, we reserve the name 'property' for the latter, we must designate the former by the term possession or some other equivalent; otherwise we should be troubled with an unpleasant synonym." [What is Property?, p. 373] Unfortunately Tucker, who translated this work, did not heed Proudhon's words of wisdom and called possession in an anarchist society by the word "property."
Looking at Tucker's arguments, it is clear that the last thing Tucker supported was capitalist property rights. For example, he argued that "property, in the sense of individual possession, is liberty" and contrasted this with capitalist property. [Instead of a Book, p. 394] That his ideas on "property" were somewhat different than that associated with right-libertarian thinkers is most clearly seen with regards to land. Here we discover him advocating "occupancy and use" and rejecting the "right" of land owners to bar the landless from any land they owned but did not personally use. Rent was "due to that denial of liberty which takes the shape of land monopoly, vesting titles to land in individuals and associations which do not use it, and thereby compelling the non-owning users to pay tribute to the non-using owners as a condition of admission to the competitive market." Anarchist opposition of rent did "not mean simply the freeing of unoccupied land. It means the freeing of all land not occupied by the owner. In other words, it means land ownership limited by occupancy and use." [Tucker, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 130 and p. 155] This would result in a "system of occupying ownership . . . accompanied by no legal power to collect rent." [Instead of a Book, p. 325]
A similar position was held by John Beverley Robinson. He argued that there "are two kinds of land ownership, proprietorship or property, by which the owner is absolute lord of the land, to use it or to hold it out of use, as it may please him; and possession, by which he is secure in the tenure of land which he uses and occupies, but has no claim upon it at all of he ceases to use it." Moreover, "[a]ll that is necessary to do away with Rent is to away with absolute property in land." [Patterns of Anarchy, p. 272]
Thus the Individualist Anarchists definition of "property" differed considerably from that of the capitalist definition. As they themselves acknowledge. Robinson argued that "the only real remedy is a change of heart, through which land using will be recognised as proper and legitimate, but land holding will be regarded as robbery and piracy." [Op. Cit., p. 273] Tucker, likewise, indicated that his ideas on "property" were not the same as existing ones when he argued that "the present system of land tenure should be changed to one of occupancy and use" and that "no advocate of occupancy-and-use tenure of land believes that it can be put in force, until as a theory it has been as generally . . . seen and accepted as is the prevailing theory of ordinary private property." [Occupancy and Use verses the Single Tax] Thus, for Tucker, anarchism is dependent on "the Anarchistic view that occupancy and use should condition and limit landholding becom[ing] the prevailing view." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 159]
Hence to claim that the Individualist Anarchists supported capitalist property rights is false. As can be seen, they advocated a system which differed significantly to the current system, indeed they urged the restriction of property rights to a form of possession. Unfortunately, by generally using the term "property" to describe this new system of possession they generated exactly the confusion that Proudhon foretold. Sadly, right-libertarians use this confusion to promote the idea that the likes of Tucker supported capitalist property rights and so capitalism.
For these two reasons it is clear that just because the Individualist Anarchists supported (a form of) "property" does not mean they are capitalists. Indeed, Kropotkin argued that a communist-anarchist revolution would not expropriate the tools of self-employed workers who exploited no-one (see his Act for Yourselves pp. 104-5). Malatesta argued that in a free society "the peasant [is free] to cultivate his piece of land, alone if he wishes; free is the shoe maker to remain at his last or the blacksmith in his small forge." Thus these two very famous communist-anarchists also "supported" "property" but they are recognised as obviously socialists. This apparent contradiction is resolved when it is understood that for communist-anarchists (like all anarchists) the abolition of property does not mean the end of possession and so "would not harm the independent worker whose real title is possession and the work done" unlike capitalist property [Malatesta, Life and Ideas, p. 103] In other words, all anarchists (as we argue in section B.3) oppose private property but support possession.
That many of the Individualist Anarchists used the term "property" to describe a system of possession (or "occupancy-and-use") should not blind us to the anti-capitalist nature of that "property." Once we move beyond looking at the words they used to want they meant by those words we clearly see that their ideas are distinctly different from those of supporters of capitalism.