I disagree, but my disagreement requires explanation.
I do not mean we on the Left are/should be anti-capital in the sense of "We hate rich people" or "We hate money". The issue is not the particular people who hold capital, but the processes of capitalism itself. To use local terminology: we can taboo the word "capitalism" and instead say, "optimization process implemented as a social system of human societies, which maximizes the accumulation of capital".
We can even go further than just "capital" and say "liquid wealth" or "potential human-usable optimization power", by analogy to potential energy. We then get: "optimization process, implemented as a social system, which maximizes the accumulation of potential human-usable optimization power."
Once we have this definition, the observed behavior of capitalism comes into a much clearer light. Yes, capitalism generates massive amounts of wealth, because it you need to generate massive amounts of wealth in order to liquidate it into potential world-shaping power. Capitalism can be industrial, when money (the definitionally most-liquid form of capital) is backed by a fixed commodity (forcing the system to physically produce large sums of that quantity and trade them around in order to accumulate capital) or financial, when money is virtual (allowing the system to "eat its own tail" by accumulating vast sums of financial wealth without engaging in real production).
We can also see, in such a definition, why anti-capitalists are anti-capitalist and why I think LessWrong-style rationalists should be anti-capitalist (in the limit): it's a human-unfriendly optimization process operating here and now! What purpose in worrying about futuristic cyber-monsters if the social monster is already biting our heads off?
The issue is not [...] but the processes of capitalism itself.
In which case I suggest that "anti-capital" is a misleading term, especially when accompanied by "pro-labor". There is a meaningful opposition between labour and capital (meaning, roughly, the people who work and the people and institutions that tell them what to do) but not between labour and capitalism; one is a class of people and the other is a process or ideology.
(For the avoidance of doubt, by "opposition" there I don't mean that the two have to be enemies ...
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.