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Finally, the arguments appeal strongly to different interest groups, and often support their positions as "rights".
Currently recognized property owners, especially corporate shareholders and holders of deeds in land or rights to exploit natural capital, are generally recognized as advocating extremely strong property rights.
However, the definition of capital has broadened in recent years to recognize and include the rationales of other major interest groups: artists or other creators who rely on copyright law, legal patent and trademark holders who improve what they call intellectual capital, workers who are largely trading in their own less creative labor guided by a body of shared and imitative instructional capital - the trades themselves, all have reasons to prefer status quo property law over any given set of proposed reforms.
Even judges, mediators or administrators charged with fair execution of some ethical code and the maintenance of some relationship between human capital and financial capital within a capitalist representative democracy, tend to have strong self-interest reasons to argue for one view or another - typically, that view that assigns them a meaningful role in the capitalist economy.
Karl Marx made the strong claim that this role actually affects their cognition, and leads them inexorably to irreconcilable points of view, i.e. that no agreement about capitalism was possible by "class collaboration", and "class struggle" between these defined it. This view was advocated by many revolutionary movements of the 20th century, but was often abandoned in practice as it seemed to lead to "class war", endless violence between those with irreconcilable points of view.Today, certain parties that were traditionally opposed to capitalism, e.g. the Communist Party of China, see some role for it in the development of their society. In such cases, debate focuses on incentive systems, not on the overall moral structure or ethical clarity of "capitalism". Former anti-capitalist groups holding such views are generally seen as having "switched sides", however, and they are often no longer on good terms with their old allies.
One important modern argument is that capitalism simply isn't a system, merely a set of questions, challenges, and assertions regarding human behavior. Like biology, or ecology and its relationship to animal behavior, it is made complex by human language, culture and ideas. Jane Jacobs and George Lakoff argued separately that there was a Guardian Ethic which was fundamentally related to nurturing and protection of life, and a Trader Ethic more related to the unique primate practice of trade. Jacobs thought that the two were made and kept separate in history, and that any collaboration between them was corruption, i.e. any unifying system that claimed to make assertions regarding both, would simply be serving itself.
Other doctrines focus narrowly on the application of capitalist means to natural capital ( Paul Hawken) or individual capital ( Ayn Rand) - assuming a more general moral and legal framework which discourages these same mechanisms when applied to non-living beings coercively, e.g. "creative accounting" combining individual creativity with the complex instructional base of accounting itself.
Aside from the very narrow arguments advancing specific mechanisms, it is quite difficult to distinguish critiques of capitalism from critiques of Western European civilization, colonialism or imperialism. These arguments often recur interchangeably within the context of the extremely complex anti-globalization movement, which is often (but not universally) described as "anti-capitalist".
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