bombcaps of the world, unite!

My wife is finishing up her 3 years teaching at Bryn Mawr College, where May Day means that hundreds of young women who usually wear all black dress up instead in all white and dance around the May Pole.

(Or, and I kid you not, the alternative celebration called the May Hole!)

Everywhere else in the world, May Day marks the festival of anticapitalism. It's not called that. It's called International Workers Day, and as Wikipedia says, it comes from a "Radical Left" ideology.

Of course, those of us who know that socialism hurts workers can appreciate a certain irony in associating a "workers day" with the anticapitalists. But too few understand any of that.

Even those who should really know better are anxious to abandon the word 'capitalism' for fear of being equated with the mercantilists and fascists. My first LRC article was on the topic of specifying which capitalism it is we support and which one we decry, but I'm completely against abandoning the word all together.

Why? Because I have yet to hear anyone suggest an alternative terminology for the private, several ownership of all scarce means of production.

The term 'free market' doesn't capture the utilitarian importance of (a) the structure of capital to the division of labor, or (b) the specific role not just of markets but of capital markets to labor productivity and therefore worker prosperity.

I am a free market anarchist, because the free market is the most relevant ethical concept in my anarchism, but I am also an anarchocapitalist (no matter how ugly the term) because it is capitalism specifically that is the most relevant economic concept in my anarchism. I'm free market because I like freedom, and I'm pro-capitalist because I like prosperity. The socialists don't get that that prosperity is for everyone. They think capital ownership is a zero-sum game.

I don't emphasize my anarchism when I can avoid it. Unlike some, I don't think the term carries any positive connotation with anyone whose opinion I care about. But I won't abandon it either.

(And I don't care that the left-anarchists have the better historical claim to it. Liberal anarchists have the better logical claim.)

On the other hand, I don't expect anyone who's unwilling to sit down and talk about it to understand what I mean by any of these terms.

People think capitalism means privileging profits over people, privileging capitalists over workers, bending the force of government to the will of the super-rich at the cost of consumer safety or worker welfare. They think anarchism means violent rebellion -- bombs and assassinations, opposition to all rules, all order, pursuit of chaos as both means and ends.

Sometimes I have the energy to clarify. And sometimes -- maybe May Day -- I'd rather just enjoy the confusion. It's not going away any time soon, so I might as well learn to revel in it.

So in the spirit of peaceful rebellion, I've designed a new logo and a new CafePress store (2 actually) for us Bomb Throwing Capitalists:

BombCaps of the World, Unite!

We Have Nothing To Lose But Our Semantic Chains!

www.bombcap.com