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Title: May Day
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: April 30th, 2014
Language: en
Topics: May Day
Source: Retrieved Sept 9, 2022, from https://c4ss.org/content/26825

Kevin Carson

May Day

Americans have been conditioned to think of May Day as a “commie

holiday,” one associated until recently with military parades in Red

Square and leaders of Marxist-Leninist regimes exchanging “fraternal

greetings” in the names of their respective peoples. They might be

surprised to learn it was originally an American holiday, created by

Chicago workers in commemoration of the eight-hour day campaign and the

Haymarket Martyrs.

Perhaps even more surprising — as much so to modern American

libertarians as anyone else — is the fact that May Day is part of the

free market libertarian movement’s heritage. That’s counter-intuitive

for obvious reasons. Since the time of Mises and Rand, American

libertarianism has generally been identified — often justifiably — with

a reflexive defense of capitalism and big business. But despite the

rightward political shift of the free market movement in the 20^(th)

century, there was a very large free market Left in the 19^(th) century,

frequently with close ties to the labor and socialist movements.

Classical liberalism had common Enlightenment roots, overlapping

considerably in its origins with the early socialist movement. A broad

current of thinkers, like the British Thomas Hodgskin and the American

individualist anarchists (or Boston anarchists) around Benjamin Tucker

and Liberty magazine, belonged within both the free market libertarian

and libertarian socialist camps. In their view capitalism was a system

in which the state intervened in the market on behalf of landlords and

other rentiers, enforcing the artificial property rights, monopolies and

artificial scarcities from which profit, interest and rent derived. They

saw the proper goal of socialism as abolition of these monopolies,

allowing market competition in the supply of capital and land to drive

the assorted rents derived from them down to zero, so that the natural

market wage of labor would be its full product.

So perhaps it’s not so surprising after all that many of these thinkers

would have close ties with, or be active participants in, the American

socialist and labor movements. Benjamin Tucker himself, although a

self-described socialist, was fairly lukewarm toward labor organization.

He saw the chief avenues of action as organizing against absentee

landlords and setting up interest-free mutual banks, and took an

agnostic view of whatever particular forms of association people might

choose in an economy free of such monopolies.

But several members of the Boston anarchist group and the Liberty circle

were active participants in the New England Labor Reform League or

William Sylvis’s National Labor Union, and later in the American Labor

Reform League. There was also a significant contingent of individualists

in the International Working People’s Association (formed by anarchists

who withdrew from the First International as it became increasingly

dominated by Marx’s followers), and in the nationwide movement and

general strike for the eight-hour day. Some leading individualists

involved in socialist and labor politics included Ezra Heywood, William

Greene, J.K. Ingalls and Stephen Pearl Andrews.

Individualists like Dyer Lum later attempted to build bridges with the

radical labor movement. Lum tried to fuse the individualist framework of

economic analysis with radical labor activism. He was closely involved

with the Knights of Labor and AFL. Lawrence Labadie went on to promote

individualist anarchist and mutualist ideas within industrial unions —

first in the Western Federation of Miners and then in the Wobblies.

The popular association of May Day with Marxist-Leninist parties and

state communist regimes reflects an overwhelming ideological victory for

the apologists of corporate capitalism in the 20^(th) century. The

ideological counter-offensive began with the cult of “Old Glory” and the

Pledge of Allegiance in the 1890s, continued with the movement for

“Americanization” within workplaces and public schools, and culminated

in the War Hysteria and Red Scare of the Wilson administration and the

brown-shirt terror tactics of the American Legion, Klan and local Red

Squads.

This ideological victory was associated with another, largely

contemporaneous victory: The association of “free markets” and “free

enterprise” with corporate capitalism in the public mind, and the belief

(also promoted by the authoritarian managerialists of the “progressive”

movement who went on to steal the name “liberal”) that the regulatory

state and big business are adversaries rather than allies.

Today is an excellent time not only to reclaim May Day as a

quintessentially American holiday, entirely compatible with the love of

liberty, but to reclaim free markets as the enemy of corporate power and

capitalism.