"Socialism" or "Capitalism"?

Today on the LRC blog, Stephan Kinsella posted another rant against "free market anti-capitalist" Kevin Carson. Kinsella's blog post is addorned with a post card he bought in Berlin right after the wall fell. It shows a heap of skulls with Lenin's one-eyed ghost glaring at the viewer, captioned with the word "Socialismus". Kinsella might be accusing Carson of advocating an authoritarian, top-down mode of organization that features the loss of personal and economic freedom and the deaths of innumerable political prisoners. Or, he might be attempting to inform Carson that the word he prefers to label free market ideology with might be misleading.

Carson's latest entry at the Center for a Stateless Society suggests we should use "Socialism", and not "Capitalism", to label our belief that society should run on voluntary interaction. He even states that free market anti-capitalists have the better claim to the title "Socialist", and says that this opinion is a "fairly common observation" among market anarchists. "For example, C4SS director Brad Spangler once suggested that Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism was 'actually a variety of socialism, in that it offers an alternative understanding of existing capitalism (or any other variety of statism) as systematic theft from the lower classes and envisions a more just society without that oppression.' As much as Rothbard himself frequently deviated from such sympathies, his stated principles at their best constitute a Rothbard that might have been. His stated principles, by providing the basis for a fundamental critique of state-enforced privilege and artificial property rights, offer much room for a common vision of social justice with the socialist Left."

Carson thinks that the word "Capitalism" needs a lot of explaining when we use it to describe our ideology and the world we envision. "Why name an economic system based on free markets after one factor of production in particular, especially when even neoclassical orthodoxy regards capital as only one coequal factor among several? The choice of terms, perhaps unwittingly, suggests a system in which the interests of capital have an especially privileged status; it may also suggest something about the sympathies of those who chose the term."

Carson goes on to explain that a truly free market would tend to "socialize" capital, particularly when there's a use and occupancy condition for land ownership (which many libertarians question or reject) and free banking (which he has a noticeably Tuckerite interpretation of). When there aren't "artificial" barriers to entry, all the wealth would spread around through voluntary exchange and everyone would get their fair share.

Maybe we can grant that "Socialism" can legitimately be used to describe a free market ideology. And we should grant that "Capitalism" makes people think of government-instituted priviledge. But if we're worried about what our audience would think, then "Socialism" can be just as bad a word. People commonly use it to describe whatever authoritarian measure they oppose. And only the most intentionally radical leftists use the word to describe their own beliefs. In the common American understanding, "Socialism" means East Germany, the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Canada. People understand words according to their recent experience, not the 19th century understanding of those words. Ben Tucker called himself a socialist, but who besides me and a handful of other guys knows who Ben Tucker was?