In just about a day I have become a big fan of fellow blogger Paul Walker’s blog Aftermath News for (a) his brilliant writing (b) his total dedication and opposition to all things that impinge upon human individual freedoms and basic human rights and (c) his immense knowledge of how the elite (or to use his formulation the neo-elite) go about fooling people to accept their rule.
But I cannot agree with his belief that Constitutions and the Rule of law can guarantee either individual freedom or basic human rights to the non-elite. I have left a comment at his blog site arguing why I cannot agree. My views are in essence the same as that of Arundhati’s as expressed in her article on Justice Sabharwal only that I have expressed them in my own way.
Since those comments have a bearing on the earlier posts (and perhaps because I love to see my writing on my site as well), I am reproducing my comment here:
I agree with you fully Paul except for one minor aspect that, I believe, has major implications.
The ruling elite whether politically represented by democratic or non-democratic parties and irrespective of the self-proclaimed ideological orientations of these parties – Left, Right or Centre – have to use the state machinery to suppress and subjugate the people to its rule.
In a class-riven society such as ours worldwide, you cannot afford to be the elite and not subjugate the people – that is tautological. And this where the Left/Right issue gets badly confused.
This is the only disagreement I seem to have with you – I cannot agree with your belief that democratic institutions and The Rule of Law under existing Constitutions can guarantee individual freedom (whatever may be the degree of this freedom which obviously varies from country to country).
If society remains class riven with an elite comprising roughly about 20% of the global population and owning the entire planet and the rest of the 80% of the people owning nothing but their labour power then you cannot expect the 20% to really allow a functioning democracy or a Constitution and Rule of Law that actually allows true individual human freedom to the rest of the non-owning 80%.
It can only allow the freedom to let you think – through an elaborate and highly expensive farce – that you are (a) electing a government of your choice when in reality all parties Left, Right or Centre actually represent only the elite and not you, the non-owning classes, and (b) selling your labour power at rates that you agree and accept on your own volition when in reality such rates are really determined by the elite through their total monopoly over resources. The whole system is based on these two BIG lies that non-owning classes have political or economic freedom! They do not!
On the other hand, if the elite really allows true individual economic and political freedom to the non-owning classes, it cannot remain the elite because then you will not accept these two BIG lies and you will overturn the system and seek one that allows all people and not just the handful that is the elite to control all economic and political power.
So we have democracies in the US and India – the two largest democracies in the world, and both function on lies – both maintain a democratic facade only to perpetuate the rule of the elite.
When it comes to socialist or communist countries – extant or extinct – the elite do not even need the farce of democracy because their coming to power was on the basis of the big lie that the party represents the people and if the party is in power, it means the people are in power. So, where is the need for elections or democracy?
But again the elite in such countries – the “party persons in power” – control all resources and the people remain what they were – only sellers of labour power, or, in many instances in such countries, mere givers of labour power for a few facilities in return that only guarantee their subsistence existence. They do not even have the right to form trade associations/trade unions and strike work demanding better returns against their labour power.
True democracy can come and allow real freedoms to people only when all people can own the entire planet collectively.That is how Nature meant it to be. Blue whales and migratory birds, to give just one example, travel thousands of miles each year from one pole to the other for food – they collectively own the entire world but we don’t because we have created a system of private property.
And please don’t confuse and equate the ownership of private articles of consumption such as your toothbrush or your undie with private ownership of wealth and global productive resources! Let’s have private ownership of articles of private consumption by all means. Humans do not need wealth but they need just a few things to lead a comfortable and peaceful life – a few clothes; a shelter that provides basic comforts such as protection against excessive heat or cold, free access to water, air and light; four square meals a day; access to information, knowledge and entertainment including education; basic health care and the opportunity and means to travel around the world and when possible around the Universe. Let’s have private ownership of or access to these few articles/services of private consumption by all means but let’s have collective, community ownership of all productive resources.
If you calculate the costs of providing these amenities to all the 6 billion people on this planet, it is not a big ask and certainly not impossible even today, right now! Just divert the resources from arms production to meeting these needs and all of us can live in peace and in comfort and enjoying all private and individual freedoms. Poverty and inhuman deprivation that is now the fate of nearly 70% – 80% of the world’s population, can be eradicated overnight, as it were.
But for that to happen global productive resources have to be owned on a collective, community basis, by the people at large and not by just a few handful, the elite. Only then can we hope to have systems of governance that can afford to allow personal and individual freedoms because then there will be no need for an elite (owning and controlling most all resources) to subjugate the non-owning classes to perpetuate their rule.
There will also be no need for spending most all resources on arms production – how ironic that collectively humans spend most of their resources on means of destruction rather than means of existence just to perpetuate the rule of a handful of inhuman beasts over the rest of us humans!
The real issue, therefore, is how do you guarantee community and collective ownership of resources in a such a way that all the people can – through real democratic processes for arriving at social choices from individual choices – decide how best to make use of available resources for the good of not only all humans but all life on this beautiful Planet Earth – the only spaceship in this mighty universe, as far as we know, where life can survive.
How can we guarantee such collective ownership without resorting to either state ownership or any other form of ownership where a small elite can again begin to control most all resources?
It may be difficult to find an answer to this question but as long as we fail to do so, the elites, their lies and the farce that is modern democracy and the Rule of Law will continue, however much we may try to protect individual freedoms.
Existing Constitutions and the so-called Rule of Law begin and end with the protection of private property. That means their primary task is to protect the people who own such property – the elite. So it is foolish to expect that Constitutions and the Rule of Law will do what it is exactly not supposed to do – protect the rights and freedoms of people who do not own property. The Rule of Law by the very act of protecting private property has to willy nilly violate the rights and freedoms of those who do not own property. The Justice Sabharwal scam in India provides a good example of this Constitutional conundrum. In case you have not read it or not come across it yet, I would request you to read the article by Booker Prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy (of God Of Small Things fame) on this issue.
As for the issue of corruption – I had mentioned the Rizwanur case not as an example of corruption but as an example of how even self-proclaimed Communists who are in power in West Bengal (a state in federal India) for the last thirty years through democratic means – a record of sorts – end up protecting the rich and the elite – the property owning classes. They have to if they have to come to power and stay in power through Constitutional processes and the Rule of Law! Because the Constitution and the Rule of Law demand that they do so – protect private property and those who own it!
The focus of my earlier comment may have been a bit too narrow because I was at that time addressing a much narrower scope of contention – namely, that the police (under the Constitution and the Rule of Law while upholding such Rule of Law) must of necessity often end up killing the innocent non-elite whether in India or elsewhere and that all states are fascist by definition and by Constitution, pun very much intended. That is really their job – in India, in the UK, in the US – everywhere there is a Constitution and Rule of Law to protect private property. Sometimes their actions are blatantly unjust and unfair and may attract your comment or mine but at all other times their fascism is just there continuously, perniciously and often without us noticing it.
Let’s face it friend, the state and its gendarmies – the police or the armed forces – are fascist because they have to be! That is their job under the Constitution and the Rule of Law – to perpetuate the rule of the haves over the have-nots by hook or by crook, through means fair or unfair, through violence or through more peaceful means. Whatever it is, they have to keep the people in general subjugated to the rule of the elites and that is why all states have to be fascist!
I am, therefore, again forced to write the sentence that you deleted from my earlier comment – Down with state fascism! Because the sub-text actually means down with private property!
3 Comments
October 11, 2007 at 8:16 pm
All this is fine but where is the motivation for the individuals. We saw the systems where the ownership is collective essentially collapse and the societies which had a strong notion of individual ownership flourish.
This clearly points to a basic human characteristic which is not just altruistic.
What is needed is a system that encourages innovation and personal effort but at the same time promotes the notion of doing good for others. Folks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have set great examples by donating majority of the wealth that they have amassed. Same need to go to the individual level.
Further, it is critical that people think and feel that they are responsible for their own welfare. They should not be looking to the government and others to take care of them.
October 12, 2007 at 12:46 am
Subhash:
While I make no claim to be in a position to answer any and all questions that may be raised against collective ownership, all I can do is try to defend collective ownership as best as I can and offer some counterarguments to the points you have raised:
1. I do not think there is enough evidence to support your view that “the systems where the ownership is collective essentially collapse and the societies which had a strong notion of individual ownership flourish.”
In fact, the evidence seems to suggest the exact opposite: systems based on collective ownership survived for millions of years while the system based on private ownership is not only on the verge of collapse but is also threatening the very existence of all life on Planet Earth.
The present global environmental situation arising from global warming and climatic destabilization, the development and accumulation of nuclear arms that can blow up the earth many times over, the threats arising from the development of biological and chemical weapons, the increasing destruction of bio-diversity and extinction of species due to human activity, to name some of the most important threats that readily come to mind are all a direct result of private ownership which arose only about 10,000 years ago at the most.
On the other hand, humans had been living in social systems based on collective ownership ever since pongids evolved into hominids – that means anything between 3 to 14 million years depending on which particular species among the several species that preceeded modern Man (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) you are willing to concede as human as well as which particular set of fossils you are willing to concede as human. To give you the maximum leeway, suppose we consider only Modern Man, even then systems based on collective ownership survived from circa 50,000 BC at least to circa 10,000 BC – 40,000 years which is 4 times longer than what seems to be the present lifespan of existing systems based on private ownership since the destruction of the present system of private ownership will be recorded in history books (in case we humans are able to survive through the present crisis and are still able to write history books) as circa 2000 AD.
However, what you are probably referring to are systems based on state ownership which have no doubt collapsed within years of their formation – they could not survive even for a single century, leave alone thousands of years. But I think I have made it very clear in my arguments that state ownership is not collective ownership – it is just another form of private ownership where the people in power in such state owned systems are the real private owners – “party persons in power” is the exact phrase I had used. In fact, it is this tendency of people to think of state ownership as some kind of collective ownership and therefore, the opposite of private ownership which is at the root of all confusion in the Left/Right and Left/Left debate. As far as I am concerned there is no difference between private capitalism and state capitalism – both are forms of private ownership. Collective ownership happens when all the people people collectively own and control productive resources that they use and can directly exercise this ownership and control over productive resources – this condition does not obtain in state ownership since in state ownership such ownership and control are exercised by a handful of people – the bureaucrats and party bosses who run the system.
2. Whether the basic human condition is altruistic or non-altruistic is essentially a matter of subjective speculation but that this condition is essentially social is an objective and scientific observation. That Man is a social animal and can only survive in society is a finding that has come from objective observation of the human condition. The Robinson Crusoe construct was developed, when it was developed historically, only because at that time, in the early days of capitalism, it was necessary to promote that kind of extreme individualism to ensure the further development of capitalism. Even then the problem is: when seen in critical perspective, Robinson Crusoe too needed another man – his Man Friday – to survive in the conditions that he found himself in. So, this whole notion of individualism as a kind of basic human condition is nothing but a myth created to perpetuate the rule of the property owning elite and to promote the greed and avarice that is the basis of capitalism. The individual individual does not exist. Only the social individual does.
3. Coming to the issue of innovations: One of the biggest human innovations or inventions ever – language – happened within collectively owned social systems. Researchers have managed to narrow down the time of emergence of language to anywhere between 40,000 and 1.5 million years ago – very much within the time when collective ownership dominated and there was no private property.
As to how much of an innovation language is, one example borrowed from Guy Deutscher, the author of “The Unfolding of Language”, should suffice:
the Sumerian word munintuma’a – a single word meaning ‘when he had made it suitable for her” is a word that is made up of different ’slots’ [mu]-[n]-[i]-[n]-[tum]-[]-[a]-['a] each corresponding to a particular portion of meaning. This sleek design allows single sounds to convey useful information, and in fact even the absence of a sound has been enlisted to express something specific. If you were to ask which bit in the Sumerian word corresponds to the pronoun ‘it’ in the English translation “when he had made it suitable for her”, then the answer would have to be ……….nothing. Mind you, a very particular kind of nothing: the nothing that stands in the empty slot in the middle. The technology is so fine-tuned that even a non-sound when carefully placed in a particular position, has been invested with a specific function.
I have not made this up – I have quoted almost verbatim from Deutscher. It took not only thousands and thousands of years but also an equal number of individual innovations for humans to develop its greatest single invention – language. And all these innovations took place under a system of collective ownership.
To provide more examples – researchers have identified the period 50,000-40,000 years ago as a period when an explosion of sorts took place in arts and technology. I am not going into the details but the point again is: this explosion of innovations took place within collective ownership.
Many of the great inventions we associate with the rise of civilization and written history – for example, the wheel, again took many thousand of years and an equal number of small, small innovations to come into existence. In fact, most of the innovations of today simply pale in comparison to the immense innovations that took place during the early years of the pre-history of man – for example, the taming of fire. All these innovations took place within collective ownership.
So, again the assertion that collective ownership does not encourage innovations is an absolute myth constructed to defend capitalism and is nothing but a politically motivated conceptual paradigm.
Ironically, that this is so is proved by the the large body of evidence that suggests that Soviet scientists were in no way behind American scientists for much of the period of the cold war although it is routinely said, almost as an article of faith, that the Soviets were far behind the Americans in innovation.
The irony is that actually there was little difference in the innovative capacity of the Soviets or the Americans simply because there was little qualitative difference between the two systems – both are/were based on forms of private ownership. Yet, the politically motivated claim was made that the American system supports innovation while the Soviet system does not – a purely mythical construction that was created to run down the Soviet system as it was falsely believed by the Americans that the Soviet system was somehow qualitatively and fundamentally different when they were not.
Naturally, there are no significant differences in the innovative capacities of the two systems. In fact, some people (not me) would even point to a few isolated examples such as the launch of the Sputnik to claim that the Soviets were ahead of the Americans in innovation. The truth is even if the Soviets were not ahead they were not significantly far behind in a statistical sense. I am unable to quote offhand any specific studies but I do remember having seen statistical studies based on things like number of patents taken out by scientists of both camps to show that there was no significant statistical difference in the innovative capacities of the two systems.
On the other hand, collective ownership is going to unleash unprecedented innovation. Modern management techniques such as Toyota Production System (TQM, Kaizen etc) all depend heavily on worker participation for process and product innovation. In fact, it is now well recognized by management gurus that the most innovative companies are those where worker participation and worker stakeholding is the highest. But such participation is now being achieved only through great conscious effort on the part of the management.
Most IT companies go in for such things as ESOP mainly to tap the innovative and creative potential of the professionals concerned. If individual entrepreneurs are innovative, imagine the innovative potential of a collective of owner-entrepreneurs.
4. Regarding personal effort: It is again a myth to claim that greed and avarice drives personal effort and therefore, people put in more personal effort in private ownership than in collective ownership. While owners of private property and wealth may be driven by greed and avarice to put in more personal effort to acquire further wealth (this is actually not so but suppose it is for the sake of argument) do you think a worker is driven to put in more personal effort when he or she knows that whatever the personal effort all that he or she will get at the end of that effort is one small sum of money – the pay packet? Don’t you think those who have a stake in any business put in more personal effort than those who do not have one? Land reforms in West Bengal is one glaring example of how people put in a lot more effort once they began to own the land compared to the effort they used to put in when someone else used to actually own the land. Similarly a professional who has a stake in the business is likely to put in more effort than one who does not. Collective ownership means all the people will have a stake in the businesses they run so it is only natural to expect that they will put in even more personal effort than in a situation when they have no stake in the business and will have to be satisfied with a small pay packet whatever the level of personal effort.
To take my own example: I get paid for writing every word if I write for the management site for which I work as a freelancer. But the excitement of starting my own blog and the immense pleasure that I am getting from writing about subjects that are close to my heart plus the added incentive that through my own blog I can better market my writing and may be able to create a situation in the future when I can earn hundreds of times more than what I can possibly do from writing for others has created a situation over the last few days where I have been spending more time on my blog than on writing for the other site. This is despite the fact that this Puja month I need more funds and I can generate more funds before the Pujas if I work as hard as for the other site as I am doing for my site – the maiximum motivation that can be generated when you are working for someone else pales in comparison to the motivation that can be generated when you are working for yourself. So, when you become a owner under collective ownership it is only to be expected that you will be a lot more motivated to work than if you are a non-owner and working for some other owner.
Finally, after having argued so far that non-ownership of private property does not encourage personal effort, let me now come back to the point that I had skipped for argument’s sake earlier – wealth encourages indolence and the tendency to fritter away your time in pleasure seeking activities, in conspicuous consumption as the American economist Thornton Veblen would have said. Most owners of immense wealth do no work but only play because they can afford to – in other words private ownership does not encourage personal effort even for the owners of such property. If we look at the ways of the elite in the days of slavery and feudalism this is further confirmed so that private ownership in fact does not encourage personal effort on the part of anybody – not owners nor non-owners of such property. But as I have already shown there are strong reasons to believe that collective ownership will encourage everybody to put in much greater personal effort.
5. To sum up, the view that private ownership encourages innovation and personal effort is again a complete myth propagated to make people, including intelligent and knowledgeable people like you, to falsely believe that a system based on private ownership is the best possible system and there is absolutely no alternative to it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
6. The fact that Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are great philanthropists only goes to prove that this mad pursuit of wealth is actually a futile exercise. No human needs so much wealth – they have to actually give it away because they have no need for it. In fact, they cannot think of anymore ways of using it after having satisfied all the whims and fancies they may have had. That the pursuit of wealth is a good thing is just another myth. A human being only needs a few items of consumption to lead a peaceful and comfortable life and the pursuit of wealth is an entirely futile exercise. But it is necessary to propagate this myth only to perpetuate private property. I am tempted here to quote from Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian: When Alexander (during his visit to India in the 4th Century BCE) asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were paying so little attention to the great conqueror, he got the following reply: King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! ….You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.
All those who spend their lives pursuing wealth are a nuisance to themselves and to others although in the end it is all in vain. When this realization dawns on the wealthy, they become philanthropists but by then they have done a great deal of damage to themselves and to others. So, is it not infinitely better to create and share wealth in a collective manner and actually enjoy not only the process of doing so but also its fruits without hurting others?
6. The real problem is private ownership can survive only on the basis of myths and lies, it does not stand up to critical scrutiny and there is absolutely no reason from any human point of view to support private ownership of wealth and productive resources over collective ownership. In any case, the very idea that a few handful of people should own the entire world while all the others, including all life on Plane Earth, would have to exist at the mercy of these handful of people revolts against any scientific or rational understanding of the existence of life on this earth. Who has determined that only a few people should own and control the entire world, and, that all the others, including the myriad forms of life that exist and have evolved on this planet, should have to depend on these few for their existence? Which scientific principle can possibly support such a view? Who has given these few people the exclusive right to own the earth?
Nobody. They have done so in the past (at the time of genesis of private property) and are doing so now only by brute force – through exercising their power over life and death over all others and by propagating various lies and myths that have the sole purpose of giving legitimacy to the concept of private property.
It is high time that intelligent and knowledgeable people realize the hoax of private property and start thinking critically. We really do not have much time before these greedy handful of people who own and control the world destroy it completely in their blind pursuit of even more wealth. In fact, it may already be too late for all we know!
November 28, 2007 at 1:18 am
[...] some of the reasons why this would be so in a previous comment against my friend Shubhash Agrawal – I request readers to click here to read it – and it is possible to show that collectively owned units will be able to quickly start building [...]