{"id":156420,"date":"2020-03-16T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T12:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=156420"},"modified":"2020-03-15T11:00:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T11:00:35","slug":"now-what-do-we-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/03\/now-what-do-we-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Now What Do We Do?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coronavirus.\u00a0\u00a0 Wars.\u00a0 Refugees.\u00a0 Racism. Sea levels rising.\u00a0 Stock markets falling.\u00a0 Most human labour becoming redundant as a factor of production and valueless in the labour market.\u00a0 The irreversible loss of the delicate chemical and physical balances that make the biosphere possible.\u00a0 Let me stop at eight.\u00a0 Any one of us could go on and on listing one after another nightmare that unfortunately is not a dream but is real.\u00a0\u00a0 They make some of us feel like leaving the room, walking to a bar, listening to the Piano Man, and forgetting about life for a while.<\/p>\n

But others of us can\u2019t leave the room. \u00a0We are glued to our seats.\u00a0\u00a0 We can\u2019t stand up and leave whatever room we happen to be in because we can\u2019t stop reading Thomas Pikettty\u2019s latest book, Capital and Ideology <\/em>(Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), released less than a week ago on March 10, 2020.<\/p>\n

The book has four parts. All of them discuss the definition and redefinition of property.\u00a0 \u00a0Part One is about inequality regimes in history, mainly in Europe.\u00a0\u00a0 Part Two is about Slave and Colonial Societies.\u00a0\u00a0 Part Three is called The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Part Four, Rethinking the Dimensions of Political Conflict speculates that it might be possible to forge alliances between the new highly educated \u2019Brahmin Left\u2019 and the impoverished poorly educated formerly left populations who now vote for Trump, Johnson, Beppo, Le Pen, Modi and the Polish and Hungarian conservatives.\u00a0 For such an alliance to come together the Brahmin Left would have to take seriously the harm and humiliation imposed on the poor by globalization and the EU in their present forms and perhaps also by immigration.\u00a0\u00a0 The highly educated left must take serious steps to reform at least two of these three; to redistribute wealth, and to equalize access to quality education.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (I find Piketty ambiguous regarding immigration.)<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether we agree with Pikkety s proposals, on almost every one of his new book s 1093 pages we find facts that, if we think about them, provide useful tips.\u00a0\u00a0 They help us to make rational choices about what we can do to make the future better.\u00a0 Pages 100-1 for example. There we read:<\/p>\n

The theory of power and property to which the [French 1789] revolutionary lawmakers adhered was in principle fairly clear.\u00a0 Its purpose was to draw a sharp distinction between, on the on hand, of regalian powers (of security, justice and legitimate violence) henceforth to be monopolized by the centralized state, and, on the other hand, property rights, which only individuals could claim. The latter were to be full, complete, and inviolable, as well as guaranteed by the state, whose primary, if not sole, mission should be to protect them.\u00a0 In practice, however, establishing the rights of property proved to be a far more complex undertaking than this simple theory would suggest This was because regalian powers and property rights were so intimately intertwined at the local level that it was extremely difficult to define consistent norms of justice acceptable to all the relevant actors, particularly when it came to the initial allocation of property rights.\u00a0 …. In the first phase (1789-90), the committee of the National Assembly in charge of these delicate issues adopted what it termed an historical approach.\u00a0 The idea was to examine the origins of each right and determine whether it was of a contractual nature, in which case it should be maintained, or whether it was noncontractual, in which case it should be abolished \u2026. The ecclesiastical tithe was also abolished and church property nationalized, again without compensations.\u00a0\u00a0 This provoked vigorous debate \u2026because many people feared that the religious, educational and hospital services previously provided by the church would suffer\u2026. For good measure, Crown property along with church property was included as <\/em>biens nationaux to be sold at auction. The general philosophy was that the state \u2026. would finance itself in the future through annual taxes duly approved by representatives of the citizenry, whereas the exploitation of perpetual property {property yielding a flow of income} would henceforth by left to private individuals. <\/em>{emphasis added}<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The preceding longish quotation provides a sample of the innumerable historical gems contained in Piketty s new book that show how property (and therefore power and therefore social structure) has been contested, defined and redefined around the world from time to time and from place to place.\u00a0\u00a0 It also provides me with a platform for briefly introducing some of my own ideas about what to do now.<\/p>\n

The above-summarized deliberations of the property committee of the National Assembly of 1789-90 provide an unusually pure ideal type of the juridical ideal of nascent capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0 The ideal-type illuminates, I suggest, the mixed bags found in historical cases.<\/p>\n

What the passage and its context make crystal clear is that what is going on is that the propertied classes are taking power.\u00a0 Everyone else is being put on a short leash.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For starters the Crown Lands are seized and auctioned off to the highest bidder.\u00a0\u00a0 The highest bidders are wealthy men.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The properties of the Church are treated in the same way.\u00a0\u00a0 The military class, the nobles, also loses its lands. Their rents will no longer be available to fund their horses and their armour. \u00a0The annual budget of the army (a modern institution, replacing the hosts of nobles and their vassals summoned by the King to follow him in war) will require approved by the Assembly and will be paid for by taxes.<\/p>\n

The workers will enter the market selling labour power if they can find buyers. A few decades later in 1817 at the beginning of the chapter on wages in his classic text on economics, David Ricardo explains the situation as follows:\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0the supply of labour is determined by the demand for it.\u00a0 When the demand for labour is low, the supply of it is also low because fewer of the children of the unemployed workers survive.<\/p>\n

Henceforth the state will have no resources of its own. It will depend for its livelihood on an annual budget voted by a parliament of property owning men. (In 1789 servants or workers of any kind were not deemed to be \u2018active citizens\u2019 qualified to vote or to hold office; women did not get the vote in France until 1944.) France will become what Joseph Schumpeter will later call a Steuerstaat, <\/em>a tax state.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 Its income will barely suffice to fund a caretaker state in a self-regulating market. Assets of the church providing social services will also be confiscated.\u00a0\u00a0 Its schools, its hospitals, its cathedrals and its convents will depend on periodic donations and on user charges paid by people who own income-producing property and are therefore able to pay,<\/p>\n

whereas the exploitation of perpetual property (property yielding a flow of income} would henceforth be left to private individuals<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the light of these considerations, one can perhaps improve one\u2019s answers to my title question, \u2018Now what do we do?\u2019\u00a0 Here I would like to introduce a notion of \u2018deep cause.\u2019\u00a0 A deep cause is simply an especially powerful cause that in turn activates other causes.\u00a0\u00a0 In deciding what to do, it is more efficient to work on a deep cause because strengthening it has stronger and more comprehensive tendencies to solve more problems.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, large scale progress on the 7th<\/sup> of the nightmares on my initial list, organizing and funding dignified and meaningful livelihoods for those rejected by the labour market (for example funding paying the musicians of an orchestra, or the ecologists reforesting a denuded mountain, or discretely subsidizing community development complementing the assets the poor themselves can mobilize) can have (I allege) a series of beneficial effects regarding other problems.\u00a0 Working toward a win-win society where everybody has dignity and an income alleviates nightmare two (wars), nightmare three (refugees) nightmare four (racism), (nightmare five (rising temperatures) nightmare seven (massive unemployment) and nightmare eight (the death of the biosphere\u2014because much of the employment paid for by sharing the surplus of people who have surplus is devoted to ecology).<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most important and most questionable sea-change advocated by the property committee of the National Assembly was the systematic withdrawal of property rights from anything that was not the private accumulation of capital.\u00a0\u00a0 On the contrary, anything inherently worth doing should be endowed to the extent that it is possible to endow it.\u00a0 Medicine should be supported by continuous flows of income.\u00a0\u00a0 Art should be endowed.\u00a0 Governments should derive income from activities that produce a continuous flow of income such as mining (if not from nationalization, then from royalties, or from government participation as shareholders in all mining companies as in Botswana, or from making the renewal of mining licenses contingent on acceptable triple bottom line -people-planet-profit accounting as in South Africa).\u00a0\u00a0 As Schumpeter effectively argued, a Steuerstaat <\/em>attempting to be a welfare state is not sustainable \u2013as is illustrated by Sweden where unbearably high taxes compelled the retrenchment of the Swedish Model.\u00a0\u00a0 And today more than ever we need a welfare state, complemented by private philanthropy with the same devotion to the common good.\u00a0\u00a0 The age when it can be assumed that most people will make a living selling their services in the labour market is over.\u00a0 OVER!<\/p>\n

This is a point where the wisdom of the ages was right and the property committee of the National Assembly was wrong.\u00a0 \u00a0Perhaps most important, at the level of deep causes with multiple effects: Accumulation for its own sake, far from being assumed to be the normal goal for property owners should not be a legitimate goal at all. In Tony Lawson\u2019s terminology, markets are created by communities.\u00a0 Property rights are created by communities.\u00a0\u00a0 They should be regarded as morally legitimate if, when, and to the extent that they function to meet the needs of human communities and of the larger earth community of which we human beings are members.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Howard Richards with the assistance of Gavin Andersson\u2019s (in press)\u00a0Economic Theory and Community Development.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Prof. Howard Richards now teaches at the University of Santiago and the University of Cape Town.\u00a0 He is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He was born in Pasadena, California but since 1966 has lived in Chile when not teaching in other places. Professor of Peace and Global Studies Emeritus, Earlham College, a school in Richmond Indiana affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) known for its peace and social justice commitments. J.D. Stanford Law School, MA and PhD in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, Advanced Certificate in Education-Oxford,\u00a0 PhD in Educational Planning from University of Toronto. Books:\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Dilemmas of Social Democracies\u00a0with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>Gandhi and the Future of Economics\u00a0with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>The Nurturing of Time Future, Understanding the Global Economy\u00a0(available in PDF on line),\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, <\/em>Following Foucault:The Trail of the Fox (with Catherine Hoppers and Evelin Lindner),\u00a0 <\/em>(on Amazon as an e book), Unbounded Organizing in Community (with Gavin Andersson, also on Amazon),\u00a0 Rethinking Thinking <\/em>(with Catherine Hoppers),\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Hacia otras Economias\u00a0with Raul Gonzalez, free download available at\u00a0<\/em>www.repensar.cl<\/strong><\/a><\/em>.\u00a0<\/em>Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: conversaciones sobre el socialismo en Rosario, Argentina.\u00a0<\/em>Available free on the blogspot lahoradelaetica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accumulation for its own sake, far from being assumed to be the normal goal for property owners should not be a legitimate goal at all. Markets are created by communities. Property rights are created by communities. They should be regarded as morally legitimate if, when, and to the extent that they function to meet the needs of human communities and of the larger earth community of which we human beings are members. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}