Collective Conscious

Via Crooked Tim­ber:

This chat runs back as far as Locke’s orig­i­nal the­ory of own­er­ship. Locke claimed that a per­son came to own what­ever they cre­ated or worked on, and also that they sur­ren­dered back to Nature any­thing they could not con­sume in their lifetime:

Before the appro­pri­a­tion of land, he who gath­ered as much of the wild fruit, killed, caught, or tamed as many of the beasts as he could — he that so employed his pains about any of the spon­ta­neous prod­ucts of Nature as any way to alter them from the state Nature put them in, by plac­ing any of his labour on them, did thereby acquire a pro­pri­ety in them; but if they per­ished in his pos­ses­sion with­out their due use — if the fruits rot­ted or the veni­son putre­fied before he could spend it, he offended against the com­mon law of Nature, and was liable to be pun­ished: he invaded his neighbour’s share, for he had no right far­ther than his use called for any of them, and they might serve to afford him con­ve­nien­cies of life.

The same mea­sures gov­erned the pos­ses­sion of land, too. What­so­ever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of before it spoiled, that was his pecu­liar right; what­so­ever he enclosed, and could feed and make use of, the cat­tle and prod­uct was also his. But if either the grass of his enclo­sure rot­ted on the ground, or the fruit of his plant­ing per­ished with­out gath­er­ing and lay­ing up, this part of the earth, notwith­stand­ing his enclo­sure, was still to be looked on as waste, and might be the pos­ses­sion of any other.

Obvi­ously peo­ple do not fol­low this sort of ethic now when assign­ing prop­erty rights, right? I’d argue that they do, but in a very dif­fer­ent way: we assign the power of appro­pri­a­tion to cap­i­tal rather that to labor. This gives a Lock­ean ethic to our present con­cep­tion of prop­erty rights: that is, the invest­ment of cap­i­tal into a busi­ness deserves an own­er­ship share, whereas the invest­ment of labor deserves noth­ing but wages.

Obvi­ously this puts the labor­ing class at a bit of a dis­ad­van­tage. Their work is every bit as valu­able as cap­i­tal equip­ment is — in fact, all the cap­i­tal in the world would be use­less with­out work­ers — but they have no means by which to win own­er­ship of any­thing in the world. Instead, cap­i­tal begets more cap­i­tal at an expo­nen­tial rate, and so ‘diver­gent accu­mu­la­tion’ becomes a nec­es­sary fea­ture of the system.

Redis­tri­b­u­tion is not the solu­tion. It is not enough to sim­ply take a few dol­lars out of the flow each year and real­lo­cate them to the poor, not when income is so small rel­a­tive to wealth, and not when the total accu­mu­la­tion pat­tern looks like this:

What is needed is acknowl­edge­ment that labor pro­vides as legit­i­mate a claim to own­er­ship as cap­i­tal does. This ele­ment of “cap­i­tal­ism” more than any other robs peo­ple of oppor­tu­nity and sat­is­fac­tion. It’s sim­ply not sen­si­ble to swear such devo­tion to “cap­i­tal” when cap­i­tal is only half the equa­tion. Work is invest­ment, and must pro­vide own­er­ship, not just sub­sis­tence, to laborers.