Property

Property

Private Property is an illusion that creates its’ own reality. Individual human beings are cut off from the biological connection with nature. In the new artificial relationship between people and nature, people are reduced to the social relations to one of possessor and possessed. There is now established a society in which human worth itself is related to the quantity of possessions in the form of capital, or private property used in the generation of wealth. Those lacking ownership of capital now must sell their labor in order to earn a living. Their labor time is now the private property of another and thus sells themselves piece by piece into slavery during the time they are at work.

Humans are a part of nature. Society is tied to both culture and nature. Like any species humans interact with their environment. A human through culture and society are molded by their environment and in turn shapes their environment. This is in essence historical as the only constant then is change. Dialectical in the Hegelian sense and materialist in the Marxist sense change is created by life itself.

Separations of peoples from their access to the natural resources needed to live makes a mockery of what it is to be human. Nature becomes an enemy and labor becomes toil. As life is no longer a celebration but a burden we need to reconnect to nature. People are social and as social animals people find themselves in other people. Labor and creative artistic activity becomes unnaturally estranged leading to enduring alienation and abnormally dissatisfied unfriendliness of daily labor.

The separation of the individual from a collective existence because of private property creates the “Other”, who is both the oppressor and the parasitic dependent that is the true explanation and spirit of the ruling class the owner of capital. Those who own the capital necessary for production control access to jobs the worker needs to live. The owner then has it in his power to keep the supply of labor above the need for labor. Workers compete with other workers for jobs. Whether through immigration, deskilling and improving technology labor shortages are routinely turned into surplus labor. Even competition between capitalists leading to centralization and concentration of capitalists leads to a surplus population through creating larger more capital-intensive firms. This in turn crates relatively speaking less demand for labor, driving wages down. Workshops, crafts, farms increasingly become operating under the capitalist model with large firms doing better then the self-employed. Soon many are without income and forced to migrate in search of jobs. These migrants create a surplus population in regions where a labor shortage exists. This may lower wages a near universal.  As the supply of labor increases wages are easily forced down. This becomes an on going strategy of capital as a class.

Private property in the form of capital is defined as sacred and the survival of real human beings is now no more seen as valuable. Now the cost of doing business is more important than living humans.

Employers employ only for the sake of profit. The resource owned by the industrialist is also a product of some one else’s labor. It is now forgotten that labor creates all wealth. Because of this we can foresee wealth without capital or the capitalist.

Absurdity becomes a way of life. The financial capitalist need not invest in productive investments in order to make a profit. Speculative investments on fantasies still make a profit without putting one single laborer to work.

Hedge Funds are the use of advanced investment strategies in derivatives or leveraged investments. This is unregulated and unprotected selling securities from a third party, buying the assets and selling them back or sill another party. In order to borrow heavily then to buy still more shares to sell them at a profit. A firm with more debt than equity is leveraged. Buying up bad mortgages, in the hopes some one will buy you out, or the government will bail you out.

Collateral Debt Obligation (CDO) this credit protection allows selling of bad credit. Failure leads to super profits if you buy debts at a fraction of their original worth and then sell them still below their original value but at profit. The last guy standing hopefully will be bailed out buy the government. Either giving you loans at such low interest rates that when things turn around you own assets now worth more than what you paid or government insures your losses.

Mean while back to the world of the worker. Capital gives the employer more power to negotiate than the employee. The employee who quits her job has no income to live on until she finds another job. Because of surplus labor another out of work laborer easily fills her position. Mean while the worker joining the ranks of the unemployed now must compete with other workers. She will replace the job she left with another low wage position.

Property becomes identified with the owner of that property. This becomes a mask for anti-social attitudes and behavior. The collective unity between the human community and the natural environment becomes concealed and confused, but never lost. Greed once a vice is redefined as a virtue. Property divides the natural community against itself. Providing for the public need is no longer an obligation, but commodities that are sold for money. The very human beings now become investment resources calculated against the profit obtained by the owner of capital.

The more profit the worker generates for the investor the more she produces her own hardship and dependency on the owner of capital The owner increases his power and wealth at the expense of those who employees he employs. He is the master, and workers mere investments. Thus by going to work the workers create the wealth of society, the wealth of the capitalist, the wealth used to create this relationship between ruler and the servant of capital and all the necessary resources for both the capitalist and the necessities of life for the rest of us.

Because labor of the worker is sold for a set price, the goal of the employer is to get as much work as possible in as short as time as possible. This means the more labor a worker produces the less she gets in relation to the employer. Because labor time is sold like any other commodity supply and demand determines price. Because the employer has more power in determining supply than the worker it is in the employer’s self-interest to set the wages as low as he can get away with.

The commodities that labor creates being necessary for her job, become the chains that hold her in bondage. What are real are the objects she makes for the employer to sell for his profit. What is not real is her personal life. Only as long as there is a market for the products that the capitalist brings to the marketplace can the worker keep her job. Her life is possible only if market trends and profitability allows her to live. It becomes true that the worker forges her own chain through her toil that is sold to her oppressor. The worker become separated from the products she produces and her labor used up in this production process. What the worker loses the capitalist gains. The slavery of one becomes the emancipation of the other. The true producer becomes dependent and the true parasite becomes the master.

The worker is in fact an active and creative force with in nature. The worker takes from nature what is needed and changes it through and vigorous and artistic process into supplies needed and consumed. It is only by standing between the creator and the creations can the owner gain power over creation and the creator.  Thus, the very process of earning a living the master and slave forms a relationship of servitude. True, free labor is only under the command of capital during the working day. But, during that time the worker follows orders, if she quits she must find another employer who will treat her in the same way. Work is not an artistic pleasure. She is forced to work by her biological necessity. Work is toil in which the worker makes all the sacrifices necessary just to survive. What could be an enjoyable expression of her humanity becomes difficult and painful only entered into to support herself and her children.

Nature the home and soul of humanity becomes an alien and hostile force. The resources necessary to work belong to another, as does the reserves needed to exist and endure. The worker then has access to needs supplied only through an alien hostile to her happiness. Her employer supports a comparative existence of himself to the external world as an opulent glutton to her pain and poverty.  She relates to the objects of nature, as an alien world unfavorably hostile to her.

The action of the worker establishes self-separation, self-disfigurement, self-alienation all needed in order to survive at the most basic level. Her humanity is reduced to an investment of another. Her labor is an article of trade an asset of advantage to the stockholder and not the employee. The animal called human breaths, eats, drinks and seek shelter in the storm and thus human lives within nature as apart of nature and through nature the meaning of life is made manifest. But, through the institution of private property and the wealth that goes with ownership this spiritual connection is severed. Thus, her humanity is denied the worker who is reduced to a draft animal and an ill-treated one at that.

The human has a need to create beauty while laboring within nature. With private property, separation of work and the resources of work, production for profit for the benefit of the owner of those resources the worker no longer creates her freedom but her own corruption. In debasing the voluntary, spontaneous, and free activity to a method and means of living, the alienated labor will replace group living into a means of physical existence without a potential for that spiritual connection with nature. The consciousness, which the worker has of her class, is thus distorted by estrangement in such a way that group survival becomes for her an outline for subsistence. Workers compete for jobs, turning her sisters into the “Other”. Her relationship with her employer is her central relationship. Her oppressor is her savior and the prophet of a false god.

This false prophet has joy where she knows only pain. Here poverty creates his wealth. Her loved ones and family being her responsibility becomes her burden. Until the manacles of slavery are undone and she tastes genuine happiness and self-determination her bully continues to be her untruthful redeemer.

 

Karl Marx Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Peter Kropotkin 1920 The Wage System in Freedom Pamphlets No. 1.

Mikhail Bakunin The Capitalist System

Karl Kautsky The Class Struggle