 |
| ||
Planet Earth has all the means required to allow each of its almost 6 billion inhabitants to be provided with all the needs of an abundant life. But sadly this is not what we see. Instead we see a planet on which a small powerful elite bask in fabulous wealth while the overwhelming majority live in unjustifiable poverty. Almost all are deprived of adequate food, clothing, shelter and, above all, space. All too many are also the frequent victims of war, violence and oppression.
Even in the wealthy West, practically all are dispossessed of land and a pleasant place in which to live and work. Their sad lot is to spend their lives in corporate slavery. They toil all day in their masters' offices and factories, returning each night to their bland suburban boxes to rest and ready themselves once more to serve their masters on the morrow. Yet an escalating minority is now denied even this unfulfilling existence. Unrequired by any master, and dispossessed of any wealth-producing means of their own, they are locked into a state of permanent poverty where they must endure the extreme isolation which poverty imposes.
But who is this small powerful elite who bask in such fabulous wealth? They are an exclusive anthropological super-community of the rich and powerful. They are a favoured few who between them own and control all the land and resources of the Earth. Yet they came to possess all this not by merit; but by conquest, enclosure, clearance, inheritance, good fortune, serendipity and chance.
They are also an exclusive coterie of traders who between them control the so-called global 'free' market through which all goods and services are exchanged. Only they are able to buy and sell land - the only source of the needs of all human life. Only they can build economic enterprises large enough to survive and prosper within their global free market.
The generic name for the vast wealth they possess, in all its various forms, is capital. And because it is through their capital that they are able to trade and prosper as they do, they themselves are commonly known as capitalists.
From where I stand within the socio-economic order, greed appears to be the force behind the capitalist's mentality. It is this which drives him along in his relentless quest to set up each increasingly ambitious enterprise. The sole purpose of every enterprise is to maximise its proprietor's income. However, his enterprise has to be fed with raw materials and labour. This presents him with a cost which consumes - and therefore deprives him of - some of the income which his enterprise generates. To maximise his profit he tries by all means to minimise costs, the most dominant of which is the cost of labour. His main problem is therefore to minimise the cost of labour.
His main instrument in this quest is technology. Advancing technology drives the rate of production per labourer up and up while at the same time reducing the skill level he needs to attain that higher rate of production. To the capitalist, therefore, technology is king.
In any capitalist society, capital inevitably becomes the possession of an ever smaller favoured few. Everybody else is, by definition, a labourer. The labourer's share of the wealth which the Earth yields in return for his labour is his wage. But the labourer's wage is the capitalist's labour cost. The capitalist's aim is to maximise his own profit by minimising his labour cost. His aim is therefore to minimise the labourer's wage.
While advancing technology drives the rate of production per labourer ever upwards, his minimum cost stays static at what is called the minimum sustainable wage. The real effect of advancing technology is therefore to drive down the number of labourers an enterprise needs in order to maintain a given rate of production.
As technology advances, the capitalist therefore jettisons more and more labourers from his workforce. He is unconcerned with their fate. After all, it is not his problem, and neither capitalist law or morality places upon him any obligation regarding their fate or their circumstances.
Under capitalism, as herein described, life for the labourer is hard and can only get harder. Nevertheless, in the indoctrinated public mind at least, it has an air of long term stability. The demand for the higher skills falls gradually. The labourer's wage sinks smoothly down to the minimum level of welfare. A growing proportion of the population is progressively jettisoned from the active work force. The future is therefore predictable. It can be planned for.
However, observed reality is different. Late twentieth century capitalism is driving the global economy relentlessly onwards along the road to chaos. Life is becoming ever less certain and predictable. Events are starting to take everybody by surprise.
This ultimate chaos has not yet arrived. Nevertheless, the capitalist saw long ago a need for a wall to protect himself against the raging tempests of that cruel sea we know as the global free market. Though he usually gains a fortune by employing his capital to make a profit from the work of others, he could lose everything if a venture goes wrong. And sooner or later, one does. So to protect his personal wealth against bad fortune, he fabricates a legal entity called the limited liability company.
The labourer, on the other hand, cannot protect himself by this means. The legal complexities, capitalisation requirements and operating costs of the limited liability company have made it difficult if not impossible for the ordinary person to own. It has therefore always been - and must forever remain - an instrument of the rich.
The economy of Planet Earth thus comprises an elite few who own (or otherwise control) the economically productive resources of the planet. These continually exchange what they have for what they want through joint-stock limited liability companies which serve as protective access ports into a world wide communications infrastructure and free-trading protocol known as the free market. The dispossessed majority of the Earth's population provides this economy with its two vital needs. 1) a source of cheap and willing labour when required. 2) a desperate and insatiable sink for its produce - again, when required.
Clearly therefore, the Global Free Market is 'free' only to the capitalist: that is, one who owns, or otherwise commands, enough of the planet's productive resources to allow him directly to transform his own labour into his needs of life. In other words, one who does not need to sell his labour to somebody else in order to survive. Free trade (that is, trade which comprises a fair exchange with the equal and unpressured volition of both the parties) can only take place between capitalists.
A labourer: one who owns, or otherwise commands, none of the Earth's productive resources, must sell his labour to one who has. Otherwise he will die. In other words, one (the labourer) to whom the sale is a matter of life and death is forced to trade with another (the capitalist) to whom the sale is simply a matter of expedience. Trade between capitalists can be free and fair, but the capitalist's total control of the Earth's resources ensures that labour is always a buyer's market.
The active elements of the Global Free Market are the limited liability joint-stock companies through which the capitalist possessors of the planet conduct their trade. These operate independently. They answer to nobody. Their activities are subject to no central means of control. They are supposedly 'self-regulating' within 'the law'.
The Global Free Market which they constitute is a free-running complex dynamical system. Its overall behaviour, and the consequences which this precipitates upon the individual inhabitants of the Earth, is therefore complex, and is determined solely by the rules by which its component elements (the limited liability joint-stack companies) interact with each other and with the individuals who, in order to live, are forced to trade with them.
If the rules by which joint-stock limited liability companies traded with each other (and with individuals) were equally fair to all, irrespective of their massive variations in size, and were everywhere the same, then trading could possibly be fair. But they are not.
A predatory company, by taking over smaller companies (or, by putting them out of business through competition), is thus free and able to take over the market shares of those smaller companies and add them to its own. This process is free to continue unhindered like a creeping cancer until the entire global market is under the control of a single enterprise.
Prime examples of capitalist agglomeration of market share are the big supermarkets. In the U.K. one or two massive super-market companies are now well on their way to controlling the entire consumer market. Almost all trade between domestic consumer and producer now has to be routed through them, thus empowering them to siphon off a painful percentage of the profit on every transaction or movement of goods between small producer and domestic consumer. Furthermore, while a supermarket's customers are essentially confined to its home nation at present, they are unlikely to remain so. The big supermarket chains in all capitalist countries are, by nature, expansionists. Their eternal quest is to seek out smaller peers all over the world to buy out and take over, thus expanding their national cartels into larger global ones.
Since the introduction of the limited liability company in the middle of the nineteenth century, the history of commerce has been characterised by one industry shake-out after another. Every industry has started off with a few small entrepreneurs and inventors. Then when what they are doing is seen to be useful, many more like minds join them and produce variants to suit every taste. An industry of artisan traders is born.
But this is always short-lived. Inevitably when an industry has stood the test of time, and is seen as a potentially lucrative source of profit, in steps the capitalist, and the insidious one-way process of take-overs and buy-outs ignites. Soon the industry is under the sway of a small cartel of big names. Product standardisation sets in. Variety and diversity disappear. Innovation ceases. The direction of product development is switched to fulfil marketing expediencies rather than sound engineering objectives.
It has happened to the motor industry. It is at the moment happening to the industry to which I once belonged - the computer software industry. Even here, a once rational industry is being gobbled up by giants who employ the super-market method of glossy presentation to stimulate the business consumer into buying impulsively from a graven image which has been carefully sculpted by marketing spin-doctors. The consumer is thus forced to follow an ever-changing string of product fashions which appeal to the malleable minds of young impressionables desperate to be seen to belong to the right clique. Rational thinking buyers must be content with whatever this newly-consumerised market condescends to offer them.
The laws of nature ensure that its systems are kept within pre-ordained limits of size, energy and mass. Atomic nuclei the size of golf balls are simply not allowed. As a natural complex dynamical system, society, if not interfered with, is also regulated by the natural laws of conscience which ensure that its component subsystems - family and community - adhere to pre-ordained limits of size, behaviour and wealth. Economic entities the size of multinational companies are simply not allowed.
But unlike the forces of nature, human beings possess a degree of self-determination. They can bend the rules by which they ought to behave. By enacting the unnatural rules of limited liability, they removed the natural upper limit on the relative wealth and power of individuals, thus paving the way for the economic enslavement of the many by the few.
A free complex-dynamical economy in which an infinity of independent proprietors create and exchange goods according to fair universal rules is, and always has been, a myth. And with the advent of the joint-stock limited liability company the prospect of its ever becoming a reality has been pushed ever further into a world which one can only dream about.
What should have been a fluid society of free individuals, families and communities - creating and exchanging to the mutual benefit of each - has been curdled by global capitalism into a viscous jelly in which true individual free enterprise is imprisoned, frustrated and suppressed.
The great joint-stock limited liability companies of the world constitute a global free market. By trading globally they stand to gain profit from the whole of the planet's economic resources: not only the ones within their own local geographic hinterlands. To these commercial leviathans, therefore, the nation-state is a nuisance. It is an undesirable relic of the past. It imposes unnecessary barriers to free trade. It levies taxes which milk their profits. It imposes customs and excises on the free exchanges of their goods.
However, the capitalist can never hope to eradicate the nation-state. Its being, form and structure are upheld by a force which even the mighty capitalist is powerless to dislodge, namely the language barrier.
Nevertheless, to the capitalist, the modern nation-state still fulfils an essential and positive role.
In the world of the ancient wanderer there was no territorial structure. Not, that is, until the settler started to commandeer and fence off land on which to cultivate his needs of life. The settler's hythe was the first allodial estate: an estate held in absolute ownership in which the owner owed no obligation, rent or tribute to any higher owner. But this did not last. Not satisfied with what the land returned for their own labour, men of violence demanded tribute from the settler. First, a local thug set up a protection racket and eventually he or one of his descendants became the local lord. Then a domineering lord became king over his peers and demanded tribute from them. These estates formed a feudal hierarchy in which the settler's hythe was the feudal estate under the local lord. The lord's local estate was a feudal estate under the nation-state of the king.
Eventually, the internal feudal structure of the local estates broke down. Each local lord dispossessed his subjects of their hythes and enclosed all common land within his jurisdiction. Thus, the former hythe owners became his bound labourers. Next, the division of skills and advancing technology won labourers freedom to move to wherever their particular skills were needed within the whole nation-state. But this absolved the local lord of all obligation to feed, clothe and shelter them as he had to do when they were his bound labourers or slaves. Yet he - along with all his peers - retained full possession of the land - the only means by which this vast majority could turn their labour into their needs of life.
Advancing technology allowed the lord to farm his land and conduct his industry with less and less labour. Improving transport and communications allowed him to sell his produce to foreign lords who could afford to buy them. He no longer depended on his freed former slaves to have the means to buy and consume his goods. It did not matter to him whether they worked or not - or whether they lived or died. So the land no longer supported or provided for most of its indigenous population. It only supported that fraction whose labour the lords had current need of.
Thus the majority of the nation-state's inhabitants were either employed by a lord (so long as he had a perceived need for them), or unemployed with no means of turning their labour into their needs of life. A population thus dispossessed is therefore insecure and hence dangerous. For whatever the laws of the land may impose, there are higher natural laws which demand unconditionally that parents feed their starving children by any means.
If, therefore, they cannot get their needs of life by applying their labour to what the Earth provides, people will take their needs of life by force. By poaching, stealing, pillaging. Therefore, it is in the interests of those who own the economic resources to provide the indigenous population with enough of the needs of life to alleviate their need to poach, steal or pillage. And it is for this selfish reason, not a humanitarian one, that the modern capitalist nation-state maintains a social security system. It is a vessel of containment in which to preserve indigenous human resources while not in use as cheaply as possible without invoking insurrection.
The other need which the landed lord ceased providing when his slaves won their freedom was education. On his estate, his labourers received their necessary education and training as a natural consequence of their daily work. Today the capitalist, through his limited liability joint-stock company, expects to be able to hire and fire at will, as many labourers as he needs of whatever skills he requires. But he does not expect to have to educate them. He expects them to be educated already. And it is for this selfish reason - not a philanthropic one - that the modern capitalist nation-state maintains an education system. It is the capitalist's means of turning an indigenous population into an economically useful human resource. To guarantee an on-going supply of the right kind of cogs for his corporate machine.
This is evinced by the observation that, as the present State leans more and more towards absolute capitalism, it grows increasingly reluctant to fund higher education.
There is no systematic reason why both social security and education cannot be implemented on a unified world-wide format. A wide range of engineering and commercial standards are already global. However, there is a barrier which, no matter how hard capitalism may try, cannot be broken down by the endeavours of man. It is the language barrier. From the capitalist's point of view, the cultural diversity and international misunderstandings which the language barrier maintains among the world's nations creates unwelcome geographic inconsistencies in his market and in his global labour pool. It is with reluctance therefore, that the capitalist resigns himself to have to work within the socio-economic structure of the nation state.
He cannot overcome the language barrier, or its effects. The best he can do is endeavour to influence the shaping of the social and economic policies of the nation state so that they become as conducive as possible to the maximising of profit and to the accumulating of capital. He must control those who govern the nation states in which his enterprises operate, and thereby control those who are governed.
As an individual, the capitalist lives in a global world. He lives in a free world. Whatever his home state, his vast resources allow him to travel freely wherever he wishes - across political divides, across international frontiers or even the front-lines of war. He trades freely as an equal in a global market. He can buy or sell what he likes where he likes when he likes. He is a peer within a global society. A true inheritor of the Earth.
But what of the labourer? He owns none of the planet on which he was born. He possesses and controls none of the means it provides for turning his labour into his needs of life. His rightful share of it was wrested from him long ago through war, seizure, enclosure, disinheritance and misfortune. It is this class of individual - he who forms the majority of humanity - with whom I am concerned. How does this capitalist world treat him?
He is a subject of the state in which he lives. He is constrained to live under a system of law he had no part in making. He is forced to fight to defend the possessions of an elite in a land in which he has no inheritance. He exists for no other purpose than to serve as an available economic resource for those who own the land in which he lives to use him as, when and if they choose. He is a captured consumer in a seller's world. He is the source of revenue which sustains the means of his enslavement. Yet in every encounter with the omnipotent cretins of bureaucracy (government or corporate) he is assumed a liar, a cheat and a malingerer - unless or until he can prove otherwise.
The human life-form alone is an incomplete system. It cannot function without the food, clothing, and shelter which its planetary environment provides in response to its applied labour. But the planetary resources which thus convert the labour of man into his needs of life are, under the regime of capitalism, owned (or controlled) by what, out of the entire population of the planet, amounts to no more a small elite minority.
This minority is not made up of the elected custodians of our planetary heritage. The universal well-being of mankind has never been part of their agenda. On the contrary they are self-seeking individualists whose shamelessly declared aim in life is unlimited private acquisition. Their insatiable greed has ignited a global process which continually increases the disparity of human wealth and well-being - a process which is guarded and sustained by the partisanous laws of the capitalist state.
Capitalists, plus those who represent their interests at State, plus those of the labouring poor who in the blindness of their delusion vote them into power, are obviously convinced that the principles and effects of capitalism are right, proper and morally just. That this elite few should inherit the Earth while the rest of mankind waits in the wings of poverty until one of that elite minority wishes to exploit them for his own selfish ends is seen as simply part of the nature of things. It is simply the way the world operates. It is the way the universe operates. Or so they say.
In the 1950's, prophets of science promised a glowing future in which the support of a comfortable and stimulating life would require an ever-decreasing amount of our time and effort. Science has kept its promise: but society has not. The regime under which we exist today still clings to the antiquated principle that an individual should be rewarded only in proportion to the work he performs. If he does not work, then he shall not eat. This principle is adhered to irrespective of whether or not there is any work for him to do. And it is enforced whether or not those Elite who own the only means of turning his work into wealth allow him to do so.
The result is all around us: the insidious and inexcusable circumstances of famine in the midst of plenty. As a conscious life-form, as a sentient being whose whole function and life-process is inextricably bound into the terrestrial environment in which it was born, I do not think it is right that most of mankind should be forced to live the way they do. Losing the little I once had made me think. Now I want more. I want my share of Planet Earth. I want to own my fair and rightful share of the means it provides to turn my labour into my needs of life, and the perfect liberty to exchange with others the fruits of our labours as we together see fit.
But on what socio-economic principles could such a world be based?