§1. Privatization of the Commons
Starting with the Romans in the west, followed by Enclosure in the 16th C. Europe; The conversion of “what was once sacred, unique and personal into the status of a commodity” (Sacred Economics, 68)
The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? - Chief Seattle’s Letter
§2. Roman concept of private ownership includes three senses of right:
1. Usus (use) is the right to use or enjoy a thing possessed, directly and without altering it.
2. Fructus (fruit, in a figurative sense) is the right to derive profit from a thing possessed: for instance, by selling crops, leasing immovables or annexed movables, taxing for entry, and so on.
3. Abusus (literally abuse), the right to alienate the thing possessed, either by consuming or destroying it (e.g. for profit), or by transferring it to someone else (e.g. sale, exchange, gift).
§3. John Locke’s Theory of Acquisition in Two Treatises on Government (1689)
"Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”
This theory rests on the concept of an autonomous self: Self-ownership allows a person the freedom to mix his or her labor with natural resources, thus converting common property into private property. Locke concludes that people need to be able to protect the resources they are using to live on, their property, and that this is a natural right, provided others are not worse off.
§4. A modern formulation by the libertarian anarchist Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia 1974)
“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.”
§5. Critique of land ownership
The earth belongs in usufruct to the living, and that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” - Thomas Jefferson
Henry George: “But who made the earth that any man can claim such ownership of it, or any part of it, or the right to give, sell, or bequeath it? Since the earth was not made by us, but is only a temporary dwelling place on which one generation of men follow another; since we find ourselves here, are manifestly here with equal permission of the Creator, it is manifest that no one can have any exclusive right of ownership in land, and that the rights of all men to land must be equal and inalienable.” - Idea for the “Single Tax” - economic rent tax on the value of land, not on the uses or products created on the land (buildings or crops).
Privatization of the Cultural, Spiritual and Social Capital
§6. Cultural Commons (i.e. “intellectual property”) Lewis Mumfold: “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”
§7. Privatization of Spiritual Capital: “Locus of attention…our mental and sensuous capacities, the ability to concentrate, to create worlds of the imagination and to derive pleasure from experiencing life.”
§8. Privatization of Social Capital: “…relationships and skills, the services that people once provided for themselves and each other in a gift economy, such as cooking, child care, health care, hospitality, entertainment, advice, the growing of food, the making of clothes, the building of houses.”
§9. Catherine Austin Fitts’ “popsicle index”: “The Popsicle Index is the % of people in a community who believe that a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to buy a Popsicle and come home alone safely. When I was a child growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1950's, the Popsicle Index was 100%. We were a modest neighborhood, even poor by some standards. But we were rich in safety. Today, after years of federal government supported drug trafficking and subsidy and loan programs, the moms in my old neighborhood probably feel the Popsicle Index is about 0%.”
§10. Community, can’t be purchased, rooted in gifts
The word "community" is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (com, "with/together" + munus, "gift"), a broad term for fellowship or organized society.
“Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift.”” [Eisenstein]
§11. Modern Economics generates financial wealth through the conversion of natural, cultural, social and spiritual capital.
The Corporation as a machine for internalizing profits and externalizing costs. With one hand, corporations take valuable stuff from the commons and privatize it. With the other hand, they dump bad stuff into the commons and pay nothing. The result is profits for corporations but a steady loss for everyone else, to whom the commons belong.
Example of corporate piracy of the commons: The government give-away of the ownership rights to the electromagnetic spectrum in 1995.
§12. Tools for reclaiming the Commons
A. Decommodification of Land ”...A Community Land Trust is a not-for-profit organization with membership open to any resident of the geographical region or bioregion where it is located. The purpose of a CLT is to create a democratic institution to hold land and to retain the use-value of the land for the benefit of the community. The effect of a CLT is to provide affordable access to land for housing, farming, small businesses, and civic projects. This effect can be achieved when a significant portion of the land in an area is held by a CLT. - Bob Swann, “Land: Challenge and Opportunity”
B. Strengthening common property rights (for airspeeds, watersheds, other ecosystems), overhaul management, make polluters and broadcasters pay, e.g. the Alaska Permanent Fund, this year paid $1600 dividend to residents.
C. The Idea for a Social Dividend: Thomas Paine’s Proposal for a “social dividend” ; Compensation for an individual's loss of her portion of the Commons) Beyond social security, this idea is being explored currently with the concept of Universal Basic Income, related to a negative income tax.
D. De-commodification of Money: Public Banks, Nationalizing the FED, national and regional community currency systems.
No comments:
Post a Comment