Yes in My Back Yard (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance: How We Build A Better World. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. ISBN 9781805226055

This book has caused quite a stir. It has even made Chancellor Reeves’ summer reading list, and been cited – in passing – by Robert Peston. It is part of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) trend. Its central theme is that government regulation is choking the capacity for effective action to generate wealth, and that instead the liberal left has been concentrating on the parcelling out of scarcity, rather than trying to improve the overall material wealth of society.

The authors mention the expensive failure to build a high-speed railway in California, citing environmental laws and litigation as the reason: alongside the excessive bureaucracy to plan the route. They also note California has higher rates of homelessness than comparable cities in Texas, and attribute the blame to zoning and to authorities loading environmental, building and labour standards into permissions, making building uneconomic for developers.

In their narrative, they do discuss the nature of landholding and the fact that residents’ houses are also financial assets, only to skip blithely over them to discuss bureaucratic complexity again. In so doing, and returning to their theme that it was the failure of efforts to restrict the power of public authorities that is to blame, they ignore the role of private property.

The state is restricted in order to secure the power of private property. The litigation is there to protect property rights. It’s there to protect economic interests (and some firms do benefit from regulation). The complex funding arrangements and financial regulations are there precisely to keep the interests of wealth superior to state power. This is a political choice, and one that those who fund the political parties will continue to demand.

At points, the authors seem to indicate that it would be better to allow constructors to build slum housing than to continue allowing homelessness. They also suggest reducing quality controls and demands on construction: in essence, they are allowing that the working class cannot afford decent housing. Although their ‘lens’, as they say, is increasing supply, they ignore the lack of effective demand for the majority.

They find time in their conclusion to reference Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto talking about unfettering productive forces to produce abundance. But they ignore what those fetters of capitalist society are: the law of no profit – no production, and the law of no profit – no employment. The growth of income streams alongside the capacity to produce so much that profit margins would be reduced to zero.

Absent an understanding of the role of private property and the class struggle from their narrative, they are reduced to a simple call for de-regulation coupled with bold state action. They do not see that the litigiousness they decry is meant to exclude a thorough-going democratic control that includes all voices. The abundance they seek can only come from the common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth.

Pik Smeet

Who Are the Looters? (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year after hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans we look at what was a media obsession at the time.

What is the first priority of government in the wake of disaster? Saving lives? Looking after the survivors? Disposing of the dead and preventing epidemics? Think again. At best these things come second. The first priority of government in the wake of disaster is exactly the same as its first priority at other times: maintaining or restoring “order” – that is, its powers of coercion.

 Moreover, the first purpose of “order” is to protect and enforce property rights. From this point of view, the main threat posed by disasters like Hurricane Katrina is not the threat to human life and health, to the environment, or even to the economy. It is the threat of “chaos,” the threat to “order” and “civilization,” but above all to property, arising from the temporary breakdown of government.

 The “looter” symbolizes and dramatizes this threat, conjuring up images of Viking warriors on the rampage, barbaric violence, evil incarnate. Of course, these particular “Vikings” were all the more terrifying for being black. In the days that followed the hurricane, the media stirred up racist fears of the poor black people of New Orleans, spreading rumours (the fashionable expression is “urban myths”) later shown to be exaggerated out of all proportion, if not completely unfounded. For example, in the week following Katrina the number of murders was average for the city (four) (see Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan, The Storm, pp. 124-8).

 All in all, we shouldn’t be too shocked or too surprised to learn that at 7 p.m. on Wednesday August 31, 2005 martial law was declared in the flooded city. Mayor Ray Nagin told police officers to stop rescuing people and focus solely on the job of cracking down on looters. This was just two and a half days after the hurricane made landfall and with thousands of people still stranded in attics and on rooftops.

 In one typically heroic encounter, police officers chased down a woman with a cart of supplies for her baby, handcuffed her – and then didn’t know what to do with her. All the jails were flooded. By the end of the week that problem was solved. A new makeshift jail was set up at the Greyhound bus terminal, with accommodation for 750 prisoners. This was the first institution in the city to resume normal functioning.

 True, it could have been worse. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 people were shot dead as looters while foraging in the wreckage of their own homes (see G. Hansen and E. Condon, Denial of Disaster, 1989). .Why did people loot? Or to use less loaded language, why did they take things that didn’t belong to them without paying for them?

 One man answered a TV interviewer who had asked him why he was looting by asking in turn: “Can you see anyone to pay?” The stores had been abandoned by their operators, but people still needed the things stored there. They needed food and fresh water, dressings for their wounds, new clothes to replace those ruined by exposure to the “toxic gumbo” of the floodwaters. Most of the so-called looting was of this kind – for the satisfaction of desperate need. In any sane society that would be a good enough reason for taking things.

 

Two paramedics from San Francisco who found themselves trapped in New Orleans wrote about the Walgreens store on the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the French quarter. The owners had locked up and fled. Milk, yogurt, and cheese could be seen through the window in the dairy display case, spoiling in the heat.

 Should we expect the parents of hungry and thirsty children not to break in, even at the risk of being pursued by the police? Would they have been good parents had they failed to do all in their power to see to their children’s needs? And what of storeowners who choose to let food go to waste rather than give it to needy neighbours? My first impulse is to wax lyrical about the sheer meanness of their behaviour. But probably they made no such conscious choice. As businesspeople they must have thought of the food and drink in their store not as products for assuaging hunger and thirst, but merely as commodities for profitable sale. If they could no longer be sold they might just as well go to waste.

 There were looters who acted not just for themselves and their families but for the benefit of the local community. For instance, the young men who collected medical supplies from a Rite Aid for distribution among elderly neighbours. Or the man who distributed food from a Winn-Dixie store to the 200 or so people holed up at the Grand Palace Hotel. “He was trying to help suffering people, and the idea that he was looting never crossed his mind.”

Socially responsible people of this kind are sometimes described as “commandeering” or “requisitioning” the goods they seize. That may well be how they view their own actions. In legal terms, however, only government officials, as representatives of duly constituted authority, have the right to commandeer or requisition property in an emergency. Private citizens who do so, whatever their motives, are engaging in theft and may be penalized accordingly.

 

Consider the feat of Jabar Gibson. This resourceful young man, purely on his own initiative, found a bus that was still in working order (the city authorities assumed that all buses had been ruined by the floodwater), took charge of it, filled it up with evacuees, and drove them to Houston. This was the first busload of evacuees to reach Houston after the storm (at 10 p.m. on Wednesday August 31). The police were forewarned that a “renegade bus” was on its way; if they had intercepted it Jabar might have been arrested and charged with theft. Fortunately he was in luck: he got through to his destination, to be greeted by Harris County Judge Robert Eckels. Presumably his crime has been forgiven.

 Of course, not all looters were responding to real personal, family, or community needs. Some were simply taking a rare opportunity to acquire coveted though non-essential consumer goods. For others looting (and shitting in) fancy stores was a form of social protest or “empowerment,” an outlet for pent-up anger against the endlessly advertised world of affluence from which they felt excluded.  

Finally, there was a phenomenon that I propose calling “entrepreneurial looting.” Entrepreneurial looters gathered assets with a view to later sale. As they got stuff for free, they could sell at any price and still make a profit. For example, “urban foresters” went after valuable lumber. Other entrepreneurs sold looted liquor. The cases of large-scale organized looting by armed groups (their weapons also probably looted) that received so much publicity must, I think, have been of this character. 

Brinkley reports an interesting conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Bernard McLaughlin of the Louisiana National Guard and a man selling liquor at a makeshift bar. When McLaughlin tells the bartender he is shutting him down, the man replies that he is “just being entrepreneurial.” Why shouldn’t he make some money? McLaughlin gets angry at this appeal to “true American” values. “This is looting. You looted that … That’s a 15-year felony. That’s a 3-year mandatory minimum sentence.” The man submits and McLaughlin proceeds to smash his bottles one by one. And yet the preceding account makes clear that McLaughlin’s real objection to such bars has nothing to do with the provenance of the alcohol. He doesn’t want the locals drinking alcohol because it makes them more quarrelsome and disorderly as well as further dehydrating their bodies. Would he have allowed the bar to stay open if it was selling – or giving away – only looted fruit juice, soda, and bottled water? Legally, however, looting remains “a 15-year felony,” be its social consequences good or bad. Property is sacred.

 The bartender might also have tried to point out in his defence that historically all capitalist enterprise is based on looting. Early capitalism looted land and other resources from peasants (in Europe) and from indigenous peoples (throughout the Americas and other colonial territories).The looting even extended to the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of human beings, such as the ancestors of most victims of Hurricane Katrina. Marx called it the primitive accumulation of capital.

 Looting is as American as cherry pie; the looters of New Orleans are keeping up an old American tradition and should surely receive all due credit as good patriots. But… it depends on whose possessions you loot, doesn’t it?

Stefan.

(WSPUS)

(Sources: Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Understanding Katrina website (understandingkatrina.ssrc.org), Kaufman.)

Might is Right. The Philosophy of the Revolutionary. (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article is reprinted from the February 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Blessed are the Strong

The Duke of Westminster receives from rents alone £3,000,000 per annum.

Shame!

No, no, not a bit of it. Who can blame him?

Thirteen millions of people in this country are living always on the verge of starvation!

Again shame!

But why?

By all the logic of nature the former is entitled to as much as he has power to grasp, while the latter deserve no more than they are willing to fight for, ay, and to conquer for themselves.

Man has a right to live only – if he can. The mightiest beast and the meanest parasite have as much right to live – and as little.

The hungry tiger strikes down the hunter and devours him – if he can, and nobody says shame! or thinks it wrong. The maggots burrow deep into the nostrils of the hartebeaste, and we say simply “Nature is cruel.”

Yet Nature is not cruel: she knows nothing of emotions. She leaves her children to fight things out for themselves, giving them one universal law : Might is Right.

“The race is to the swift,
The battle to the strong.”

Let us be strong, then, for the weak have neither right nor portion in Nature’s economy.

The wolves in sheep’s clothing, the Christian priesthood, commonly profess to hold that man has other right to live than this right of might – this elementary right of the tiger and the maggot. Of such jealous guardians of the Rights of Man this question may be asked :

What becomes of the “Right”  to live if the means by which alone it is possible to live are in the hands of others?

Clearly in this case man cannot live by any heaven bestowed “right,” but only on sufferance, So the logic of their own ethic places the Christians in contradiction to the social system which they uphold, and whole central principle – private property in the means of life – is the very denial and negation of their fundamental belief, that God having created man, man has a “right” to live.

Logic in the Making
Far nearer to the truth of things was that London magistrate who answered the pilferer’s plea that one “must live”, with the sententious announcement: “Not necessarily”. Two words sufficed to reveal the naked truth in all its frank brutality. Capitalist society recognises no “right” to live, and the cynical lawyer gives the lie to the sycophantic priest

If man has a God-given right to live, as Christians commonly hold, then it devolves upon men to secure for themselves the means by which alone they can live, in the first place, and in the second place it sets the mark of Cain upon the brows of those who have taken “the earth and the fullness thereof” from the people.

If, on the other hand, man has but the right of might – the right of tiger and of the maggot – to live, then Westminster, with his vast rent-roll, is justified, in the face of starving millions.

If it appears strange that only the ethic of the revolutionary can justify the lords of capitalism, whilst the logical conclusion of the creed that bolsters them up in their high place on their mountain of spoils, condemns them, this is only because the first is the true ethic, both of capitalism and of the revolution it is producing  – ay, and of all life, for all time – while the second is false, a soporific, the chloroform rag in the hands of the social footpad.

However, under both philosophies we proceed to the same action – to live, by our “right” or our might – and therefore to seize all those things necessary for the fullest enjoyment of life; in the one case because common property is the first essential to living by “right”, in the other case simply because it is expedient.

Down with the Meekling! 
The revolutionary requires no other justification than that of expediency. No revolutionary in history ever really did. True they have paid much lip service to Justice and other figments of the popular the mind, but that has been only because they have required the assistance of those who were to gain nothing from revolution, and who had therefore to be inspired with empty phrases and confused with humbug. But the highest sanction revolutionaries ever have required has been – opportunity.

The Socialist asks no more. Let who will grovel at the feet of Justice, or slobber over the “Natural Rights of Man” – the Socialist has no use for such meaningless vapourings. Expediency is his justification for all things, and opportunity finds him always is the right.

Notwithstanding the prevailing cant, Machiavelism is inherent in every “State”. Wherever a “State” exists wherever, in short, society is founded upon the subjugation of a class, there the suppression of that class follows as a matter of course, and utterly without scruple.

In the Name of Law. and Order, and of Freedom and Justice and Equality, as befits a world of commodities whose freedom of motion and equality, become nature, demands at least a fictitious freedom and equality for their owners. And in the name of Christ, too, as behoves men who must seek some higher sanction than that of commodity owners to suppress commodity owners.

Any Means that are Means
The feudal lord appeared as a different order of being to the serf. They were not commensurable in the flesh, for heaven had made one noble and the other base. But under capitalism all are commodity owners – the man who holds untold stores, and the man who has only his labour-power to that sell. As commodity owners they are stand equal. Hence suppression in the name of Equality – but not on the authority of all commodity owners: oh dear no, that would never do. Nor on the authority of some commodity owners, for that would be contrary to that beautiful capitalist ideal – the equality of all possessors of commodities.

So Christ is their refuge and their salvation; Christ the meek and lowly submissive, who recognised “constituted ” authority in the command :  “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.

But under all this, Might is Right. A great show of “moral suasion” as exemplified in 40,000 parsons, it is true; but for every parson there is a policeman and three bluejackets and half-a dozen soldiers – for every “man of peace” ten “dogs of war”.

Much talk of loyalty and honesty and honour. Loyalty, indeed, with an army to keep us loyal; honesty, indeed, in the thieves’ kitchen of capitalism; honour where nothing is trusted to honour!

Honour and force are contradictory terms, mutually exclusive. Capitalism has no need for the first (except as a piece of humbug): it relies upon force. Among equals honour is the voluntary observance of the rules of the game; but in present-day society we are not equals, hence honour is replaced by force.

The tradesman, in his thirst for profit, gives credit. Does he trust to honour? No. He makes a calculation based on the fact that he has all the forces of the Law behind him. Can I make him pay? is the only question he is concerned with, and he acts according to his judgment of that problem, and if, leaning upon the force of the Law, he finds it a broken reed, be has made a mistake, that is all.

The rules of the game – who made the rules of the game? Those who say we shall observe them. But if a hooligan or a footpad jumps us in the street are we slavishly careful of Marquis of Queensbury rules? Not if a brick is bandy. No, any means that are means!

The Ethic of Socialism
So with the revolutionary. He takes his stand upon the same code that has served to carry so many exploiters, to power, and which last must help the workers to their emancipation. There is no right but might. We deserve nothing but what we can get with our teeth and our claws.

Against the might of the strong few shall be put the might of the many weak ones. Before that might capitalism and private ownership will go down for ever. Then, when society founded upon common property in the means of life, has become one harmonious whole, the brutal dictum, might is right, will hold good only between the social organism and external nature, while between man and man a new ethic will arise – or rather the old ethic of gentile society under a new form – that only the social good is right.

A. E. Jacomb

1688 and all that (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year is a good one for patriots as there are three big anniversaries for them to celebrate. The shipwrecking of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the colonisation of Australia by British convicts in 1788 and the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. This last is perhaps the least well known. Not that this is such a bad thing since there was nothing glorious for ordinary people in the revolution which replaced King James II by King William III.

1688 did, however, have an immense importance for the propertied classes of Britain as it established a stable property regime that has lasted to this day, under which those who held property at that time were legally established in their rights and their descendants have ever since enjoyed the full legal backing of the Courts against the kind of arbitrary dispossession that frequently occurred up until then. It also established the constitutional principle that the sovereign is subordinate to Parliament. Although he was more than the well-paid rubber stamp that present-day occupants of Buckingham Palace are, William was appointed king by Parliament. He did not claim to rule by “divine right” as had all previous monarchs, including his immediate predecessor James, who paid dearly for his illusion, as did his father, Charles I, who had his head chopped off in 1649 in the course of the English bourgeois revolution that much more deservingly merits the title of “glorious”.

The ideological defence of the 1688 revolution was provided by John Locke whose Two Treatises of Government is still required reading on political philosophy courses in English-speaking universities. This work is not only a defence of the “rule of law” as drawn up by a parliament of property-owners but an explicit defence of private property as against common ownership. Locke was forced to do this in order to refute any embarrassing literal interpretation of the Christian doctrine which he quoted in the chapter “Of Property” in his second treatise: “God gave the World to Men in Common”. Political argument at the time was conducted in religious terms — which takes some getting used to for those, like socialists, who know that god is a myth and religion a collection of superstitions, but less than 40 years before William III replaced James II, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers had interpreted Christianity in just such a communist fashion.

Locke’s way round this embarrassing aspect of Christian dogma was to argue that God did indeed give the world to humanity in common, but that it wasn’t his intention that it should remain so. According to Locke, it was clearly God’s intention that humans should take action to keep themselves alive and that to do so they should consume products from nature, insofar as they worked to obtain these products (even if the only effort involved was reaching out and picking an apple from a tree) they were entitled to ownership rights over them. As Locke, speaking for God, put it:

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 joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men.

Locke’s argument here, that natural materials that are “common to all Men” can legitimately lose this status and become private property when they are mixed with human labour, is not as obvious as he assumes. For it could just as logically be argued that the natural materials from which all wealth is fashioned should remain common property even after they have had human labour mixed with them. This, at any rate, was the prevailing view in those societies which practised common ownership. Nor is human labour the individual product Locke assumes, but a social product — all humans acquire their skills in and through society — and, in fact, since human beings are a part and a product of nature, human labour is itself a natural force.

Locke used the same principle of labour to justify private property in land: a person was entitled to own the land which they had worked because they had mixed their labour with it. At one point in his argument, however, Locke contradicted himself, writing about his right to own “the Turfs my Servant has cut” whereas, on his own argument, these turfs ought to be the property of the servant, who actually did the work and mixed his labour with the natural material, rather than of the servant’s employer who had done nothing. This was probably only a slip on Locke’s part, but a revealing one, as it demonstrated that Locke took for granted the division of society into masters and servants and the right of the master to appropriate the product of the labour of the servant. It was, of course, by exploiting this contradiction that early socialists, at the time of the Chartists, were able to turn the labour theory of property against the landlord and capitalist classes and to denounce them for the parasitic exploiters of other people’s labour that they were.

But Locke was concerned not just with justifying the private property of the working farmer or artisan but also with justifying that of the rich merchants and large landed estate-owners who existed both before and after 1688 and whose rights the revolution was intended to consolidate. Here again he came up against Christian dogma which taught that humans were entitled to take from the common store of nature and make their property only what they needed and no more. In fact, to the extent that taking more than was required for personal use deprived someone else of their basic needs, this was robbery and the person in need was fully entitled to take what they needed from the greedy person’s surplus.

Such a doctrine provided no justification for the accumulation of capital and the concentration of property ownership that were necessary for the development of the capitalist society that the 1688 revolution was designed to accelerate. On the contrary, it ruled out the accumulation of property beyond the personal needs of the property-owner. So, after refuting common ownership, Locke had to go on to refute also the idea that there were limits to the size of property holdings. He did so in what has to be admitted was an ingenious, if entirely specious way.

Agreed, he wrote, property-owners have no right to own more than they can use but the reason for this limitation is that they have no right to let any surplus to their own needs go rotten. If however, he went on, some means could be found of accumulating a surplus in a form which didn’t rot this would be all right from a moral point of view. This could be done, Locke concluded triumphantly, if the surplus in the form of perishable agricultural products is converted into non-perishable metals like gold and silver, in other words, if they are sold for money and accumulated as such.

Locke took the argument even further. In agreeing to the use of money and to the putting of a value on it, humans had tacitly agreed to the accumulation of property and the unequal distribution of wealth ownership:

But since Gold and Silver, being little useful to the Life of Man in proportion to Food, Rayment, and Carriage, has its value only from the consent of Men, whereof Labour yet makes in great part, the measure, it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metalls not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things, in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of Societie, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money.

It is for having provided this pathetic justification for unequal property society that Locke is regarded by contemporary capitalist society as the greatest political thinker of the 17th century and is taught in English-speaking universities throughout the world. Winstanley, on the other hand, who was by far Locke’s superior, both in style and quality of argument, is dismissed as a minor religious fanatic. But then, he defended common ownership and denounced the rich merchants and landowners as robbers and usurpers while Locke flattered them and justified their riches.

Locke was, however, right on one point: the link between money and the unequal distribution of wealth. A money economy is, or inevitably soon develops into, a society characterised by two main classes, those who own and accumulate wealth having a monetary value and those who don’t. It is because the so-called Glorious Revolution was designed to stabilise such an unequal society that we socialists won’t be celebrating it. After all, as class-conscious members of the majority propertyless class in society, why should we celebrate the consolidation of the property rights of the ancestors of today’s property-owning minority?

Adam Buick

It’s a bloody crime – or is it? (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business” (Clarence Darrow).

The man in front of me in the bus said to his companion “You know, it’s a bloody crime!” He was obviously referring to the front page story in the evening newspaper which he was holding and which I had read earlier.

The story referred to a sick child who needed intensive care. The hospitals locally and elsewhere had been canvassed by medical staff for an intensive care cot but none were available. Last year, given the same level of demand, a cot would have been available but pressure on NHS funding had necessitated cuts in services. The child died, a newshound got a story and the grieving parents were left to wonder why.

But the man in front of me on the bus was wrong; it was not a crime. In fact he was using the term ‘crime’, as many do, as a designation for something that is obviously wrong or bad or evil and these qualities are not necessarily the considerations that determine what is and what is not a crime.

Crime is a transgression of the laws governing particular societies; specifically rules usually endorsed by a ruling executive that, in a political democracy, has been elected by the people or, in a dictatorship, has amassed sufficient coercive power to impose its authority upon the people.

Laws or rules of behaviour

It need hardly be said that whatever the form of society some form of behavioural rules or mores are necessary; equally, of course, the form of society we live in creates the conditions that determine the need for specific rules. Society is continually evolving and it is this evolution that continually creates the need for ruling executives amending existing laws and passing new laws to meet the exigencies created by new situations like, for example, the social implications of technological advances in automotive transport.

Much of this form of legislation should be straightforward, at least in motive; if people driving cars did not abide by defined regulations road accidents would increase incalculably. If anyone was allowed to pilot an aircraft there would be frequent air disasters. Unfortunately, in our present society, interests outside the province of safety can impact on the lawmakers. The vast wealth of vehicle manufacturers, petroleum refiners, civil engineering contractors, et al, can be used, and is used, to ensure that as far as possible their specific interests are not adversely affected and such interests are rarely in the general interest. It would be difficult to think of any new regulation, even one patently beneficial to the general good, like restrictions on passive smoking, that will not find opposition from some commercial interest.

Arising from property

The overwhelming body of laws in all countries today are not primarily concerned with public health, public safety or public well-being. They are concerned with property in all its forms; with the endorsement, protection and conveyance of possessions. In fact, the greatest volume of law, the millions of pages of legislation, the myriad volumes of case law, is based on relationships arising from the existence of property.

The whole legal circuses, clown-attired judges, wigged councillors, solicitors, the solemn decorum of the courts, the years of legal study and practice behind the imposing façade of erudition, these are not necessarily concerned with acts that are in themselves bad or injurious to people nor are they faithful to some abstract principles of good and evil. The entire fabric of what is absurdly known in the United Kingdom as ‘the Queen’s justice’ or elsewhere as State Justice is solidly founded on the appalling injustice of property society; specifically today, the Laws of capitalism and the Order necessary to allow for the smooth functioning of those Laws.

The French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, affirmed that ’Property is theft!’ He was, like the man on the bus, wrong. The act of theft is a crime but the possession of property rather than being a crime is lauded by the major religions and is the very foundation of capitalist civilisation.

The cornerstone of freedom

Inevitably, in a property society people will aspire to ownership and those who claim that the right to property is the cornerstone of freedom often cite this aspiration as proof that capitalism conforms with the natural order of things. But the capitalists and their political defenders are not promoting some unworkable concept of equality within a property society nor are they referring to the right of every citizen to a home and such personal appurtenances as reflect the material needs of everyone in the pursuit of a full and happy life.

What the capitalists and the political advocates of capitalism effectively promote is the legal right of a minority class of people to own and/or control the machinery of production and distribution; the land, the factories, mills, mines, warehouses; in fact the resources of nature and the machinery and tools used by the working class to produce all the vital goods and services needed to sustain the whole of society.

It is the Law that enforces the right of a minority to use its ownership to take possession of all the goods and services produced by those who labour by hand or brain in exchange for a wage or salary that restricts the overwhelming majority of workers to conditions of relative poverty or dire want. It is in fact capitalism’s law that confers on the working class the apt designation of wage slaves.

But the effects of this much-vaunted ‘cornerstone of freedom’ do not end there. Ownership of the means of production and distribution also gives the capitalist class the right to embargo any productive activity that does not hold out for the owning class the promise of profit. Additionally, in today’s world, technology has facilitated the mobility of capital thus gifting to the capitalists the ability to locate wherever the rate of profit is most beneficial to them irrespective of the hardships they impose by unemployment on the workers whose labour is already enshrined in the fortunes of the capitalists.

Additionally, this mobility has given capital an effective weapon in enfeebling trade unions and resisting wage claims with the threat of re-locating plant where the slaves are paid less.

Majestic equality

Behind capitalism’s legal system is its vast array of coercion; ultimately the armed forces of the state but more usually police forces, judges, magistrates, lawyers and jailers. We hear about their work through the media; overladen, they toil diligently as a vast conveyor belt of capitalist justice, keeping vandals and villains and thieves and robbers off the streets; stuffing the jails to overcapacity. Essentially virtuous in their majestic equality.

The French writer, Anatole France, perhaps better than most exposes the vacuity of capitalism’s legal charade when he said:

  “The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, sleep in the parks or to steal bread”.

Reality means that we live in conditions determined by capitalism and it is those conditions that almost without exception create the circumstances in which all forms of crime occur. In the past the power of the cop and the judge, unquestioning instruments of class justice, were reinforced by the fictions of religion and the Ten Commandments.

In today’s world the sins of the gods, like the legal misdeeds of the rich are increasingly evident. None would challenge the observation of the eminent American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow – he of the famous ’Monkey’ trial – that “the law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business”.

The Order that capitalism needs to underpin its Law is showing evident signs of breakdown. The hired hands that the system needs in the political system and the pensioned media to maintain its rotten values scream for ever more laws, ever greater penalties, against the evidence that crime is a reflection of capitalism and will remain as long as that system does.

Richard Montague

New act in the courts (1992)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

As they happily go about their business of committing crimes, criminals may not be aware that this month the new Criminal Justice Act came into operation. Normally, it would not be worth mentioning the arrival of yet another piece of law in this field, but this is the most far-reaching such Act for a very long time and what is called the criminal justice system is threatened with chaos as the courts, the prisons and the police try to digest the changes brought in by the Act.

The very words criminal justice have an interest of their own for they imply that someone who is suspected of a crime has a legal right to be told about the charges against them and to have the truth of them assessed without bias or prejudice by a court which, if it decides the defendant is guilty, will sentence them in the same objective way. If something goes wrong and an innocent person is found guilty, the appeal machinery exists to put the matter to rights. So if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear; and if you have done something you will be dealt with fair and square.

So that's alright, then. Except that that proposition has only to be stated to expose its fallacy. Every day, the courts and the prisons are full of people whose response, if they were told about the essential goodness of the criminal justice system, would be a bitter, hollow laugh. With damning regularity—as in the case of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad—evidence emerges which shows that this cynicism is completely justified.

Changes
In any case criminal justice is not something which is consistent. At one time it can mean harsher penalties from the courts, at others more lenient. It once meant that some prison sentences had to be suspended—until another Act decided that that was not just. A few years later it meant the substitution of Youth Custody for Borstal training; more recently it has meant a deliberate policy of keeping younger offenders out of custody. With the new Act, criminal justice means that imprisonment should be reserved for only the most serious offence.

The changes brought about by the latest Act are too numerous to mention here. Some will be welcomed by the more neurotically punitive sentencer, like the combination order (which in practice is not expected to be available as a magistrates court sentence) which combines a period on probation with a community service order. Others may not be so welcome—fixing the size of fines by units, the number of which depends on the seriousness of the offence, multiplied by the “disposable income" of the defendant. The Act is intended to abolish the halllowed custom which encouraged courts to dish out punishment for the offence before them, adjusted to take account of a defendant's previous offences. So no more shall we hear puffed-up magistrates and judges address the quivering prison-bound wretch in the dock in such terms as “You have an appalling record, which leaves me with no choice but to . . .”. Another part of the Act which is unlikely to be welcomed by the courts is the requirement that people should be sentenced for the offences they have committed—which means not to set an example to others. This should mean the end of that traditional preamble to a sentence which began “There is altogether too much of this going on at present. This court wants the message to go out that it will no longer be tolerated. So we are going to sentence you to . . .”.

There will also be big changes in how the time to be spent in prison is calculated, how much of a sentence is served behind bars and how much under the less obvious, but nevertheless powerful, restraints of licence in the community (of which more later). It is open to question whether in the long term these changes will have any real effect. Whatever parliament says, the courts have usually been able to ensure that the people they send to prison do roughly the time the courts think they should. It has been simply a matter of adjusting the length of sentence to take account of the possibility of early release on parole, or licence or whatever. Finally, there are two requirements of the new Act which will be as ineffective as they are welcome to the ever-hopeful penal reformers. One is the sharper distinction to be drawn between offences against property and those against the person.This is in response to the many recent cases in which property was clearly valued higher than human safety, which is perfectly in tune with the basis of capitalist society and its morality.

It remains to be seen whether courts actually do treat people who have stolen large amounts of money more leniently than those who have injured someone. Another reaction to fashionable outrage is the Act placing a statutory duty on everyone in the criminal justice system, including the police, lawyers and the courts, to avoid discrimination on any grounds such as race or sex. Like “criminal justice’’, that sounds very re-assuring until we remember, for example, the repeated declarations by successive Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, that racism will not be tolerated in the force—and contrast this with how the police actually behave towards black people on the streets or in the fastness of their stations.

Economy
The reason for the new Act, with its sweeping changes in policy and application, are not difficult to see. Even under a government which time and time again has declared war on crime, the figures for recorded offences climb up and up. Since Thatcher's coming to power in 1979 there has been an increase from 2,536,700 to 5,276,700 in 1991.The traditional response to this is to impose harsher penalties, in particular more prison sentences and longer ones. There are, however, some drawbacks to this policy.

First of all, prison is a very expensive way of temporarily removing someone from the opportunity to commit crime—or at any rate from the kind of crime which goes on in the world outside the prison walls as distinct from what happens inside the prison. The cost of keeping someone locked up varies from prison to prison but for all of them it costs a lot more than it would to send a youngster to public school. On top of that, the evidence is that prison is not effective in the way it is supposed to be—it does not deter people from crime when they come out. Indeed, through their embitterment, brutalizing, or institutionalizing, or getting a criminal education, it often tends to make them recidivist rather than conformist.

The government's response to this, after years of Green Papers and White Papers, of “consultation” and “debate”, has been to form the policy of dealing with offenders in the “community” rather than in custody. The motive for this is to save money but it is presented as a policy partly inspired on humane grounds because the very word “community” suggests something warm and caring and supportive. That is why we have Community Psychiatric Nurses whose function now is to treat people in their homes when they should be in mental hospitals if the hospitals hadn’t been cut back or closed in order to save money. We have community centres where mentally bedraggled residents of some ghastly estate where alienation was designed into every pre-cast concrete slab are encouraged to tolerate their intolerable lives. We have Community Service under which people have to do unpaid work to “make restitution to society” for their offences. But if such a thing as “the community” exists it does so as a defensive organism against some of the worst of capitalism’s excesses, or to anaesthetize the systems effects in the delusion that a society based on dividing human beings can have refuges of unity.

But dealing with more offenders in “the community” causes political problems because there are few votes to be gained— and a lot to be lost—by a government seen to be soft on criminals. The Tory government's wily response to this, in the latest Criminal Justice Act, is to legislate to keep people out of prison except for the most serious offences but then to treat them in a harsher, more controlling, way in “the community”.This has the added advantage of allowing ministers to make kinky speeches about the innate lawlessness of human beings which can only be controlled by the threat of strict punishment. It is no coincidence that the drafting of the Act and piloting of it through parliament was largely the work of the militant Roman Catholic John Patten, who is now venting his vaunted theories about morality on the education system and its children.

In spite of the theories and claims of the politicians, there is no evidence that the level of crime is affected by Acts of parliament or criminological theories or the vote-catching neuroses of politicians. Crime is just another aspect of the society we live under, dominated by a minority class which lives by the parasitic process of stealing from the majority through the exploitation of our wage labour. This theft is perfectly legal—like much of capitalism's violence against the person—because the parasites have seen to it that there is a huge legal and penal system to make it so, to bring to account anyone who indulges in theft or violence outside the law.

The exploited majority must exist on a lower social and economic level than those who exploit them. Workers in factories and offices are aware of how their social betters enjoy the results of that exploitation, in their sumptuous and glamorous life-styles and their contempt for how the majority are condemned to live. It is not envy which makes workers want to have some of that life-style, but an inevitable struggle to even things up a little. That is what crime is mostly concerned with, for the overwhelming majority it is offences against property and property rights.

In most cases the workers accept their depressed place under capitalism with an apathetic docility, dreaming of ending their misery with a big pools win. In some cases the criminals view it rather differently; theft is a faster, more lucrative way of getting a living and there is always the possibility of the equivalent of scooping the pools—the big tickle. Between these two delusions there is really nothing to choose—and while they persist the ruling class gets on with the more secure and predictable method of legal theft.

Ivan

Rights. What rights? (2019)

From the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) was struggling with the feudal nobility, it was anxious to secure its ‘rights’ –  the ‘rights’ of the towns – the rising factor all through the Middle Ages – against barons and king, who controlled the state.

Rights were in the hands of the feudal state to bestow on its subjects. The word implies acceptance of one’s subordination to another, of whom you demand rights – the right to do something, express an idea, and so on. Rights are bestowed or withheld. Where there are no classes, no rulers and ruled, rights are an absurdity. They cease to be.

When the bourgeoisie stopped requesting its ‘rights’ and, instead, overthrew the nobility (namely in the French Revolution), it kept the language of Rights, and enshrined it in the bourgeois constitution. Now the bourgeoisie grants rights to, or withholds them from, its subject class, the working class.

Everyone thus today clamours about their ‘rights’ – the right to be a wage-slave, the rights of women, the rights of animals, the rights of minorities, ethnic or sexual. Like ‘freedom’, ‘rights’ is bourgeois language. We petition and plead with our masters for our “rights.”

No more rights! No more capitalist system! Abolish class by abolishing the wages system! Let’s get up off our knees and stop begging for treats.

Cooking the Books: The Property Rights Act (2006)

The Cooking the Books Column from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Labour got back into office in 1997, one of the first things they did, to show without spending any money that they were reformers, was to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights. This was supposed to give people more legal “rights”. Actually, as infringements could give rise to monetary compensation, it was more a bonanza for lawyers and has resulted in the further spread of “compensation culture”, capitalism’s tendency to put a monetary value on everything.

But it has also had another effect: to entrench further the rights of property, as two recent legal cases have shown (Times, 18 April and 23 November). Before the entry into force of the 1998 Human Rights Act, “squatters” acquired a legal right to a property after occupying it unchallenged for at least 12 years.

The cases involved property companies which had acquired titles to land which had been squatted by farmers for more than the 12 years. The companies relied on an article of the Convention that states: “Every natural person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided by law.”

The judges in both cases (the second those of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg from which there is no appeal) ruled that the previous English law that allowed the farmers to assume ownership of the land was an infringement of the property companies’ rights as enshrined in the Convention. As a result they will receive as compensation a nice fat cheque, likely to run in one case to millions of pounds.

So-called “human rights” have always been linked to property rights. As C.B. Macpherson showed in his classic study of 16th and 17th English political philosophy, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, the whole concept of human rights was based on the idea of every human being having a property right to their own body. The state is not supposed to stop them using their mental and physical energies as they think fit; this involves not just freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, but also the freedom to exercise their mental faculties in speech, publication and religion.

Property as such came to be regarded as a human right when it was argued that humans also had a right to what they themselves had got from nature by their own bodily efforts, i.e. by their own labour. However, given the existing unequal ownership of property, especially land, the bourgeois “theorists of possessive individualism” shied away from the egalitarian implications of this labour theory of property. Instead they came up with various more or less specious reasons as to why property, however acquired (and including land, which no one created by their labour, and even slaves), was, in the words of the French Revolution’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, “an inviolable and sacred right”.

The freedom of property-owners from arbitrary dispossession by the state was what the French Revolution established in France, but which the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the US Constitution had already established in these countries.

The European Convention of Human Rights is a direct descendant of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, itself a reflection of the theory of “possessive individualism”. It is essentially a Convention on the Rights of Property – as neatly illustrated by the fact that the article under which the property companies won was not some obscure subsection, but Article I of Protocol I entitled “Protection of Property”.

The Suffragettes (1968)

From Punch Magazine, 1918.

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

In January 1918 Punch signalled the end of the struggle for female suffrage, which had provided it with so much material, with one last cartoon. There was a woman, looking like Joan of Arc, holding a banner with the words “Women’s Franchise”. The caption read simply “At Last”.

In February that year an amendment to the Representation of the People Act gave the parliamentary vote to those women over thirty who held a £5 occupation qualification, or were householders, the wives of householders, or graduates. That was the beginning; in 1928 the Baldwin government, despite one or two diehards still resisting from the last ditches, conceded the vote to everyone over the age of twenty-one, man and woman.

The campaign for the vote was part of a great surge of female discontent which had gathered its force at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the full effects of industrialisation were being felt; the old type of home life had been undermined and women had been forced onto the labour market in competition with men. Wherever they could —in the craft unions and, for the better off in the so-called professions—the men organised to resist this competition.

For most women, the one hope of escape from the labour market was by marriage which, since it involved the exchange of conjugal rights for some sort of livelihood, was sometimes stigmatised as legal prostitution. Marriage, in any case, had its problems; the old melodramas about wife beating were based on more than the authors’ imagination.

Yet even marriage was a mathematical impossibility for many. In 1851, for every 1,000 males in Britain there were 1042 females. This surplus went on increasing until in 1911 there were 1068 females for every 1,000 males. The 1851 Census found that, with 24½ the average age for a girl to marry, 42 per cent of females between the ages of twenty and forty were spinsters. [1] 

The unmarried woman found few opportunities for a job outside certain fields. Many became domestic skivvies; others "submitted to the sweatshops in the rag trade or went onto the streets. For the more genteel there was always the dreary treadmill of the governess, of which the 1851 Census recorded 21,000. These unhappy women got their living trying to teach rudimentary mathematics and languages at a cut price to the children of clergymen and stockbrokers, ever fearful of being dismissed, always fighting to preserve their faded respectability to carry on to their next “position”.

Even when, after the turn of the century, women had broken into industry in a big way, their conditions still compared badly with those of men. In 1911, for example, they could work at making army and police uniforms for ten and a half hours a day for a wage of a shilling a day. For four and a half hours’ work basting police trousers they were paid 3¾d. [2] This sort of wage was useless for a woman who had to keep herself.

The reaction to this came when women began to organise into trade unions, and even to form their own union — the Women’s Protective and Provident League. Among the well- to-do it came also in the rise of the “new women”, who demanded that society catch up with the changes which industry had forced upon it and recognise that women could do most jobs as well as men. They were rich enough to argue that their place was not in the home. They wanted the vote as a means of settling their grievances.

When these demands became crystallised into the cry Votes for Women the result was one of the most impressive examples of militancy, beside which Tariq Ali is dwarfed. The most original and determined of the demonstrators were the Suffragettes.*

Few organisations have rivalled the Suffragettes in their techniques of publicity and fund-raising. Without votes and candidates, they could dominate a by-election. They jammed the streets and parks with mammoth rallies. They called up Army reserves with bogus telephone calls, burnt down Lloyd George’s new home at Walton Heath, flooded the organ at the Albert Hall and, in one hectic night in 1914, destroyed three Scottish castles.

The Suffragettes had to endure a great deal of ribaldry, and worse. At one demonstration Churchill, who was then Home Secretary, told the police to deny the women their object of being arrested but to do anything else they liked with them—an order which was faithfully obeyed. The Suffragettes’ answer to arrest was the hunger strike, to which the authorities’ reply was forcible feeding, which was as barbarous and revolting as it sounds. Their ordeals made the Suffragettes’ unity all the stronger, but they did not raise unvarying sympathy; the Socialist Standard for June 1911 made this comment on the rich hunger strikers;

   Starvation, to them, has all the charms of novelty, Self-indulged, it buys a martyr’s crown, clears the blood, and whiles away the prison hours.

It is true that many of the Suffragettes were rich, and many of them aristocrats, and that they aimed at perpetuating the voting privileges which went with poverty. Many of them were moved by the same indignation as a Miss Bancroft of St. Anne’s Manor, who found that the 1868 election allowed three of her male employees to vote but denied it to her. Their organisation was not democratic; it was, in fact, Mrs. Pankhurst’s private dictatorship in which anyone who fell foul of her—like the Pethwick Lawrences—were disposed of.

Indeed, the very tactics of the Suffragettes prevented them being democratic. A lot of what they did was criminal— and crimes cannot be decided upon democratically, after a free discussion and vote. The majority of WSPU members could not know, or influence, what was going on; they had to take the orders laid down by the secret meetings or sent over from Christabel Pankhurst's secret hideaway in Paris.

In time they developed their own notions of sex superiority. In much the same way as the Black Power movement has reacted against Negro suppression with theories of white inferiority, the Suffragettes began to say that men were an unclean menace to Woman’s purity. “Votes for women and chastity for men” became Christabel’s favourite slogan. She also wrote The Great Scourge, an exaggerated and alarmist account of the extent and effects of venereal disease among men and alleged that “only an insignificant minority—twenty- five per cent at most—of men escaped infection from V.D.” [3]

Just as the Suffragettes were hotting up, the First World War, which might have been their big opportunity, finished them. With hardly a backward glance, they gave their talents to the recruiting drive and the scorn which Mrs. Pankhurst had previously reserved for devious politicians was turned upon the men who refused to fight at the call of the government which had so recently tortured her followers:

  Could any woman face the possibility of the affairs of the country being settled by Conscientious Objectors, passive resisters and shirkers? (Queen’s Hall, London, 1/10/1914.)

The popular notion is that it was as a reward for their war work that the women got the vote in 1918. In fact, the vote was not given to the very age and income group which had supplied the muscle power of that effort. More likely, the government simply gave in, knowing that to hold out any longer would have brought a resumption of the whole sorry business.

Since then, one of the central questions of the Votes for Women campaign has been answered. Women have voted, we have had women M.P.s, Cabinet Ministers—we might soon even have a woman for Premier. But the poverty and injustice on which the Suffragettes hung their propaganda are still with us and women have no more idea of how to abolish them than have men.

Indeed, some of the feminists have gone along with the sort of frothy nonsense which it supposed to prove that women are social and intellectually inferior. Here, for example, are a couple of comments—not untypical—on the political scene from a one time woman M.P.:

   I could always tell by Mrs. Attlee's knitting when another grandchild was on the way.
   Mary Wilson (wife of (he Prime Minister) is a sweet girl. Pity to involve her in the political game. [4]

One other question is still to be settled. Women has physiological differences to man but these do not make her inferior; what has often given her a social back seat is the fact that capitalism puts a price on those differences. The employers buy labour power on the most economical terms, which for some jobs means that they must look for labour power which will stay available. These jobs — for example technical, managerial, professional — are usually better paid and are difficult for a woman to hold because her role as a child bearer must periodically take her out of the labour market.

The tendency is therefore to confine woman to the humdrum jobs like typing and simple assembly work where a high labour turnover does not matter to the employer too much. This has the effect of making the man the main wage earner in a family — in the last analysis it is from his wage that the children are brought up and the bills art paid. And the effect of this is to raise the value of a man's labour power above a woman’s, which has the overall result of keeping his wages that much higher. This is not the verdict of a sex war; it is simply capitalism applying its own laws to human beings—and degrading and suppressing not a few of them in the process.

If women are to do something about their place in society, they must first face the fact that most of them are workers, with labour power to sell, just like the majority of men. They must realise that their vote has solved nothing, changed nothing, because—again like the majority of men—it is a vote not backed by an understanding of society. But with that understanding the vote can do more than any Suffragette ever dreamed of — it can bring ". . .  the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex."

Ivan

* The term Suffragette is here applied to what eventually became called the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). There were other organisations in the campaign—for example the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies — which were less militant.

[1] Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain by Constance Rover.

[2] Women On the Warpath by David Mitchell.

[3] The Suffragette Movement by Sylvia Parkhurst,

[4] Woman In Parliament by Jean Mann.

Cooking the Books: Capitalism Goes into Space (2016)

The Cooking the Books Column from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dutch Marxist, Anton Pannekoek, once wrote that because the Earth’s size was limited so would capitalism be, implying that when capitalism had extended to the whole of the globe it would come to an end. This conclusion might have been reassuring, but it was never a rigorous argument. The Earth’s size has nothing to do with the lifespan of capitalism. But, if it had, Pannekoek had overlooked the possibility of capitalism extending itself beyond the Earth; surprising since he was a professor of astronomy, but he was writing in 1942.

Fast forward to today and an online article on 25 November (tinyurl.com/nq9csxn) suggests that we too might be behind the times when we talk of ‘world’ socialism:

‘President Barrack Obama today put his signature on a law supporting the rights of space miners to extract, use and sell resources from asteroids, the moon, Mars and other celestial bodies.’

The US law exploits a loophole in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which banned weapons of mass destruction (but not other weapons) in space but which also laid down that ‘outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.’ This meant only that no state could claim territorial rights over parts of space but did not rule out corporations or individuals exercising private property rights over them.

The 1979 Moon Treaty did attempt to prevent this, declaring (Article 11) that ‘the Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind’ and banning any state, corporate or private individual ownership of them. Since this treaty was not signed by the US or by any other country likely to send a mission to the Moon this clause was without effect. Now the US has enacted a law permitting the exercise of private property rights there and beyond.

It was passed as a result of lobbying by capitalist corporations that are already investing in the possibility of exploiting the natural resources of the Moon and near-Earth asteroids.

They were over the moon about it. ‘This is the single greatest recognition of property rights in history,’ exaggerated Eric Anderson of Planetary Resources. ‘In the long view of history,’ enthused Rick Tumlinson of Deep Space Industries, ‘it is the sort of positive action that changes civilization’. It, added Hannah Kerner of the Space Frontier Foundation, ‘extends our free market values into space.’

Actually, in the long view of history, it is more likely to be seen as a disaster and a disgrace as extending into space private property rights and the production for profit that caused such havoc on Earth. There is nothing wrong with making use of the natural resources of the Moon, Mars and asteroids. It’s an exciting prospect and will be an advance in human civilisation, but it will only be done rationally and in the interest of humanity if carried out under conditions where these resources, together with those of the Earth, really are ‘the common heritage of mankind’.

These are conditions which Article 11 of the Moon Treaty could be adapted to describe:

‘Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Earth, the Moon or other celestial bodies, nor any part thereof, shall be the property of any state, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.’

Fortunately, Pannekoek was wrong about capitalism having physical limits since space is so vast that, if he’d been right, capitalism would potentially be able to last forever.

Intellectual Property: a further restriction on personal freedom (2006)

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s contribution is based on a Q&A session held on 22 April last year at Washington State University. Tristan Miller provides a commentary from a socialist perspective on the following page.

Guaranteeing corporate profits

The relation of intellectual property to personal freedom and its place in public and academic settings is an interesting topic with an interesting history.

The Uruguay Round that set up the World Trade Organization imposed what is called a free trade agreement, but which is, in fact, a highly protectionist agreement (the US and business leaders being strongly opposed to free trade and market economies, except in highly specific ways beneficial to them). A crucial part of this agreement was the establishment of very strong “intellectual property rights”. What this actually means is rights that guarantee monopoly pricing power to private tyrannies.

For example, consider a drug corporation. Most of their serious research and development – the hard part of it – is funded by the public. In fact, much of the dynamism of the world’s economy comes out of public expenditures through the state system, which is the source of most innovation and development. There is some research and development in the corporate system, but it’s mostly at the marketing end. And this is true of the drug industry. Once the corporations gain the benefit of the public paying the costs and taking the risks, they want to monopolize the profit and the intellectual property rights. These rights are not for small inventors. In fact, the people doing the work in the corporations don’t get much out of them; at best, they would receive a small bonus if they invent something. It’s the corporate tyrannies that are making the profits and they want to guarantee them.

The World Trade Organization proposed new, enhanced intellectual property rights – patent rights – far beyond anything that existed in the past. In fact, they are not only designed to maximize monopoly pricing and profit, but also to prevent development. For instance, the World Trade Organization rules introduced the concept of product patents. It used to be you could patent a process, but not the product, so if some smart guy could figure out a better way of producing something, he could do it. The WTO wants to block this. It’s important to block development and progress in order to ensure monopoly rights, so they now have product patents.

Consider US history: suppose the colonies, after independence, had been forced to accept this patent regime. What would we Americans be doing now? First of all, there would be very few of us at all, but those of us who would be here would be pursuing our comparative advantage in exporting fish and fur. That’s what economists tell you is right – pursue your comparative advantage. That was our comparative advantage. We certainly wouldn’t have had a textile industry. The British textiles were far cheaper and better. Actually, British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their techniques. They therefore became the pre-eminent textile manufacturer, by force of course. In actuality, the US does have a textile industry which grew up around Massachusetts. But the only way it could develop was by extremely high tariffs which protected unviable US industries. Our textile industry developed and later had spin-offs into other industries. And so it continues.

We would never have had a steel industry either, for the same reason: British steel was far superior. One of the reasons is because they were stealing Indian techniques. British engineers were going to India to learn about steel-making well into the 19th century. They ran the country by force so they could take what the Indians knew and develop a steel industry. In order to develop its own steel industry, the US used massive government involvement through extremely high tariffs and the military system, as usual.

This system continues right up to the present, and furthermore it’s true of every single developed society. It’s one of the best-known truths of economic history that the only countries that developed are the ones that pursued these techniques. There were countries that were forced to adopt free trade and “liberalization” – the colonies – and they got destroyed. The sharp divide between the first and the third worlds has really taken shape since the 18th century. And maintaining this divide is what intellectual property rights are for. In fact, there’s a name for it in economic history: Friedrich List, the famous German political economist in the 19th century, who borrowed his major protectionist doctrines from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder”. First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it.

Intellectual property rights have very little to do with individual initiative. Einstein didn’t have any intellectual property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by people who are interested in it; that’s the way science works. However, there’s been an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, much the same way everything else has been commercialized. So you don’t do science because it’s exciting and challenging, because you want to find out something new, and because you want the world to benefit from it; you do it because maybe you can make some money out of it. You can make your own judgment about the moral value. Personally, I think it’s extremely cheapening, but also destructive of initiative and development.

It’s important to note that the profits from patents commonly don’t go back to the individual inventors. This is a very well-studied topic. Take, for example, the well-studied case of computer-controlled machine tools, which are now a fundamental component of the economy. There’s a very good study of this by David Noble, a leading political economist. What he discovered is that these techniques were invented by some small guy working in his garage somewhere in, I think, Michigan. After the MIT mechanical engineering department learned about it, they picked up these techniques and developed them and extended them and so on, and the corporations came and picked them up from MIT, and finally it became a core part of US industry. Well, what happened to the guy who invented it? He’s still probably working in his garage in Michigan or wherever it is. And that’s very typical.

I just don’t think intellectual property has much to do with innovation or independence. It has to do with protecting major concentrations of power which mostly got their power as a public gift, and making sure that they can maintain and expand their power. And these highly protectionist devices really have to be rammed down the public’s throat. They don’t make any economic sense or any other sense.

Neither do I think that intellectual property should play any role in academic and public institutions. In 1980 the Bayh-Dole Act gave universities the right to patent inventions that came out of their own research. But nothing comes strictly out of a university’s own research; it comes out of public funding. That’s how the university can function; that’s how their research projects work. The whole system is set up to socialize cost and risk to the general public, and then within that context, things can be invented. But I don’t think universities should patent them. They should be working for the public good, and that means the fruits of their research should be available to the public.

Noam Chomsky

No amount of legislation can change the basics

To most people today, the notion that ideas or information can be owned seems as natural as owning a house or a bicycle. We are brought up to believe that when someone writes a book or piece of music, or develops plans for a new invention, they become that work’s sole owner. This means that they alone have the right to determine whether and how that work is used by other people, or the right to transfer ownership of the work to another person or a company. Only the owner is allowed to make and sell copies of the work, to incorporate it into a collection of other works, or to produce a new work based on the original, such as a new edition or a sequel. These “rights”, as they are called, are encoded not just in our laws, but increasingly, as we shall see, in our social norms and our technology.

However, the world did not always work this way. To people in the Ancient world and in Mediaeval times, the thought that anyone could claim ownership and control of something intangible like a poem or an idea would have seemed ludicrous. Philosophers and mathematicians regularly borrowed, critiqued, and expanded upon the works of their colleagues; historians compiled and summarized descriptions of events recorded by others; and musicians performed existing songs while adding their own embellishments. Written works were copied freely (albeit laboriously) by trained scribes, and technological improvements diffused gradually among artisans through word of mouth.

To someone from the past, then, today’s intellectual property regime would seem terribly restrictive. Had Shakespeare been told he could not copy and rework material from other playwrights, he would have seen this as a tyrannical imposition on his personal freedom as an artist. What’s more, we would have been robbed of many of his greatest works, including Hamlet and King Lear, both of which were adaptations of other authors’ plays. What was it that changed, then, between Shakespeare’s time and ours, to allow us to think of information and ideas in the same terms as physical property? And more importantly, is our society more or less free as a result?

The answer to the first question is relatively simple when we look at things in their historical context. In the century preceding Shakespeare, two great developments began sweeping across Europe, one technological, the other socio-economical. The first of these was mechanized printing, introduced by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s. Books and pamphlets suddenly became easy and cheap to reproduce, and with their abundance literacy and authorship increased. The second development was the capitalist mode of production, which was by fits and starts beginning to replace the old feudal system. Trained scribes who used their own inexpensive tools for copying manuscripts were replaced by relatively unskilled workers who operated a costly printing press owned by their employer. Few authors could afford a press to print their own books, and the wealthy publishers who owned the presses depended on a steady supply of new literature to drive their sales. Therefore, authors and publishers entered into an agreement whereby the publisher supported the author financially in exchange for printing their book and retaining the profits from its sale.

Though a few popular authors became quite wealthy through this arrangement, the vast majority were not significantly better off than the rest of the labouring class. As with any employment relationship, it was not in the publisher’s interest to pay authors any more than required for their upkeep, thus forcing them to either continue writing or seek other employment. To prevent authors from securing payment from more than one publisher simultaneously and to prevent rival publishers from cutting into their profits, publishers in the 17th and 18th centuries pressured governments to enact laws recognizing a publisher’s exclusive ownership and control (“copyright”) of a literary work. (Initially this ownership rested with the author, though as it was useless to anyone without a press, he invariably assigned it to a publisher.) Similar laws were enacted granting monopolies on “any manner of new manufactures” – that is, patents – which again were beneficial primarily to those who already had the capital to exploit and defend them.

For professional writers, artists, and inventors, then, copyrights and patents – collectively referred to as “intellectual property” – are simply a specialized legal formalization of the wage-labour exchange other workers are forced to make with their employers. Just as manual labourers, lacking the means to produce and distribute their own products, must sell their labour power to a factory owner for an hourly wage, writers, lacking a printing press and bookstore, sell the copyright on their writing to a publishing house for a lump sum or nominal royalty. And just as manual labourers selling their labour power must waive ownership of the goods they have produced and the freedom to use them as they see fit, so too do writers selling their copyright lose the freedom to use their writing as they wishes. If a writer wishes to adapt or incorporate elements of another book – even one that they themself originally wrote – into a new work, they must first secure (and often pay for) permission from the publisher who owns the copyright. Given that the free and fruitful exchange of ideas and information was commonplace before intellectual property, it is difficult to argue that these laws have done anything other than rob artists and scientists of their personal freedom to learn from and interact with each other.

And what of the rest of us, those of us who do not make our livings writing, performing, or inventing? Has the intellectual property regime affected us in any way? Until relatively recently, the answer was not much, or at least, not personally. Intellectual property was simply a legal fiction allowing corporations to stake their various claims to “properties” in the information market. How the capitalists decided amongst themselves who had the right to produce what had little bearing on the individual freedom of the average worker, who owned neither presses to print books nor factories to mass-produce new machines . Technically it was illegal for a worker to make a copy of a book, but since it would take them weeks or months to do so by hand, the publishers’ profits were not threatened and no injunction was sought.

With the advent of home computers and the Internet, however, the entire working class suddenly found itself in possession of the same sorts of instruments of production and distribution that had previously been exclusive to wealthy publishing houses. Once a book or piece of music had been put into digital form, anyone could instantly produce unlimited copies with the click of a button and instantly send them anywhere in the world. Alarmed at the threat to their monopolies and their profits, publishers began to take notice. Criminal and civil lawsuits were brought against individuals who downloaded music from the Internet or copied software for their friends. Publishers launched wide-scale public “education” campaigns to convince people that unauthorized copying was akin to theft or even to piracy on the high seas. The full force of the law and corporate propaganda apparatus was applied to preventing workers from exercising their new-found ability to produce and distribute intellectual property on a massive scale.

At this point, one could well argue that people technically had not lost any of their personal freedoms, since by law they were never free to copy information in the first place. This changed, as Noam Chomsky notes, with the passing of increasingly restrictive laws in the late 20th century. Now it is a crime not just to copy a digital work, but also to use it in any way not authorized by the publisher. Many of the freedoms people enjoyed with printed books and analogue audio and video recordings no longer apply to their digital counterparts. A publisher can arbitrarily decide that a particular e-book can be read only a certain number of times, or only up to a certain date, or only on a certain device, making transfer to a friend or donation to a library impossible. These restrictions are hard-coded into the device or software which reads the e-book, and modifying the software or inventing a new device to circumvent these restrictions is a criminal offence.

In conclusion, Prof. Chomsky is correct in his identification of today’s intellectual property system as a way of granting legal monopolies to corporations. And I applaud him for speaking out against the worst excesses of companies exploiting the patent system in the name of maximizing profits. But by focussing on and attacking only recent intellectual property law reforms, it is easy to fall into the trap of suggesting that the system could be “fixed” simply by repealing these reforms or otherwise tweaking the laws. As I hope I have shown here, from their very beginnings copyrights and patents have existed to benefit only that small minority of people who owned the presses, warehouses, and stores through which books and other media are reproduced and distributed. Any benefit to the inventors and authors who actually produce inventions and artistic works is incidental, and furthermore comes at the cost of stifling cross-pollination of ideas and the progress it entails. No amount of legislation can ever change the fundamental relationship in production between the workers, who produce almost all of the world’s artistic and scientific wealth, and the rich minority who control the means of disseminating this wealth. Therefore workers have no stake in the intellectual property regime and should work only for the abolition of the entire system that supports it.

Tristan Miller