by Tim Di Muzio
To escape any re-evaluation, the oligarchy keeps repeating the dominant ideology according to which the solution to the social crisis is production growth. That is supposedly the sole means of fighting poverty and unemployment. Growth would allow the overall level of wealth to rise and consequently improve the lot of the poor without – and this part is never spelled out – any need to modify the distribution of wealth (ibid.: 70).
The main problem with the growth hypothesis identified here is that it deflects our attention away from a local and global conversation about needed social and economic change. Other problems with the growth hypothesis include: 1) there is little evidence that beyond a certain point economic growth contributes to human happiness (Jackson 2009: 30ff); 2) economic growth has been tightly correlated with non-renewable fossil fuel consumption (Tverberg 2011); and 3) there are physical limits to many of the world’s resources and evidence is mounting that we are reaching those limits (Heinberg 2007). As the polymath Kenneth Boulding asserted: ‘anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever is either a madman or an economist’ (United States Congress 1973: 248). Yet the political pursuit of facilitating investment climates in an effort to stimulate economic growth continues. As Clive Hamilton observed:
In the thrall of the growth fetish, all the major political parties … have made themselves captives of the national accounts. The parties may differ on social policy, but there is unchallengeable consensus that the overriding objective of government must be the growth of the economy. The parties fighting elections each promise to manage the economy better, so that economic growth will be higher. The answer to almost every problem is ‘more economic growth’ (Hamilton 2004: 2).
Hamilton and Kempf argue that if the public and their governments are not willing to challenge this defensive armour of dominant owners, and if these same owners are unwilling to change their consumption habits or join a conversation about needed social change, then environmental collapse and accelerating inequality are virtually assured. From an ethical point of view that values human and natural life, this path appears indefensible, but it is one being forged daily by the 1% and the dominant capital they own.
A further problem with chasing GDP is that it is an adding up of all the price transactions in the economy. This means that things that are actually harmful to society boost GDP. For example, if a company pollutes a lake and has to spend money cleaning up their mess, this will be added to GDP rather than subtracted as being socially harmful. Similarly, if someone were to run around a neighbourhood smashing car windows, all the repairs would add to GDP. Every gun, tank and nuclear warhead adds to GDP. As the reader can tell, this is a terribly inaccurate indicator for assessing national or societal well-being. The point was not lost on Robert F. Kennedy:
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans (cited in Fioramonti 2013: 81).
5 | SOCIETY VERSUS THE SUPERMAN THEORY OF WEALTH
The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power, and therefore is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgment of another. (Thomas Hobbes 1651: 54–5)
… men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth. (John Locke 2005: 27)
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. (Albert Einstein 2009)
We have already provided a sketch of some of the views on the origin of social surplus – the master question of political economy. In this chapter, I will consider the main justifications for its unequal distribution. In contrast with Hobbes’ view of sovereign ownership, I begin by considering Locke’s interpretation of ownership and his justification for an unlimited accumulation of property in the form of money. As we shall uncover, it is Locke’s ideas that underpin what I call the superman theory of wealth. This is the view that dominant owners have become incredibly wealthy because of their individual, superhuman talents. Given the scale of their wealth today, these talents, whether the result of DNA or acquired through learning, must far surpass those of non-dominant owners and our human ancestors to justify their pecuniary fortunes.
From Hobbes to Locke’s theory of ownership
In trying to convince English subjects of the need for an absolute sovereign, Hobbes invited them to imagine a condition before civil government. He suggested that the pre-state condition was one of general war: a never-ending battle of each against all. In this existential condition, no one’s life was safe and all were equally subject to the potential terror of others. Let us push to one side the fact that Hobbes is not talking about a real war such as the Norman Conquest, but an imaginary war he conjures up for the sake of his argument. How does he derive this fictional war? Hobbes makes the claim that war is possible only because individuals are more or less equal in power, ability and talent. Of course, Hobbes did admit that there were differences between subjects, but these were subtle and largely inconsequential. To demonstrate the equality of humans (or, for Hobbes, men), he says that if men really were radically unequal then one of two situations would take place. First, the strongest would simply subjugate the weak and either enslave them or decimate them. Second, the weak would realise that they were too feeble to fight and would simply surrender to the strong. So, in the thinking of Hobbes, ‘differences lead to peace’ and equality to constant war (Foucault 2003: 91). Since Hobbes ultimately wanted peace, this is the reason why he argued for a monarch with absolute differential power over his subjects. This overarching power, reasoned Hobbes, would ensure the security of commercial transactions and the lives of men.
At first glance, the position taken by Hobbes seems strange. Why start with the natural equality of subjects when Hobbes is clearly living in a time of widespread inequality in the distinction of class, rank and privilege? The answer has to be the context in which Hobbes was writing: the tumultuous times of the English Civil War (1642–51) and the republican Commonwealth. During the tumult, radically democratic positions were advanced about the natural rights of Englishmen that challenged the traditional view of royal society and princely order. These more radical ideas came to the fore in pamphlet after pamphlet by the Levellers and the Diggers, among other recalcitrant groups in society.1 Not only did the people have the right to resist illegitimate forms of power, men also had the right to participate in the political community as enfranchised citizens – a radical idea for the times.2 These men held that rights were not something granted to them by the king of the realm but originated in the very fact that they were born in England. Ellen Meiksins Wood illustrates how the notion of popular, rath
er than royal, sovereignty challenged English political thought:
these people would exert their ‘popular sovereignty’ not just by reclaiming their rights in tyrannical emergencies but regularly and repeatedly, in the normal exercise of their everyday political rights as citizens. After this theoretical innovation, and after the historic events that brought it into being, English political theory was never the same again. Theorists of a far less radical disposition, including even a defender of royal absolutism like Hobbes, felt obliged to meet the radical argument on its own ground, even to show that their preferred, and less democratic, forms of government met this new test of political legitimacy (Wood 2012: 240).
Ideas of rights and equality had come into conflict with the existing distribution of political power and property in England, and, as Wood suggests, once in circulation, they were difficult to remove from the body politic. A new set of empowering, if radical, ideas had entered the human consciousness: the right to have a say in one’s own governance, the right to rebel against illegitimate authority and, for the Diggers above all, the right to resist wage labour and work in cooperation with others for common benefit. Thus political economists and moral philosophers in support of the emerging capitalist mode of power would have to wrestle with, and indeed justify, inequality amidst these new and challenging ideas. The fact that history or God has made it so was no longer acceptable to an increasingly literate population undergoing profound changes in their daily lives. The problem became particularly acute with a greater social surplus to distribute and growing recognition that there was a perpetual shortage of money in the economy (Wennerlind 2011). Into the fray stepped John Locke.
Before Locke’s intervention, what little political philosophy existed understood property as the grant of a sovereign. In other words, private individuals held property at the pleasure of the monarch and this pleasure could always be rescinded. In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government we get an altogether different interpretation: one that serves to justify not only the existing inequality of property, but also the right of the few to accumulate without limit. Locke was an Oxford-educated philosopher and physician in the employ of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83), an English politician and wealthy landowner through inheritance. Shaftesbury also sought to profit from English colonialism – a position that Locke defended (Arneil 1994; 1996; Jahn 2013: 45ff; Wood and Wood 1997: 116ff).3
Locke begins his section on property by relying on the Christian Bible. He agrees that in the beginning God gave the Earth to all men as a commons. If this is so, reasons Locke, how do we arrive at private property? Yet answering this question is not his only goal. If we pay close attention, what Locke wants to demonstrate is ‘how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners’ (Locke 2005: 18, section 25, my emphasis). Thus there are two things of importance that Locke has to convince us of: 1) a man can own several different types of property; and 2) he can come to own that property without the express consent of everyone. The burden of his argument is a large one. How does Locke make his case?
Locke’s first move is to say that everyone has a property in their own capacity to labour, and while nature seems to provide an abundance of useful products for all, it is only by mixing labour with the products of nature that a man may claim a portion of this abundance as his own to the exclusion of all others. The first restriction, however, is that taking away from the commons cannot be done unless there are sufficient provisions for others. Locke imagines a man picking apples and acorns in the forest and asks whether we would find it reasonable for this man to go around asking everyone for consent for their appropriation, or whether just the fact of his taking possession of the apples and acorns through labour is enough. Put differently, from this abstract example, Locke wants to show that it would be absurd to ask everyone for consent for the mere reason that this would be incredibly inconvenient. He then goes on to say, in one of his most telling passages, which reveals his and Shaftesbury’s political interests:
And the taking of this or that part, does not depend on the express consent of all the commoners. Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them (ibid.: 19, section 28, my emphasis).
Astute readers will wonder how we go from a situation where someone in the forest is picking apples and acorns to one where all of a sudden a servant appears on the scene. Locke equates the forest-gathering scenario (personal labour picking apples and acorns) with the labour of a servant (not the direct labour of the person claiming property or ownership). But this is precisely the move Locke has to make if he wants to justify individual private property and exclusive ownership. The labour of the servant has to be the private property of the servant’s master – no further explanation is required as to how the servant arrived on the historical scene.
Locke then moves on to say that people may object to this appropriation from the commons as private property because what is to stop someone from gaining possession of as much as he or she can? Locke’s answer is that God did not give the Earth to man to let portions of it spoil or go to waste. This is Locke’s second limitation on ownership: one cannot appropriate so much of the commons that portions of it are allowed to spoil. This sounds reasonable enough, but Locke goes even further in his case for exclusive private property. He takes us out of the forest and on to a farm. His argument is simple: improving the land through cultivation is a God-bound duty, and as long as there is enough land for others to cultivate, the improver of land has a right to claim exclusive rights over the acreage he has worked. Improving and cultivating land that was previously lying waste is not only the path to property ownership but actually adds to society, since the land yields more products than wasteland. What is important to note is that the products of the land are not for direct consumption but produced for exchange value or profit. Locke is very clear about this when he discusses ‘wasteland’ in America.
So, after demonstrating that labour is the real source of value in improving the land, Locke has to explain how it can be that some own much more than others, since, while there may be differences in talent and skill among men, they would hardly be so drastic as to justify massive disparities in property ownership. It turns out that money is the great decider:
And as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them … Where there is not some thing, both lasting and scarce, and so valuable to be hoarded up, there men will not be apt to enlarge their possessions of land (ibid.: 26, section 48).
In the same section, Locke goes as far as to say that enclosing the land would be senseless without the incentive to make money – and, by extension, to augment one’s power. So how does money lead to an increase in possessions or greater wealth or property? Locke’s answer is that selling surplus goods on the market for money does not allow them to spoil. For example, I may sell surplus potatoes I cannot eat and in exchange receive some silver coins. The transaction satisfies Locke’s own limitation on property because it does not lead to spoilage: my customer can eat my potatoes that I could not eat and I have silver coins that I can then use to buy something I need. As this continues, some cultivators will amass more and more coins and therefore more power to command labour and resources, leading to the accumulation of more money. For Locke, this disparity is justified because by using money, people have tacitly consented to the resulting distribution of property. And there we have it all wrapped up in a tight bow: ownership confers the right to accumulate money without limit.
Of course, this was all philosophical fantasy detached from the actual processes of p
rivate property appropriation and the accumulation of money.4 But it did not stop it from being popular among the powerful and propertied. Until Rousseau’s critique of property and Bentham’s response that influenced mainstream economics, Locke’s theory of property supported the rise of what Macpherson called ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson 1978: 200). This extreme form of individualism laid the groundwork for what I have called the superman theory of wealth: the radically antisocial belief that wealth is the sole result of individual efforts and talents – biological or acquired.
Rousseau, Bentham and mainstream economics
For Locke, the property that a person had in their own personal labour gave them the natural right to appropriate the products of the Earth as private property. As long as money is around, people have the right to accumulate it without limit. Today, modern economists celebrate private property as one of the key explanatory variables for the rise of the West and its unequal wealth. They forget that, starting from Locke’s premise, alternative interpretations are available.
Like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) also started from a natural rights tradition but demonstrated the exact opposite conclusion: the right to accumulate without limit sanctified by Locke’s theory led to a situation whereby the majority of men were without property or the chance of ever acquiring any. In such a situation, Locke’s natural right to property was contravened for the majority:
What a strange and fatal condition – where accumulated riches facilitate still greater riches, but where men with none can acquire none; where the good man knows no way out of his misery; where the most roguish are the most honored and where virtue must be renounced for men to remain honest (Rousseau quoted in Wood 2012: 192).
In other words, Lockean natural rights and the right to accumulate without limit led to a property-owning minority and a property-less majority. Rousseau also condemned the practice of working for others for wages and argued that ‘no one should be able to appropriate the labor of others or be forced to alienate his own’ (ibid.: 209). He imagined a society where no one was poor enough to have to rent their labour to someone else and no one was rich enough to purchase the labour power of others (Macpherson 1978: 29ff). For Rousseau, property was power, and thus those without property had no power. At any rate, Rousseau, like the Diggers, abhorred wage labour and understood government as an organised force protecting the propertied against the struggling property-less. By starting from the premise of natural rights, Rousseau’s analysis exploded Locke’s justification for radically unequal property relations. To safeguard unequal property, a new justification would have to be found. Into this fray stepped Jeremy Bentham.