• DaSaw@midwest.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    One thing I disagree with:

    The basic myth goes back to the old idea, prominent in the Middle Ages, that the governance or Lordship over people residing on and using the land was considered part and parcel of the Ownership of the land. As Maitland put it: “ownership blends with lordship, rulership, sovereignty in the vague medieval dominium,….” [Maitland 1960, 174] The landlord was the Lord of the Land. But then socialists and capitalists alike—each for their own reasons—carried over the idea that “Rulership and Ownership were blent” [Gierke 1958, 88] to the “ownership of the means of production.”

    I observe the opposite: that modern peoples simply do not recognize that control of the Land is the same thing as control of the people who live on it, at least in the United States. We went through such a long historical period with plenty of cheap open land (so long as you were white), allowing people to become property owners at best, or negotiate an advantageous tenancy at worst, that the idea that capitalist land ownership is in any way a violation of the freedom of anyone else is almost totally counterintuitive to most people. Taken together, the landowning class literally has the power of life and death over the rest of the population. But because this ownership isn’t individual, because we can choose our landlord and competition keeps rents below the literal death level for the majority, we are considered “free”, even as market forces perpetually push rents* up to a point where they absorb our entire productive surplus.

    –

    *Note that “rents” is not only the money paid to live in a particular place (and even that is not entirely Rent), but also things like the money our employer does not pay us because competition for scarce jobs, the market power of the employer, ensures he does not have to pay us our entire marginal productivity.

    • DaSaw@midwest.social
      4·
      1 year ago

      And here is something with which I enthusiastically agree:

      The civic republican scholar, Quentin Skinner, has emphasized the same contrast between alienation and delegation [1978]. Democratic theory is in fact based not on the courageous liberal stand against coercion and in favor of the consent of the governed nor on the critique of a pactum subjectionis as not being “really” voluntary. Democratic theory is based on a critique of the contracts of alienation as alienating that which is inalienable [Ellerman 2005, 2010b].[10]

      As some may have seen elsewhere, my personal hobby horse is land theory. Our current theory of economy allows people to fully alienate themselves from the land. But the right to land is the right to be. To exist is to occupy space. To be landless is to be dependent on others for the very privilege of existing. I do not believe it is proper that anyone can be alienated from this right.

      To the degree that some have the privilege of deciding who is and is not allowed to exist, they should be required to compensate the excluded to the greatest value the market will bear. Currently the revenue from that operation accumulates in the hands of a privileged subset of humankind, with a few collecting massive sums from great numbers of others for no service other than allowing them the privilege of existing. But because this “service” is bundled together with other actual services, it is rendered invisible to most people.