- Again, The Question of Property:
Public Matters, Private Rights
(From Just Peace #34, Summer, 1996)
- One way of comprehending a "root cause" of the
many different social ills with which we progressives are concerned,
I wrote recently in Just Peace, is to consider "the
question of property". The institution of private property
is of fundamental importance for most of our concerns. The greed,
competitiveness, loneliness and consumerism that pervades modern
life; the alienation among people that is the basis of violence
and of race, ethnic and gender antipathy; the stratification
of society into a structure of classes that underlies attitudes
of superiority and domination; the profound abuses of the natural
world that arise from the economic system of the business corporation....
private property lies at the heart of all of these.
While the institution of private property may not be itself the
"ultimate" source of these ills, none of them can be
significantly mitigated without major changes in the property
system as it now exists. Genuine and enduring community among
people cannot be cultivated without lowering the physical and
cultural barriers that exist between them on account of their
individually exclusive ownership of distinct "chunks of
the world". Attitudes of superiority and domination are
unlikely ever to disappear as long as people live in a society
of vast inequality of ownership and great material insecurity,
and work in places owned by others to whose command they must
acquiesce on the threat of losing what little security their
jobs give them. And there can be no significant reversal of the
appalling violation of the natural world that is spreading with
the culture of modern industry unless major changes are made
in the most pernicious of all forms of modern private property,
the business enterprise.
It may seem utopian to discuss such matters in times like these,
when the modern property system seems as permanently in place
as ever. Yet alienation, social injustice, and environmental,
cultural and spiritual degradation cannot be significantly ameliorated
while strictly adhering to the principles of private property.
Only marginal progress in mitigating these ills can ever be accomplished
without greatly enlarging the social space that is allocated
for public life in general, as opposed to the "private"
life of individuals and families, and especially critical is
the need to expand the role of democratic public decision-making
in matters of public concern -- and these necessitate basic changes
in the property system.
We progressives should not shrink from the implications of these
principles. Thus, in the realm of traditional "politics",
an important priority for us must be the kind of expansion of
already given, basic rights and processes of democracy that would
occur with such reforms as proportional representation in legislatures,
public funding of electoral campaigns, public oversight of lobbying
activities, and access of all political groups to the mass media.
Yet while changes such as these would be major accomplishments,
real democratic public decision-making requires altering far
more than just the "political" realm itself.
For one thing, as long as there are vast inequalities in people's
income and wealth, there will continue to be enormous differences
in their abilities to participate in all political activities,
from contributing to political groups and taking public actions
on their behalf, to simply casting votes in elections and referenda.
We must recall that a commitment to political democracy implies
an equally strong commitment to major reductions in economic
inequality, and we must continue to resist the current attack
worldwide on the whole set of important twentieth-century egalitarian
reforms: we must commit instead to strengthening the progressivity
of income and wealth taxes; improving the welfare insurance "safety
net"; committing major public funding for jobs and job training
and relocation; extending rather than cutting back public education,
health care, retirement insurance; and so forth.
Similarly, as long as private ownership of the mass media continues,
the existing powerful bias not only in political discourse, but
also in entertainment, "culture" and recreation, will
continue in directions most accommodating to the interests of
media owners. Thus we must take seriously such important reforms
of the media as extensions of public ownership and subsidy of
both mainstream and alternative broadcasting and publishing;
anti-trust action against media conglomerates; public regulation
of advertising; public access to programming and page space,
and so forth.
Taken altogether, these and other similar conditions that are
necessary for real democracy in "politics" are quite
radical -- yet a significant expansion in the public sphere and
in the role of democratic decision-making within it also requires
major redefinions of property rights themselves. Public spaces
of all sorts -- parks and natural areas, for example, recreation
and cultural centers, libraries and public meeting places --
are not just "amenities" for affluent "planned
communities" but vital necessities for real community wherever
people live: they are public rights. Moreover, in modern societies
invariably they require that most basic of all forms of public
"intrusion into private lives" -- taxes taken out of
people's incomes. Similarly, issues of how and where people live
are not matters of purely private interest either: the environmentally
and culturally devastating sprawl of modern urban and suburban
life -- and the automobile-and-highway mode of transportation
and the energy-intensive consumerism that fuel it -- are public
concerns and will require public "infringement" upon
private "rights" if they are to be ameliorated.
Probably the most important of the rights of property that are
in need of major redefinition are those associated with the modern
business corporation. Of course, the rights of the corporation
have already been significantly altered in recent history in
unambiguously progressive directions. Consider this short list
of formerly held corporate rights that have been considerably
curtailed in modern times:
the right
to employ child-labor,
the right
to refuse to recognize labor-unions,
the right
to work employees over-time without just compensation,
the right
to discriminate by race or sex in hiring and salaries,
- the right to use unsafe and unhealthy workplaces,
- the right to sell unsafe or unhealthy products,
- the right to dump toxic wastes,
- the right to add certain pollutants to the air and water,
- the right to leave wasted land unrestored,
- the right to make unlimited financial contributions to political
campaigns and lobbies.
Many other items could be added to this list of "rights"
of coporate property that have been "infringed upon"
in the public interest. Taken altogether, the progressive curtailments
of corporate license that have occurred in this century are quite
momentous: We should commit strongly not only to reversing the
current trend of roll-backs in these restrictions, but also to
strengthening and extending their coverage, for example, by curbing
corporations' rights to hire "scabs", to deny employees
adequate medical and retirement insurance, to stifle free speech
in the workplace, to shut down without notice, to relocate overseas
without penalty, and so forth.
However, even were all of this to be accomplished, the most important
issue concerning the corporation as property would still remain
to be addressed: It is unconscionable that the vast majority of
people spend half their active lives at work in business establishments
that are wholly owned by other people who, though they have nothing
to do with the real work of their businesses, have complete discretion
over all matters that concern it. There is no good reason why
workplaces and the larger organizations of which they are part
should not be considered and treated as democratic public spaces
-- i.e., belonging to the community of those who work in them.
There is no question that worklife as it is now organized is a
major factor, perhaps the principal factor, in people's alienation
from other individuals and groups, from the natural world, and
from their own capacities for self-initiative. If people seem
lamentably ill-equipped with the skills needed for citizenship
in a democratic society, perhaps that has something to do with
it. And there is little evidence that democratic worker- and community-owned
firms are "less efficient" than their capitalist counterparts
-- the overwhelming evidence is instead just the opposite. The
democratization of production should be among the primary advocacies
of progressives, and a major subject of our own continuing self-education
as well, for we have often neglected this most important of issues.
Is it "utopian" to reflect upon and discuss matters
such as these? Not at all. There are very few issues among those
with which we progressives are concerned that do not directly
and fundamentally involve "the question of property".
If anything, it is the notion that somehow the ills of our time
can be approached without taking up the property question that
is "utopian". Certainly private property need not be
understood as the only "root issue" that is common among
the concerns of progressives, but virtually the entire variety
of things we progressives advocate directly imply changes in the
property system as it is now constituted: property is an issue
we simply cannot ignore.