Die Neue Zeit
11th February 2010, 03:16
Transformative Critique: Directional Measures and Laws on Property Rights
Like what the typical Trotskyist “transitional” critic would say, the list of directional measures preceding the Basic Principles is not as exhaustive as it should be from a social-abolitionist perspective, and may not be as exhaustive as it could be from even a proletocratic perspective. Some of the measures look like they could easily fit into the principles.
Consider one particular measure raised by Mike Macnair in his book on revolutionary strategy – for some reason as an “immediate” measure but tied to his background as a legal academic:
Abolition of constitutional guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade.
While this looks like it could easily fit into the maximalist program of social labour, there is an element of subtlety that makes it only directional but nevertheless nothing less than directional: constitutional guarantees. For example, Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone of the magazine Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics noted in 2006 that the Venezuelan government engaged in similar measures to the one enacted by the Paris Commune on cooperatives:
In a more typically confrontational example, displaced workers first occupied a sugar refinery in Cumanacoa and restarted it on their own. The federal government then expropriated the property and turned it over to cooperatives of the plant's workers. The owners' property rights were respected inasmuch as the government loaned the workers the money for the purchase, though the price was well below what the owners had claimed. Such expropriated factories are then often run by elected representatives of workers alongside of government appointees.
There are strings attached. "We haven't expropriated Cumanacoa and Sideroca for the workers just to help them become rich people the day after tomorrow," said Chávez. "This has not been done just for them—it is to help make everyone wealthy." Take the case of Cacao Sucre, another sugar mill closed for eight years by its private owners, leaving 120 workers unemployed in a neighborhood of grinding poverty. The state's governor put out a call for the workers to form a co-op. After receiving training in self-management, the mill co-op integrated with the 3,665-strong cane growers' co-op. In July 2005, this large cooperative became the first "Social Production Enterprise." The new designation means that the co-op is required to set aside a portion of its profits to fund health, education, and housing for the local population, and to open its food hall to the community as well.
While the technical assistance was certainly not unconditional on the part of the Venezuelan government’s usage of eminent domain or compulsory purchase (a widespread power among even developed bourgeois-capitalist states that ironically violates the more propertarian Article 17 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”), the previous owners did not enjoy property rights akin to those secured by the US constitution’s Fifth Amendment on “just compensation.”
Another application of this directional measure can be applied to interest (usury). Before extending litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all non-workers who appropriate surplus value atop any economic rent applied towards exclusively public purposes, a society seriously intent upon the maximalist program of social labour would have to enact more stringent measures against interest beyond “equity not usury” – if not ban it altogether – like prohibiting civil courts from enforcing the collection of the interest portion of debt payments, or imposing severe criminal penalties on those who use threats of harm to extort interest. Otherwise, it would be more profitable to earn large amounts of interest in bank accounts than to use the money to employ workers.
As a legal academic, Macnair asserted that the very notion of law, from the very dawn of class society, is intrinsically tied to property rights:
Lawyers are notoriously expensive, obscure and troublesome: this has been a common theme of satire since Roman times. Moreover, not all historical societies do use law and few – most notably the later Roman empire – have been as ‘law-saturated’ and obsessed with law as the late 20th and early 21st century world.
To start with adjudication: it seems that adjudication as a mode of decision-making presupposes and is adapted to disputes about private property. The ‘justice’ which a judge or arbitrator is to deliver is at its core the restoration of prior ownership, or compensation for the loss of ownership. From this core, which appears at the heart of early legal systems, law is extended by analogy: a crime is a ‘taking from the state’ or a ‘taking from the society’; jurisdiction, or decision-making power, is treated as a kind of property right. But the sanctity of property remains the core basis of legal reasoning.
[...]
The sanctity of private property is embedded in every ‘human rights’ document, from the English Petition of Right (1627) through to the Charter of rights in the draft constitution of the European Union. It is reflected in constitutional prohibitions on expropriation and in ‘restrictive construction’ in favour of the property owner of tax laws, laws controlling property use, and so on. The role of lawyers in the construction of certainty inexorably carries with both ‘tax avoidance’ and ‘regulatory failure’: ie, the use of the requirement of predictability to undermine for the benefit of the rich the effect of rules made by parliaments. It carries with it ‘inequality of arms’: ie, that the rich can afford more and better legal services than the poor. These phenomena are commonly attributed to judicial bias: the truth is that the biases are inherent in the idea and practice of law itself.
It should be apparent on the basis of this analysis that ‘the rule of law’ is under present conditions a euphemism for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
For some reason, the abolition of all constitutional guarantees of the rights of private ownership of productive and other non-possessive property is missing from the list of directional measures. It is obvious that neither the most social-democratic form of bourgeois capitalism (that is, on the threshold) nor mere petty-capitalist social relations can or will accomplish this, but why are certain directional measures that are incompatible with present and past class societies listed (against information asymmetry, socialization of all economic rent up to and including surplus value, and full extension of labour litigation rights in accordance with the Socially Necessary Labour Theory of Value) and this one omitted? Is the “bridge” between an analysis of capitalism and its development on the one hand, and on the other the basic principles meant to be so indirect about the question of property rights?
REFERENCES
The minimum platform and extreme democracy by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/625/macnair.htm]
Venezuela's Cooperative Revolution by Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone [http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0706bowmanstone.html]
The war and the law by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker2/index.php?action=viewarticle&article_id=1001970]
Like what the typical Trotskyist “transitional” critic would say, the list of directional measures preceding the Basic Principles is not as exhaustive as it should be from a social-abolitionist perspective, and may not be as exhaustive as it could be from even a proletocratic perspective. Some of the measures look like they could easily fit into the principles.
Consider one particular measure raised by Mike Macnair in his book on revolutionary strategy – for some reason as an “immediate” measure but tied to his background as a legal academic:
Abolition of constitutional guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade.
While this looks like it could easily fit into the maximalist program of social labour, there is an element of subtlety that makes it only directional but nevertheless nothing less than directional: constitutional guarantees. For example, Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone of the magazine Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics noted in 2006 that the Venezuelan government engaged in similar measures to the one enacted by the Paris Commune on cooperatives:
In a more typically confrontational example, displaced workers first occupied a sugar refinery in Cumanacoa and restarted it on their own. The federal government then expropriated the property and turned it over to cooperatives of the plant's workers. The owners' property rights were respected inasmuch as the government loaned the workers the money for the purchase, though the price was well below what the owners had claimed. Such expropriated factories are then often run by elected representatives of workers alongside of government appointees.
There are strings attached. "We haven't expropriated Cumanacoa and Sideroca for the workers just to help them become rich people the day after tomorrow," said Chávez. "This has not been done just for them—it is to help make everyone wealthy." Take the case of Cacao Sucre, another sugar mill closed for eight years by its private owners, leaving 120 workers unemployed in a neighborhood of grinding poverty. The state's governor put out a call for the workers to form a co-op. After receiving training in self-management, the mill co-op integrated with the 3,665-strong cane growers' co-op. In July 2005, this large cooperative became the first "Social Production Enterprise." The new designation means that the co-op is required to set aside a portion of its profits to fund health, education, and housing for the local population, and to open its food hall to the community as well.
While the technical assistance was certainly not unconditional on the part of the Venezuelan government’s usage of eminent domain or compulsory purchase (a widespread power among even developed bourgeois-capitalist states that ironically violates the more propertarian Article 17 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”), the previous owners did not enjoy property rights akin to those secured by the US constitution’s Fifth Amendment on “just compensation.”
Another application of this directional measure can be applied to interest (usury). Before extending litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all non-workers who appropriate surplus value atop any economic rent applied towards exclusively public purposes, a society seriously intent upon the maximalist program of social labour would have to enact more stringent measures against interest beyond “equity not usury” – if not ban it altogether – like prohibiting civil courts from enforcing the collection of the interest portion of debt payments, or imposing severe criminal penalties on those who use threats of harm to extort interest. Otherwise, it would be more profitable to earn large amounts of interest in bank accounts than to use the money to employ workers.
As a legal academic, Macnair asserted that the very notion of law, from the very dawn of class society, is intrinsically tied to property rights:
Lawyers are notoriously expensive, obscure and troublesome: this has been a common theme of satire since Roman times. Moreover, not all historical societies do use law and few – most notably the later Roman empire – have been as ‘law-saturated’ and obsessed with law as the late 20th and early 21st century world.
To start with adjudication: it seems that adjudication as a mode of decision-making presupposes and is adapted to disputes about private property. The ‘justice’ which a judge or arbitrator is to deliver is at its core the restoration of prior ownership, or compensation for the loss of ownership. From this core, which appears at the heart of early legal systems, law is extended by analogy: a crime is a ‘taking from the state’ or a ‘taking from the society’; jurisdiction, or decision-making power, is treated as a kind of property right. But the sanctity of property remains the core basis of legal reasoning.
[...]
The sanctity of private property is embedded in every ‘human rights’ document, from the English Petition of Right (1627) through to the Charter of rights in the draft constitution of the European Union. It is reflected in constitutional prohibitions on expropriation and in ‘restrictive construction’ in favour of the property owner of tax laws, laws controlling property use, and so on. The role of lawyers in the construction of certainty inexorably carries with both ‘tax avoidance’ and ‘regulatory failure’: ie, the use of the requirement of predictability to undermine for the benefit of the rich the effect of rules made by parliaments. It carries with it ‘inequality of arms’: ie, that the rich can afford more and better legal services than the poor. These phenomena are commonly attributed to judicial bias: the truth is that the biases are inherent in the idea and practice of law itself.
It should be apparent on the basis of this analysis that ‘the rule of law’ is under present conditions a euphemism for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
For some reason, the abolition of all constitutional guarantees of the rights of private ownership of productive and other non-possessive property is missing from the list of directional measures. It is obvious that neither the most social-democratic form of bourgeois capitalism (that is, on the threshold) nor mere petty-capitalist social relations can or will accomplish this, but why are certain directional measures that are incompatible with present and past class societies listed (against information asymmetry, socialization of all economic rent up to and including surplus value, and full extension of labour litigation rights in accordance with the Socially Necessary Labour Theory of Value) and this one omitted? Is the “bridge” between an analysis of capitalism and its development on the one hand, and on the other the basic principles meant to be so indirect about the question of property rights?
REFERENCES
The minimum platform and extreme democracy by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/625/macnair.htm]
Venezuela's Cooperative Revolution by Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone [http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0706bowmanstone.html]
The war and the law by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker2/index.php?action=viewarticle&article_id=1001970]