We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Libertaria: A Libertarian Paradise

Click here to access article by John Spritzler from New Democracy World.  

Spritzler constructs a pure economic libertarian nation to introduce an egalitarian vision of a nation. This piece is helpful in clarifying the difference between an organization of society ruled by those who want the owners of economic property to be free of all restrictions; and a society organized around strictly egalitarian principles where people have, as much as possible, equal access to the decision making process and to the benefits of the entire economy in which property ownership is limited to personal property. 

The key difference here, of course, hinges on the notion of property ownership: personal property versus social property. The concept of social property essentially recognizes the social nature of economic property when property is used by more than one person, or a family, to obtain material value. 

The history of capitalism has been essentially a struggle between advocates of these two concepts. Capitalists as a class have dominated most societies over the past 400 years. And, now we are seeing the results in a dramatic bifurcation of societies: a tiny class of "owners" of economic property that have accrued enormous amounts of wealth and, its concomitant, power, and an underclass, who are the vast majority, who live in precarious economic conditions with little political influence. These extreme in-egalitarian conditions have devolved into a dystopia, so well described and analyzed by critics such as Henry Giroux, and now exists throughout the world dominated by capitalist elites. 

However, this type of organization of societies goes against what is a basic component of human nature: social justice or fairness. Thus, people are raising questions, protesting, and rebelling. Hence, the need by this capitalist class to obscure the nature of their rule as much as possible through their control of all the ideological institutions of society while greatly augmenting all its authoritarian methods of control.