One of the most important things to understand about industrial capitalism is that the lower classes didn’t want it.
Peasants did not leave the land voluntarily. They were forced off, often violently, in a series of enclosures, through which their millennia-old rights to use the land were taken together.
This was a vast, albeit “legal” (because bills were passed that made it legal), seizure of property rights. Property is just rights, and those rights were taken from the peasantry and free farmers and given to the lords.
The justification for this was that “enclosed lands are more productive,” but detailed study has found this was only somewhat true: Commons fields were about 80 percent to 90 percent as productive, and their productivity increased at the same rate as enclosed fields. For some crops, common fields were more productive.
With the the fields enclosed, the peasantry lost control of capital (land is capital). They couldn’t grow their own food, raise sheep for wool, chop down trees for fuel, and so on.
They were thus forced off the land, into the city slums, and had to work for industrialists, six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day on average. They died younger, there was far more disease, they were maimed often, and they lived worse.
They knew this. They resisted. They hated.
Capitalism, among the many things that it is, is the concentration of capital in the hands of a few people. That means access to capital is removed from most people. Most people must now work for someone else. In some times and places that work is nice, at others it is not, but it is a loss of control and choice.
Peasants and free farmers in Britain had far more control over what they did and when than factory workers. In fact, they had more control than most modern American workers do today.
Yes, they had to engage in demeaning status rituals from which we are largely exempt, but they had a type of freedom most wage slaves don’t.
The choice for most people today is to choose their master, not to choose to have no master. The local gentry or nobles did not supervise the peasants most of the time, they let them get on with their work, took their share of the proceeds, and got a certain number of days of work from the peasantry.
But they were not close-supervising them.
Again, we tend to compare today with then, but this is the wrong comparison. The comparison is then (peasant/yeoman) with then (factory worker). The first was so far superior to the second as for there to be no comparison.
Was all of this disempowerment, this removal of capital from everyone but the few, necessary for industrialization and its benefits? Did people have to be forced off the land and into satanic mills, where they worked like dogs and died young?
Or was there a better path, which we did not take?
And what are the results today? The results are, in fact, that fewer and fewer people have control over capital or the means of production, and the rest of us have to do what those people say, not just for a month or two every year and here’s a share, but for five or more days a week, with intrusive monitoring and micro-managing bosses.
They control the capital. We do what they tell us to, negotiating only who wields the whip.
That’s capitalism.
Did it have to be that way?
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scruff
Pretty much the same as the transition to agriculture and the locking up of the food. Same sort of results in terms of freedom and health and living consequences.
Ten Bears
Was into an almost tangential somewhat philosophical diatribe over fresh French pastries and Mexican spiced chocolate down at the Italian bistro this morning about Luddites and the Monkey Wrench Gang. An odd memory, an obscure address in the file allocation to something quite likely on floppy disk. Or, oh wait!, on paper. I’ve just ordered it, need to read it again, it’s been forty years. There’s a connection, twixt then, then, and now. I’ll find it.
Synoia
Absolutely correct.
Thees laws were the collection of “Enclosure Acts.” The objective was to forcibly move the yeomen into the cities to work in industry,
When the Industrial workers finally got Unions well established, the Ruling Class seized upon Neo-Liberalism to Crush the Unions.
And now we have zero hours contracts, and a Labor Party further to the right than Churchill’s ,McMillan’s or Heath’s governments in the 1950s and 1960s.
With Tony Blair as a “left wing” leader.
Jerry Brown
“Did it have to be that way?” No- and it wasn’t that way everywhere in the world. But if you look around the world for places you would really want to live- wouldn’t you find a correlation between the ones that went capitalistic generally? Once people realized they can use their government to moderate the greed to some extent- it doesn’t look all that bad.
Peasant societies throughout the world probably would not be able to sustain 8 billion people that live in this world. Although capitalistic society may also be reaching a breaking point there but that remains to be seen.
Anyways, in an attempt to be sort of happy and positive- there are plenty of people even in the most capitalistic country in the world that do not live under dictates from capital owners. I don’t as a self employed carpenter. Millions work for the government in all kinds of capacities. There are many people like maybe Ian Welsh that rely on their talents for their incomes and are not necessarily dependent on capitalistic private corporations.
rangoon78
On 1 April 1649, Winstanley and his followers (The diggers or levelers) took over vacant or common lands on St George’s Hill in Surrey. Other Digger colonies followed in Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Northamptonshire. Their action was to cultivate the land and distribute food without charge to any who would join them in the work. Winstanley stated that if some wished to “call the Inclosures [their] own land . . . we are not against it,” though this may have been just a diplomatic gesture. Instead they wanted to create their own alternative Inclosure which would be a “Common Treasury of All” and where commoners would have “the freedom of the land for their livelihood . . . as the Gentry hathe the benefit of their Inclosures”.
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain
Willy
Speaking of choosing ones own master in a capitalist system, somebody here once mentioned Wright Patman, champion of small business capitalism, or, capitalism without all the Amazon slaves, Walmart ruined main streets, or the dysfunctional-corrupt health care system.
krake
Capitalism and yeoman/smallholder mercantilism probably don’t (shouldn’t) fall under the same header of ‘capitalism’.
And it’s unlikely that any kind of mercantilism distinct from feudal relations or semi-feudal frontier warlordism is possible.
Jessica
Connected to topic, but slightly tangential: In many nations, there were tensions between workers trying to fight off Satanic millization (a.k.a. proletarianization) and those already stuck in the mills trying to better them somehow. Organized resistance to Satanic millization was often by artisans.
Don’t know of any place that industrialized gently.
Perhaps if different civilizations had been more isolated from each other – not a coincidence that industrialization happened shortly after the entire planet was connected enough that any gentler places had to either toughen up (nasty up) or be overrun – somebody could have done it gently.
Could make the case that once civilization turns hierarchical and hoarding of property starts (which newish research shows is thousands of years after cities are founded, not simultaneous), the capacity to do much of anything gently was lost.
Perhaps on a planet with a less social sentient species. I can picture sentient dogs being herded into Satanic mills, but not sentient cats.
Hope we can make our species more humane. That’s where the meditation and such come in.
Synoia
Jerusalem Hymn
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
CH
That’s why industrialization occurred so much later in Eastern Europe–the peasants there had more control of their own land: http://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-plight-of-late-industrializers-what.html
anon
I’m fortunate to be in a job that I do not hate, pays well, and does not force me to do horrible things to other people to earn a paycheck. However, I have worked in the service industry several times in my life. Some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. Low pay, demeaning supervisors or store owners, working on your feet for long hours, and oftentimes no health insurance if you’re part-time or temp. My office jobs were always much easier with significantly higher pay and less supervision, but you have to luck out with a kind boss. If your boss is evil, your life will be hell.
If I had to be stuck in a low wage or dangerous blue collar job, specifically in this current situation with no PPE, I would much rather work on my own land, grow my own food, and find a way to monetize whatever I could grow or create. Even if I were to be poor for the rest of my life, I’d most certainly be happier working from home, be able to spend more time with my family, feel safer, and not have to put up with abuse and horrible work conditions for .01 percent of what a Bezos-type CEO makes from my labor. We have seen this play out time and again in the UK, in the USA, and now in China and other parts of Asia. Families were much happier living together in the countryside compared to being separated from their children for most of the year just to work for a few more dollars in horrible city factories.
That’s why I’ve always envied people who have found a way to successfully work for themselves or at least work from home independently. Maybe this pandemic will give people a glimpse of what life could be like not being micromanaged in an office every weekday. If things can change to give some people more options to work from home at least part-time, I see that is one of the few benefits that will have come out of this crisis.
Hugh
The muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote a book (about monopolies and Standard Oil) with a title that pretty much says it all, Wealth Against Commonwealth.
If you want to increase your wealth/capital, more power to you. But that wealth should not be at the expense of the commonwealth and there should be real restrictions on both how that wealth is used and just how much can be amassed before it compromises the commonwealth.
krake
Franklin can be problematic. But:
Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris
25 Dec. 1783 Writings 9:138
The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People’s Money out of their Pockets, tho’ only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors’ Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell’d to pay by some Law.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
The Founders’ Constitution
Volume 1, Chapter 16, Document 12
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html
The University of Chicago Press
Stirling S Newberry
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/
StewartM
Did it have to be that way? No. But there is an analogy to warfare–once one group did it, others were compelled to do it as well in order to survive. Because the capitalist West was able to produce the world’s best death toys, and then to subdue the rest of the world It’s similar why agriculture replaced hunter-gathering, not because it produce a better life (in fact, the contrary) but it allowed for denser albeit more impoverished and unfree populations which could field bigger armies.
The solution, in principle, is simple–give back control of capital to everyone. How you accomplish that is more problematic. The Leninist ‘solution’ of ‘put us in charge and we’ll manage everything for the benefit for everyone’ turned out to be a lie. The best, democratic, solution must be decentralized. I favor a kind of market socialism where firms larger than mom-and-pop shops are control by their workforce and investors (the capitalist class) are bondholders with no power to directly influence the decision-making of a firm. I think you could begin putting this into place by intelligently using the tax code to tax rich corporate ‘people’s profitst the same tax rate (95 % or so) as you do rich individuals, their only escape from this confiscatory taxation would be to turn control of the firm away from the investors to the workers. To escape taxation they’d have to relinquish power.
Mark Pontin
Ho ho Ho! More jolly fun —
‘Ukraine: Forest fire near Chernobyl under control – State Emergency Service’
–Yesterday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6Xv_GFS4OE
‘Fires restart in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone’
–14 hours ago
https://meduza.io/en/news/2020/04/16/fires-restart-in-chernobyl-exclusion-zone
‘Strong winds exacerbate fire burning near Chernobyl plant’
–10 hours ago
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/16/strong-winds-exacerbate-fire-burning-near-chernobyl-plant/
someofparts
One way or another, it feels like we are smack in the middle of a transition as large as the shift to industrialization, except faster. So much is changing it is hard to keep up.
Matt Stoller is getting my hopes up that good old-fashioned deflation will finally wipe out the private-equity boys.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/is-private-equity-having-its-minsky
Nicholas Taleb focuses on risk in complex systems. He says dealing with the pandemic and recovering from the dislocations it has caused will drag on for a long time. There will be no quick snaps back to normal.
https://twitter.com/nntaleb
Amber Frost interviewed the spokesman for a teamsters local. It sounds like promising changes in control of the union may be bubbling up. I’ve heard some hairy stories about how those guys roll. Respect.
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house
Wendell Potter is pulling the curtain all the way back on the ramped-up pandemic profiteering by private health care insurers. If desperation and upheaval are on the way I hope to see that energy directed into something constructive. There could be no more constructive outcome than putting these awful people out of business.
https://twitter.com/wendellpotter
someofparts
Almost forgot this –
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/
Right now this feels like a concept I want to hang on to. It’s the best description I’ve found of the kind of people we are dealing with in Hillary or Obama. Rulers of the Vampire Castle.
“What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism.”
Joe Rogan makes a point of bringing on people who have been hounded out of the official public conversation. I wonder if that is one of the reasons he is so popular. It would be encouraging if it were.
Aqua Lung
And yet you and many others at this venue have lobbied Ian to censor various commenters with whom you disagree because their commentary evokes cognitive dissonance and makes you feel discomfort.
Joe Rogan is just another version of Donald Trump. He’s a con man entertainer. A publicity hound. A joke and a bad one at that. The fact he can make a living at what he does is part & parcel of why the world, thankfully at this point, is going to crash and burn.
Stirling S Newberry
“And it’s unlikely that any kind of mercantilism distinct from feudal relations or semi-feudal frontier warlordism is possible.”
Not true. Feudalism requires “common land.” It is with aristocracy that enclosures begin because the top of society needs a greater percentage to build palaces – which are for gathering the nobles and converting them into aristocrats. See the change of Yorkist England to Tudor, the transition from de Valois to Bourbon (Henri V – Louis XIII – Louis XIV), the change to Tokugawa in Japan, the Hapsburgs in Spain, etc. The elite needed more and money was the way to get it. (and in Europe the way was to loot and trade for it.) Capitalism was in the future and industrialization was in its infancy.
Stirling S Newberry
John Conway in the NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/technology/john-horton-conway-dead-coronavirus.htm
krake
Stirling, medieval castle-building preceded Enclosure by several hundred years.
Enclosure was driven by capitalist and proto-capitalist accumulation, not castle-building.
The mercantile system persisted in the Colonies a bit longer precisely because the corvee plantation system replicated many aspects of feudal relations contemporaneously losing ground to the rising bourgoisie in England and France. 13 years after the Colonies’ merchant and plantation lords revolted, that bourgoisie would have its revolution in France. The outcomes were so distinct, because the economic preconditions and goals were so different.
Those yoeman relations are gone forever, because the necessary patchwork of feudalism, guild economics, market towns and mercantilism are gone forever.
Ché Pasa
“Lots of death” is part of the program in operation. Significant reductions in surplus populations, culling useless eaters, and scaring the daylights out of survivors to stamp out rebellion and ensure control over the remaining rabble are time worn and usually effective tactics employed by overlords throughout history — especially in crisis situations.
Transition to capitalism and transition out of it were accompanied by lots of death. And so it is now.
We don’t know what the real death rate is during this Outbreak. But it’s higher than we’re being told. Two, three, four times higher wouldn’t be surprising. We may never know.
The oligarchy is consolidating its control and has discovered that in truth it doesn’t need resources, workers, product, sales or much of anything else that previously constituted The Economy. The fire hose of cash has opened again, and they can have whatever they want when they want it in a “closed” economy. Perhaps no more than one or two percent of the working class are actually essential when you get down to it. The rest could vanish and not be missed, no?
I don’t think we can expect things to get better even as the Outbreak subsides. Our rulers have learned something pleasing to them. There’s no need or reason for most of the rest of us to exist. What uprising there is (so far) isn’t countering that lesson, it’s accelerating it.
As Mr. Burns might say, “Excellent!”
Ten Bears
Is anyone fighting those fires, Mark? It’s not clear in the link. Certainly not fighting them as we fight forest fires here. It’s a dead zone, ancillary to my observations the other day on the 450 nukes around the planet that will require about ten thousand years of human intervention to maintain even a modicum of environmental safety. Not just drought, earthquakes and floods…
rangoon78
Capitalism—A uniquely insidious form ofexploitation: “In all pre-capitalist societies, producers have had direct access to the means of their own reproduction. This has meant that when their surplus labor has been appropriated by exploiters, it has been done by what Marx called “extra-economic” means—that is, by means of direct coercion, exercised by landlords and/or states employing superior force, privileged access to military, judicial, and political power.
Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of surplus appropriation based on the dispossession of the direct producers whose surplus labor is appropriated by purely “economic” means. Because direct producers in a fully developed capitalism are propertyless, and because their only access to the means of production, to the requirements of their own reproduction, even to the means of their own labor, is the sale of their labor-power in exchange for a wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers’ surplus labor without direct coercion.” -Ellen Wood 1998
nihil obstet
Side note on some things mentioned above. There’s a rather interesting film about Gerard Winstanley and his leadership of the Diggers in the 16th c. — Winstanley.
The latest novel in C.J. Sansom’s mystery series about the lawyer Shardlake who works for Thomas Cromwell and subsequently several of the Tudors is Tombland in which Shardlake gets mixed up in Kett’s Rebellion, an East Anglian peasant rebellion in 1549 against enclosures of common land by landowners.
Stirling S Newberry
“Enclosure was driven by capitalist and proto-capitalist accumulation, not castle-building.”
Palace-building is not the same thing as castle-building, castles were for defense, palaces were for gathering. A good way to see the shift is when kings/emperors/shoguns stop moving around and had their nobility come to them. Richard III went everywhere, Henry VIII moved less, and George I less still. Similar examples from France (see Loire Valley) etc. Again, capitalism is in the future – mercantilism and aristocracy is what made enclosure. You can say “proto-” only with hindsight and ignoring a series of wars.
Feudalism builds castles, Aristocracy builds palaces. Feudalism’s structure was, therefore, not interested in control over the peasantry except by using serfdom. Aristocracy (and its handmaiden mercantilism) needed more and introduce slavery, bondage, and wage slavery. Learn the difference between nobles and aristocrats.
So capitalism has a questionable beginning, as well as a working-class that is shat upon. But it also produces a very large amount of surplus, which the working class uses to produce children aplenty (and through vaccines and medicine more of them survive.) The elites are meaner, but the working class is more numerous and odious. A plague on both your houses. When seen what a dictatorship of the proletariat does. “Under capitalism, man kills man; in communism, it is the reverse.” JKG
Eric Anderson
“Property is just rights … “
Wrong.
And I’ve said on here before, multiple times, that this is a fundamental thinking error committed by virtually every human on the planet that doesn’t understand property law.
Repeat after after me, and BURN IT ON YOUR BRAIN:
There is no such thing as a “RIGHT” without an attendant “DUTY.”
“Property” is the assemblage of rights and duties, made law, that enable State sanctioned violence to compel obedience.
So now ask yourself, proceeding from the correct definition, whether or not it had to be this way. Then, ask yourself how we fix it and the answer should be obvious.
Eric Anderson
Furthermore, the fundamental failure of people to understand the relationship between rights and duties is the foundational reason democracy dies.
Build a nation that thinks they are all entitled to their rights without having to make good on their duties and see what happens.
You’re living it.
Eric Anderson
And finally, Ian has spoken on here in several different posts about how the elite are failing the world through their profiteering at the expense of those that work for them. That’s not an “economy” under any sane definition of the term. But we LET this situation exist because they have brainwashed us (propaganda through advertising) to think you have rights without duties, and therefore, that they have rights without duties as well.
Capitalism is a deal. We give the elite the “right” to accumulate fortunes that allow for production at scale. In return, they do their “duty” and ensure that productivity is invested in a manner that benefits the masses giving them the right to be rich. Therefore, one of our duties as citizens is to constantly ensure that they are doing their duty. And if not, we cut their f’king heads off.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled wasn’t convincing the world the devil doesn’t exist. We all know it does. It was convincing the world they had rights without duties. It is our duty to hold the devil to account and throw him from his lofty heavenly perch when he gets out of line.
Us. “Our” duty.
Benjamin
@Eric Anderson
>There is no such thing as a “RIGHT” without an attendant “DUTY.”
Says who? You?
Smitty
In my opinion, you are confusing industrialization with capitalism. Capitalism really started back in the late 1300\’s, as the black death / plague ended feudalism. That disease freed the serfs to seek a better wage from other lords. Industrialization started much later, and has used state legal power to guarantee profits for its owners, which is not capitalism, but rather something else: maybe cronyism?
someofparts
Whatever the verdict on capitalism or industrialization may be, it feels like we are transitioning to some new economic/cultural stage, whatever that is going to look like once the dust settles.
To the extent that regular folk have any input on the shape of the future and need a handy template for it, I would say just adopt the entire Green Party platform. Start by replacing the New Deal regulatory structure and then keep going.
Portents and omens:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/is-private-equity-having-its-minsky
If I’m understanding him, it sounds like Stoller is telling us the private equity crowd are about to get their clocks cleaned. I will be happy to see these guys busted and exiled but I also worry that their downfall will hurt me and mine financially in ways I’m too clueless to see yet.
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house
This is Amber Frost interviewing the spokesman for a teamsters local. It sounds like there is unheaval in the union and membership is using the turmoil to force needed changes in leadership.
Eric Anderson
Benjamin:
Says my J.D., my M.S. in Bioregional Planning and Community Design, and the opinion of every property lawyer in the world who isn’t a Federalist Society nitwit actively trying to undermine a centuries old definition.
That clear things up for you?
Ché Pasa
We should note that the various task forces charged with the Grand ReOpening Planning don’t include workers. It’s all CEOs and their Republicrat handmaidens. That should turn out well, don’t you think?
Eric Anderson
Benjamin:
Apologies. This topic gets me all het up.
A concrete example instead.
Let’s say you own property. You have rights such as kicking trespassers off. You also have duties, such as, not creating a nuisance that impact your neighbors. If you do create a nuisance the neighbor may very well take you to court and win a money judgment or an injunction against the nuisance. Should refuse to pay the neighbor, or continue the nuisance in the face of the judgment, the state will use violence to make you do so. Or, if the money judgment is big enough and you can’t pay? Well, then the neighbor will have the sheriff auction off your land to satisfy the judgment. Then where are your property rights? All because you refused to do your duty.
I can provide 100 different examples if you’d like me to.
Again, apologies for being a dick.
Ten Bears
As an outlaw, an outsider: outside the protection of “the law”, I’ve always been familiar with it as “no rights without responsibility”, akin to the perhaps canard, perhaps misattributed to Ben Franklin, perhaps out of Blackstone and the Magna Carta “rights end at the tip of those nose.” In essence “your ‘right’ to offend ends when you have offended me.”
(speaking as one of those that find ‘property’ offensive, very nice analysis Eric, thank you)
nihil obstet
Property “rights” aren’t so simple. Ever been involved with a homeowners’ association? It’s true that if you paint your house the wrong color or fail to keep your grass mowed, you may damage your next door neighbor’s property value. Are environmental restrictions “takings”? These and similar questions keep the courts pretty busy.
bruce wilder
It is certainly true that the otherwise landless peasants were not happy about being dispossessed of their interest in the commons. Nor were later generations of cottagers dependent on weaving happy about factories.
I cannot say I credit the sunny retrospective gaze upon the “freedom” of the serf from managerial supervision. The 12th century serf was not free and I cannot imagine that the economic dependence on the manorial mill or the manorial court or the demands of manorial corvee made for happy occasions.
The talk of aristocrats and nobles should not disguise the thoroughly thuggish nature of medieval feudalism. Sure, the earl and his knights provided little in the way of supervision or deliberate social cooperation; as a class their economic function was purely extractive. They earned nothing and went abroad on the tiny surplus they could extract in order to loot and pillage. It was an era of literal robber barons strangling commerce in the crib and life was frequently brutish and short, war frequent.
There were ups and downs thru the centuries for the peasants I suppose. The expansion of the High Middle Ages ended in famine and the Black Death. Henry V must have drawn from a well-fed strata the long-bow archers who won the field at Agincourt. The sheer number of “nobles” killed in the later War of the Roses, under a bastard feudalism clientalism, prepared the way for the early Tudors to both concentrate wealth in their own hands and disperse wealth to a new gentry. The brutal authoritarianism of Henry VIII should not be overlooked, nor the barbarity of legal punishments in common use.
The use of managerial supervision in the organization of the economy is a relatively recent development historically, a feature of an industrial capitalism that only emerged roughly in the 1880s, as the Second Industrial Revolution was just getting underway with its use of petroleum, electricity and science.
As a technical means, supervision in hierarchical control of production processes appears to work, in the sense of producing economies and efficiencies. Whether the inclination toward tyranny in common psychopathology does not result in petty and inefficient hierarchy is an open question: it is an arrangement in which fair bargains between top and bottom seem prejudiced against.
Benjamin
@Eric Anderson
Yes, that’s an example. But how are you defining rights here? Because to say *every* right has a duty seems a dubious dissertation.
Also I’m not one to be impressed by the flashing of credentials.
Eric Anderson
nihil obstet:
Please. You have a handy property lawyer here. Just, maybe ask?
Homeowners associations are creatures of contract law, not property law.
You sign a contract that tells you what your rights and duties are in return for the services the association provides through dues.
Come on people. Do better. You’re actively demonstrating my point for me.
Ten Bears: Thanks man 🙂
nihil obstet
@Eric Anderson
I take it that “Do better” means “Read my mind”. It’s amazing how doltish other people who don’t agree with me are!!!
A statement like “Property” is the assemblage of rights and duties, made law, that enable State sanctioned violence to compel obedience is a nice text bookish definition, but in practice, the makers of law can pretty much eliminate either the rights or the duties. And generally, the makers of law have eliminated most of the duties. Which duties ought to be incorporated into law is a matter of policy on which individuals will differ.
State sanctioned violence is also used to enforce contract law so while the distinction may be useful in organizing the legal code, it’s a difference without a difference in many situations where control of a good or service is the issue.