Dear Reader,
This blog-entry contains the fourth part
of my serialization, within this blog, of the E.A.g.’s [Equitist Advocacy
group's] “Way Forward” proposal,
entitled “Alternative
to the Totalitarian,
Humanocidal Self-Degeneration
of Capitalism -- Political-Economic Democracy”, with my own edits added to their text, for its
improvement [improvement, at least, to my way of thinking!].
In my opinion, this text is
too valuable to be treated as any kind of “sacred text”.
It needs to be “improved upon”, and circulated, «samizdat», worldwide, in such “improved” editions -- i.e.,
in as many versions as are seen as being needed, by every author who thinks
that [s]he can “improve” upon it [including this one].
This text is under the
Equitist Advocacy group’s “omni-copyright” umbrella [see item 6,
“Universal
Property”, in text at: http://www.equitist.org/Equitist/InternalAffairs/InternalAffairs.htm
],
so there are no “copyright violation” issues to hinder such circulation,
whether such an edition, “improved” or not, is attributed anonymously, or under
the name, or under a pseudonym, of the improving author, or under the name of
the Equitist Advocacy group itself [although, in that case, the fact of the
“improvement” of their original text by (an)other author(s) should be
explicitly noted, obviously].
Here are the links to the original version --
http://equitism.org/Equitism/Equitism-entry.htm
Regards,
Miguel
Part 4. of
8. --
Alternative to the
Totalitarian, Humanocidal Self-Degeneration
of Capitalism -- Political-Economic Democracy.
Envisioning the Transition
from Capital-Only-Equitarian to Generalized-Equitarian Social Relations of Social
Self-Reproduction.
We expect to observe, as well as to participate in — given
a protracted and appropriate, including «samizdat», preparation
of the majority social conscience — in the upcoming years, the emergence of a
majoritarian, popular movement for the 'Equitarian Reform' and 'economic-democratic extension' of
the "representative-democratic", '''political-democratic'''
constitutions of the nations of the capital-system's global market core.
We expect this movement to develop in response to the
accelerating '''political-economic immiseration'''
and degradation of those societies in the accelerating on-rush, by their ruling
classes, into the multi-genocidal, state-capitalist totalitarian destiny
engendered by the unresisted descendant-phase depredations of the
capitals-system.
The envisioned 'Equitarian
Reforms' are a 'constitutionalization'
and 'juridicalization', into social
law, of an immanent critique, or self-critique, of the
"capital-relation" — of capital – a critique both theoretical and
practical.
The institutional infrastructure of the ‘Externality Equity’«species» of ‘generalized equity’
is a scaled self-similarity structure, a 'synchronic meta-fractal', of
economic governance bodies, based in publicly-elected,
base-elected public directors, serving in the new,
constitutionally-mandated, '''second houses'''
of newly bi-cameral
boards of directors, or of local operating unit “management
committees”: the public
stakeholders’ «camera», or ‘externality-equities’ «camera», of that newly bi-cameral
governance.
Per this programme, these ‘‘‘second house’’’, ‘public boards of
directors’, or ‘boards of popularly-elected, public
directors’, are to be constitutionally required in
all local enterprises with sufficient externalities impact, in accordance with
a constitutionally-stipulated externalities-impact metric, and a threshold
stipulated in terms of that metric.
These new, public boards, would
co-manage, in continuous negotiation with the traditional, ‘internality-equities’ board,
and/or its local operating units’ “management committees”, or "executive
committees" delegates, the annual ‘externalities
budgets’/operating plans of each
such enterprise, or local operating unit, with constitutionally and
legislatively ceded co-authority to do so, ‘adjudicate-able’ via the
judiciary branch of social governance in cases of deadlock.
Arising therefrom — possibly, at first, as
extra-constitutional “NGOs”, prior to their full constitutional
institutionalization, as ‘endo-constitutional’ “GOs” — we anticipate the
accelerating emergence of local/municipal, state/provincial, regional,
national, continental, and, eventually, global, associations of public directors.
All levels of these associations of
public directors must be constitutionally-required to be base-elected,
so that it is not the members of a more local-scale association that elect the members of the
next-less-local-scale association, but, instead, the entire citizen base of
next-less-local-scale association.
That is, any hierarchy of electors
is to be avoided.
It must be the combined base of all of the more local associations addressed by a given next-scale association that elect the members of that next-scale association.
The function of these associations
is to coordinate externalities social management policy at ‘meta-enterprise’
-- or ‘meta-local-operating-unit -- levels.
We expect that these would increasingly constitute – at
first, «de facto», and, later, by sovereign, popular
institution and constitutional amendment, «de jure» — a
fourth, ‘econo-political’,
branch of
government, in sustained
‘quadruple-power’ with «aufheben»-conserved/-transformed
executive, legislative, and judicial branches, with checks-and-balances between every pair of these -- now four -- branches.
A key effect of the actions of these associations
would be a human-geographical ‘de-abstractification’ / ‘re-determination
/ -containment’ of abstract capital; an «aufheben»-conserving
/ -negating ‘‘‘real
subsumption’’’ of the capital-equity, or
‘internality-equity’,
relation, its markets, and its ‘‘‘market failures’’’, within the democratized relations of production of ‘the generalized-equity-relation’,
including all of the new socio-ontological classes of
‘non-internality-equity’ emergent from
their ‘externality-equity’
«arché».
The ‘Intra-Duality’ of the “Capital-Relation” and the Emergence therefrom of the Social-Relations-of-Production ‘Socio-Ontology’ of ‘Generalized Equity’: Some Conjectures Regarding ‘Equitism’.
An 'essence-ial' operation of
the «Kapitals»-system,
that it applies, externally, to its surrounding
pre-capitalist hinterland [as it converts that hinterland into new
socio-geographical increments to itself, to its own geographical domain], as it
does also internally, to its own already-converted
internal terrain, is one of expropriation — expropriation
of small-holder peasant producers on the land and of self-employed urban artisans,
etc., to form/expand the wage-labour class; expropriation
of smaller capitals by larger, expropriation of
surplus-labor and of surplus-value, etc.
«Kapital» is also,
'essence-ially', an operation of bursting-asunder all
barriers to the quanto-qualitative advance of human ‘societal
self-productivity’ [of the “social productive forces”,
cf. Marx].
As the «Kapital»-conversion
of the pre-capital hinterland nears completion, as the «Kapitals»-system
comes to surround the last remnants of the social-systemic ‘‘‘other’’’ that
once surrounded and confronted it, we move toward that moment in the history of
the «Kapitals»-system in which
that system will ‘‘‘surround’’’ and confront only itself
worldwide.
That approaching [extended] historical moment means that
the operations which that system hitherto applied to the predecessor social formations that ‘environmented’
it in the past – namely, the operations of expropriation
and of social-productivity-barrier-dissolution — will be applied to
the «Kapitals»-system itself, by
the «Kapitals»-system itself,
as its own only remaining human-social environment, in its final confrontation: in its confrontation with itself.
With regard to the expropriation operator,
this would mean an expropriation of the expropriation
[operation]
itself,
which operation is «Kapital», regarding
which Marx wrote as follows --
“What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into?”
“In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and
serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private
property based on the labour of its owner. …”
“as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its
own feet...the further expropriation
of private proprietors takes a new form.”
“That which is now to be expropriated is
no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many
labourers. This expropriation
is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of
capital.”
“One capitalist always kills many.”
“Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation
of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-increasing
scale, the cooperative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science,
the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments
of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of
all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined,
socialised labour [‘the objective
socialization of the means of production’ – Ed.], the
entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and, with this, the
international character of the capitalist régime. ...”
“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.”
“Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation
of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their
capitalist integument.”
“This integument is burst asunder.”
“The knell of capitalist private
property sounds.”
“The expropriators are expropriated.”
[Karl Marx; Capital (vol. I), Chapter XXXII, “Historical
Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”, International Publishers [NY: 1967], pp.
761-764; bold, italic, and underlined
emphasis added].
Marx foresaw, in the Grundrisse
manuscripts, that, in this ‘self-environment’ or ‘self-surroundment’ and ‘self-envelopment’ of the «Kapitals»-system, it would find in
its own nature a barrier
to the further development of the social '''self-forces''' of self-expanding societal self-[re-]production, and act upon itself accordingly,
unstoppably, whatever to the contrary its partisans and beneficiaries might
wish:
“...
capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and
the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within
well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life.”
“It is destructive of all this, and permanently
revolutionary, tearing down
all obstacles that impede the development of the productive
forces, the expansion of needs,
the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and
intellectual forces.”
“But because capital sets up any such boundary as a
limitation and is thus ideally over and
beyond it, it does not in any way follow that it has really surmounted it, and since any such limitation contradicts its
vocation, capitalist production moves in contradictions, which are constantly
overcome, only to be, again, constantly re-established [and, on an
ever-larger ‘qualo-fractal’ scale – Ed.].”
“Still more so.”
“The universality towards which it is perpetually driving
finds limitations in its own nature, which, at a certain stage of its development will make it
appear as itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, leading thus to its own self-destruction.”
[David McLellan; The Grundrisse, Karl Marx;
Harper & Row [NY: 1971], pp. 94-95].
Vastly more needs to be said about the historical dynamics
and ‘meta-dynamics’ of the «Kapitals»-system, and about the
mechanisms and ‘organisms’ of its ‘meta-finite self-conversion / self-bifurcation self-singularity’, as
especially about the immanent tendency of accumulating capital-value
to de-value
itself, and of the rate of capital value-accumulation to decelerate
itself, both as expressions of the growth of the society-re-productive forces
within capital.
However, the above-excerpted intimations must suffice for
the present purpose.
Averting, via Social[-Relations] Revolution, the Otherwise Pre-Destined ‘‘‘New Dark Age’’’ Denouement of
‘‘‘Descendant-Phase’’’ Capitalism: Towards a Strategy for Humanity.
The Fight for Human Liberty is Now a
Life-and-Death Struggle Against Descendant-Phase [State-]Capitalism – Against the
Unchecked Power of the Totalitarian,
‘‘‘Humanocidal’’’ [State-]Capitalist Plutocracy of the
Advanced-Decadent [State-]Capitalist Core of the World-Market System: the Core Plutocracy of the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. .
The «Kapitals»-systems
of national and global political economy have engendered liberal political
constitutions, with internal checks and balances limiting the abuse of
political power, which have, as a result, proven relatively so
successful at growing social productivity / ‘‘‘the social forces of production’’’,
that their economic and social success
is now rapidly turning into its opposite — catastrophic economic, political, social failure.
Their economies have, at length, outgrown the power of
their political constitutions, and of their exclusively political
checks and balances, to avert the
accumulation of unchecked
power, and the human-species-lethal abuse of that unchecked power, in the formation
of a pro-totalitarian capitalist plutocracy.
Their market competition, which initially provides
economic checks and balances limiting abuses in the pricing and quality of
goods and services -- and in customer service quality in general -- becomes,
and must become, successful competition.
Successful competition becomes,
and must become, the [partial] negation of competition, namely, monopoly [or
oligopolistic, etc., near-monopoly].
Thus, competition leads to and becomes its opposite,
monopoly and oligopoly.
The process of the competition of capitals thus leads to
the formation of agglomerations of capital so gargantuan that they can take
over the mass media of public communication, and buy-out the political system —
legislative, executive, and judicial; lock, stock, and barrel.
Thereby, the political-only checks
and balances among those branches of the public, political government are obviated and subverted.
The houses of legislature become
houses of prostitution.
The executive and judicial branches of political governance
are, over time, likewise bought-out and prostituted.
Increasingly, only those
candidates for public, political, elected office who sell themselves to the plutocracy can acquire the vast funding necessary to
buy access to the plutocracy-dominated mass media --
television, etc. -- sufficient to
achieve electoral victory.
Thus, successful
advanced capitalist democracies are characterized by a seemingly irresistible tendency
to plutocratic, totalitarian self-degeneration.
The horrific dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin, precisely
because they arose in nations whose capitalist development was in some ways retarded,
have provided a prevenient, disfigured prefigurement of the hellish future of
demise that humanity faces in the further, advanced-decadence development of this plutocratic, totalitarian, ‘‘‘humanocidal’’’ self-degeneration of
capitalism.
Only the addition of economic checks
and balances can overcome this economic, plutocratic
subversion of once-partially-effective but exclusively political
checks and balances.
Only the emergence of political-economic democracy,
of a democratically ‘politicized’ political economy, can check this tendency to plutocratic, totalitarian, ‘‘‘humanocidal’’’ political degeneration,
a degeneration which has arisen from the economy;
from the 'economic side'
of the political-economy; from the economy's production
of a hyper-concentrated-wealth plutocracy, hence of a prostitute-government,
prostituted most-abjectly to the economic
plutocracy.
The Capital Equity Stock Shares-Principles
of ‘Internality
Equity’ and the Capital-Governance
Norm of Stockholder
Democracy.
The share-principle, the capital-equity-principle,
the one-share-unit-of-capital-owned = one-vote-for-the-election-of-directors-to-the-board-of-directors
governance principle of stockholder
democracy immanent within the 'socio-ontological category' of
capital, is a principle of economic-democratic enfranchisement
for the owners of capital, but also a principle of total
economic dis-enfranchisement
for the non-owners of capital.
The ‘social equity’ principle of ‘Equitism’ outers the latent, immanent dual
of that capital-principle, a principle of enfranchisement also for the
non-owners of
capital.
It does so in the form of the moral recognition and juridical formation, initially, of a new class of property-equities, that of ‘externality-equities’,
in part via the “equity”
tradition of ‘precedentary’,
case-law jurisprudence, as well as from the generalized-equity-enabling
‘Equitarian’
constitutional amendments —
amendments to be proposed in detail under separate cover.
Thus, we hold, the ‘onto’
-- the ‘socio-ontological
category’, or ‘kind of
social thing category -- of Capital, will, in the
future, if humanity is to have a future, ‘self-bifurcate’ into the '~+~'-signified, antagonistic
“non-amalgamative sum” of extant
social ontology —
Capital-Equity ~+~ The Rest
of [Generalized] Equity:
. . .
Juridical ‘Meta-Genealogy’ of the Concept
of ‘Externality-Equity’ and the Generalization to ‘Stakeholder Democracy’.
The term ‘Externality Equity’ as
deployed herein denotes a form of non-stockholder
stakeholder
equity
which arises from principles extending those already extant and precedented in
the “equity” tradition of Anglo-American case law.
It arises, in particular, from the principle that the ownership of capital, however legitimately acquired, does not
convey to the owner the unlimited right to inflict harm and damage upon other
citizens, and upon society as a whole.
It arises also from the further principle that the best locus
in which to adjudicate and mitigate the externalities
generated by the operation of capitalist enterprises — the external
costs or costs imposed upon third-parties whose interests are not
represented in the traditional institutions of private capital governance — is
the locus of governance of the entities which conduct their origination: the very heart of capital governance itself.
External, governmental regulatory bureaucracies,
legislatively chartered and overseen, are subject to the plutocracy's bribery
of the legislatures, and to the “revolving door” bribes of later, lucrative
industry-employment offered to the regulating bureaucrats by the very industries
that those bureaucrats are supposed to “regulate”.
Lawsuits, brought before the judiciary, against the
personal and social damages inflicted by those industries, are generally too
delayed, and too costly, for the citizen litigants, typically members of the
absolutely-impoverished, or at least relatively-impoverished, producers class, who
face the ultra-deep-pockets of their plutocratic, mega-corporate, absolutely
and relatively hyper-well-funded adversaries.
Such exclusively litigious actions for redress are also
exposed to the gradual corruption of the judiciary, by the plutocracy's bribery
-- bribery that already increasingly controls the legislature and the executive
branches, which share the power to appoint the central judiciary.
On the other hand, nationalization of
industry, and state-monopoly of all capital, threatens to resurrect the unchecked,
absolute, absolutely-corrupt,
and soon-totalitarian dictatorship of Stalinist or Fascist
state-capitalist bureaucracies, and must therefore count as another non-solution,
and as, in reality, either an acceleration of, or a prevenient
attainment of, the very «telos» of the totalitarian, ‘‘‘humanocidal’’’ «taxis»
of advanced-decadent capital.
- The dictatorship of a
state-bureaucratic ruling class, whose grip on power and whose tenuous
ruling-class-collectivist economic de facto ‘ownership’ claim on
the means of production, and on the fruits of the surplus labor of the
producers, is political-only, and totally vulnerable to political
assault [unlike the case with a
ruling class of private
owners of capital], therefore tends to
totalitarianism as the only effective defense of its ruling
power. It does so because any
successful political challenge to such a ruling class
would mean its political replacement, and thus its total
loss of ruling power. If
deposed politically,
it is deposed totally.
Police-state political totalitarianism is
thus the "natural" form of political and
economic class self-defense for this kind of ruling class.
- The motive to multi-genocidal global totalitarianism of the capitalist plutocracy, formed in the core regions of
advanced-decadent private-capital, is quite other than the motive
described above. The latter motive
arises with the decision of that plutocracy to reverse the historical
growth of the human-social forces of production, as its only defense
against its overthrow by the ‘obsolescence
depreciation’ of its principal capital assets, and
by the formation of an educated, tendentially prosperous, and therefore “ungovernable”,
“middle class” of producers, of workers, which much-further growth of the
productive forces would bring. This
power-jeopardy of the advanced-decadent capitalist ruling class is
epitomized, in particular, by the prospect, for this petroleum/banking plutocracy, of the advent of controlled nuclear fusion
atomic power
as a superior and, thus, oil-obsolescing alternative to
its core power-asset in fossil-fuel-based molecular
power. It
is epitomized, in general, by the way that rising, global, “middle-class”
levels of workers’ living standards, health, education, and new,
entrepreneurial wealth threaten the overthrow of this plutocracy’s power to rule.
The Econo-Political
Institutional Infrastructure of the Initial Phase of ‘Externality-Equities’ ‘Equitism’.
The ‘Externality-Equities’ initial phase
of ‘Equitism’
envisions the constitutional-amendment provision, and partially courts- and
legislatures-regulated operation, of ‘bicameral’
boards of directors, and/or
of management committees, in
all capitalist enterprises of sufficient size and social impact, with
a ‘second house’ of
local-community-elected public
directors in all local operating units of such enterprises.
These ‘publics’ boards’ would have constitutionally- and legislatively-ceded authority
over the ‘externalities budgets’, the
‘quanto-qualitative’, externalities-production local annual operating
plans of these enterprises.
These publics’ boards would thus represent, at the very
heart of corporate governance, the ‘externality-equities’
owned collectively
-- in a collective property-rights,
public property-rights,
or social-property-rights application of the “Coase Theorem” -- by each such
local-community's citizens, as public stakeholders, in virtue of this, their new and special kind of [social]-property right.
The traditional board of directors and its delegates,
representing the ownership of ‘internality-equities’ by the traditional stockholders, would continue to
have authority over the dollar-/other-denominated, financial annual operating
plan.
Discrepancies between the two operating plans would have
to be negotiated between the two “houses” in accord with the constitutionally
and legislatively mandated rules for such negotiation, with constitutionally
and legislatively prescribed and regulated judicial review and/or arbitration
in the event of deadlock/negotiation-failure.
Any effort by the plutocracy to bribe the thousands of
grass-roots public directors elected in local communities all across the
landscape would face prohibitive costs and risks of exposure because of their
vast multiplicity.
Such massive bribery would be rendered more difficult also
by the base-level, the radically “town-hall”-, “grass-roots”-democracy-restorationist
character of the institution of ‘externality equities’.
That is, such bribery would be rendered more difficult by
the fact that the locally-resident citizens eligible to be elected as public
directors would be fighting to defend their families, their
homes, their local communities, and their very lives — e.g., from local
toxic pollution, lethal to the lives of their children and to those of their
other loved ones; produced, typically, by nearby capitalistic firms, or even
produced by nearby ‘stewardship-equity’
producers-cooperatives, those in which human
decency is outstripped by desire for monetary earnings [hopefully less
typically] — in a way and from a vantage which would be very non-abstract, very
direct and personal, compared to the vantage of the traditional long-distance,
or ‘‘‘absentee’’’, central government legislator.
In any case, attempts by the core plutocracy, and/or
by their subordinate capitalist-class elements — subordinate elements, hostage
to the core plutocracy, which we technically
and collectively term ‘the drooling greedies’ in our social-scientific
nomenclature — to buy-off the vast number of citizen-directors nationwide, and,
eventually, worldwide, would break the bribery budgets of even the
super-richest of the super-rich, as well as, by the repeated public exposure of
this bribery, expose that core plutocracy to the total delegitimation that
these so richly rotten-to-the-core rich so richly deserve!
