Monday, April 22, 2013

Part 4. of 8: Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

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 / -containmentof 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 expropriationexpropriation 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 equitytradition 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!























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