New ‘‘‘Equitism’’’ Series -- SERIES OVERVIEW.
Dear Reader,
The forthcoming
series introduced here presents a detailed proposal for the constitutional and
legislative infrastructure needed for a higher successor system to the present
[state-]capitalist system. The system we propose is neither a “state-less”,
anarchist-localist model, nor a variant of the presently-prevalent “Big
Government” state-capitalism.
What we will
propose, in this series, is a system based upon grass-roots ‘political-ECONOMIC
DEMOCRACY’, extending the rule of law tradition. Its implementation is to be sought, in a scaling-up
fashion, starting on the municipal scale, and extending, ultimately, to the
county, state, regional, national, and international scales, all to be achieved
by entirely lawful, legislative and constitutional means, not by the
hyper-costly and failure-prone path of bloody, law-less, violent revolution,
and the new dictatorships to which that path tends to lead: “Meet the new boss; same as the old boss”.
Nor do we
claim, in any way, that what we propose, once implemented, would produce a
“perfection”, or a “heaven on Earth”.
Reality is imperfection. The
demand for -- unattainable -- “perfection” is naive, immature, an “infantile
disorder”. But we do hold that the
successor system we propose would produce a majority life far better than what
the majority suffers today. It
represents, we hold, the next step in the evolution of democracy, in the
evolution of human wealth, and in the evolution of collective human happiness.
We are
consciously seeking, in designing the infrastructure for this successor system,
to resuscitate, to restore, to continue, to update, and to extend the work of
the U.S. “founding fathers”, and
‘founding mothers’, especially regarding constitutional “checks and balances”
and “countervailing powers”, when they
crafted the Constitution of the United States. This design is, in particular, targeted to resuscitate
the subverted political checks-and-balances of the U.S. Constitution, by
means of adding new, ‘economic checks and balances’.
We are also,
thereby, consciously aiming to achieve a synthesis of the “divided and
conquered” left versus right conflict that has lately engulfed, and incapacitated,
the polities of the United States, of Western Europe, and beyond.
Our aim is
to present a constitutional and social design for a successor system that will
appeal to the majorities of these polities, right-leaning and left-leaning
alike, and that will ultimately prove far more satisfying to their instincts,
and to their social desires, than the traditional models that presently
paralyze both leanings.
This
successor system is designed to be more democratic, more respectful
of individual liberty, more in accord with the rule of law, more
observant of property rights, and of human rights, than capitalism today is,
than it ever was, and than it ever even could be.
We call this
successor system design by the names ‘Equitism’, ‘Generalized Equity’, and
‘Political-Economic Democracy’. We call
the social, political, economic, and legal process that implements ‘Equitism’
by the name ‘The Equitarian Reform/Revolution’.
The social
impetus that has led us to this design is our part of the widespread
recognition of the increasing failures of “actually-existing
[state-]capitalism”. We will, in the
course of this series, delve deeply into the many dimensions of the growing
problems of this “actually existing capitalism”.
We will also
introduce you, perhaps for your first time, to the dynamical “law of motion” of
this capitalism, that unifies these many problematic dimensions as their
singular, core, if difficult to discern, root cause. We name this law ‘the law of the tendency of
the rate of reproduction of capital’.
This series will
also introduce you to the notion of the ‘ascendence phase’ of capitalism,
followed by its ‘descendence phase’, the latter being the phase that both
surrounds and permeates and dominates our contemporary lives.
During the
‘ascendence phase’, now passed, the tendency of that rate of reproduction is to
rise. From the beginning of the
‘descendence phase’, which now engulfs us, the tendency of that rate of
reproduction is to fall.
A key aspect
of this ‘descendence phase’, and of its specific “law of motion”, is the
growing tendency of ‘descendence phase’ capitalism to drive toward
state-capitalist, police-state, totalitarian, omni-genocidal dictatorship. George Orwell perceived this tendency with
unsurpassed clarity, and warned us about it in his famous novel, 1984.
In the
transition from feudalism and monarchy to capitalism, in the fight against the
feudal “ancien régime”, and in the early history of capitalism -- during
capitalism’s ‘ascendence phase’ -- many capitalists fought heroically for
greater individual liberty: for the expansion of suffrage, toward universal
adult suffrage, for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, for the right of
the people to bear arms as a potential check against the abuse of power by the
government, for freedom of religion and the prohibition of the establishment of
any religion by the state, for the rule of law, for human rights such as that of
assembly to petition the state for redress of grievances, for trial by juries
of peers, for the right to privacy, and for the right to the protection of property
by due process of law.
But with the
turn into the ‘descendence phase’, a powerful faction of the ultra-wealthy
capitalist ruling class has turned against all of this, and is driving toward
dictatorship. We will, in this series,
trace back to the root cause of this turn, finding it in the “law of motion”
already mentioned.
This
tendency to totalitarianism is rooted partly in a corollary of that “law of
motion” -- in its subsumed law of capitalist competition. Competition leads, not primarily to the
reproduction of competition, but to oligopoly and monopoly. Extreme capital wealth ownership concentrates
increasingly, and into ever fewer hands.
And those ever fewer hands act to undermine the checks and balances,
that, alone, when they function as intended, help to protect democracy from degenerating
into tyranny.
With
sufficient concentration of gargantuan capital monetary wealth, the ever fewer
owners of that wealth can “buy out” all three political branches of government,
obviating their intended ‘inter-mutually’ restraining and “countervailing”
powers.
The houses
of legislature become houses of prostitution -- prostituted to the owners of
that hyper-concentrated wealth.
The
prostituted executive branch becomes an agency promoting the interests of those
ever fewer, and ever more dominant, owners, against the interests of the
majority.
The
judiciary branch becomes an enforcer of the interests of that
capital-controlling hyper-minority.
This
hyper-concentration of wealth ownership, and this growth of oligopoly and
monopoly, contains the potential for the subversion of the political
checks and balances that preserve liberty, but they do not fully explain, in
our view, why the strongest faction of the ultra-wealthy opts to use that
potential to actualize dictatorship.
While it is
true, in our view, that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely”, we think that this concentrated power of the uppermost capitalists
is not sufficient to explain what has happened, and what is happening now. We detect something more desperate in the über-ruling-class
reaction to their potential for near-absolute power. We will address, in this series, the root cause
of that anti-democratic agenda as well.
To do so, we will have to unearth much of the hidden history of the late
19th and 20th centuries.
The three “Pillars”
of the successor system that this series will present -- each of which is to be
both a newly recognized, constitutional, human right, and a new kind of, constitutionally-protected,
property right, are named by us (1) ‘Citizen Externality Equity’, (2) ‘Citizen
Birthright Equity’, and (3) ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’.
These new
constitutional rights, and their enabling institutions, are designed to advance
both the liberty and the prosperity of the vast majority of the population, and
to provide risk management to the individuals and families making up that
majority, against the “market failures” and the other mortal hazards to which
contemporary capitalism exposes us, but against which it offers us no effective
remedies.
In brief,
‘Citizen Externality Equity’ provides a constitutional rights-based defense
against what capitalist economists call pollution, etc., “externalities”,
in the locale of residence of each citizen, by a kind of grassroots-democratic,
‘economic suffrage’. It is designed to
expand the self-protection of each citizen, and of their families, against
pollution, e.g., by factories and plants that impact their families with health-destroying,
even potentially-lethal, pollution, but in a very direct way, and a way that
would be exhorbitant -- unaffordable -- to ruling-class bribery; a way which
skirts the failed capitalist methods of relying upon regulatory bureaucracies,
that are regularly “captured” -- prostituted -- by the firms that they were
created to regulate.
It also
skirts the increasingly failed approach of suing the polluting firms in federal
court, and fighting a usually losing battle against deep-pocketed mega-corporations,
and against an increasingly prostituted judiciary, appointed by an executive
branch increasingly “owned”, under the present system of “legalized bribery”,
by the lobbyists of those same corporations, with the “advice and consent” of a
Senate increasingly prostituted to same.
‘Citizen
Birthright Equity’, financed, primarily, from the proceeds of the other two
“Pillars of Equitism”, would make every child born, every new citizen, a “Trust
Fund Baby”, equipped with an absolutely portable personal “safety net”, regardless
of which “side of the tracks” that baby was born on.
Society
would self-invest in every new citizen, enough to give each child the
wherewithal for a socially supported decent start in life.
Likewise,
each citizen would have “skin in the game” -- would not be abandoned by their
society, to fend for themselves if they lack parental support, treated, in a
desperation-breeding and crime-breeding manner, as if the police, and society
at large, would rather that they die young -- very young -- or that they were
already dead!
And, they
would have something to lose should they turn to an anti-social life of
crime. If convicted of a crime, by a
jury of their peers, their ‘Birthright Equity’ trust fund would be liable for
the cost of jury-determined reparations to their victims.
‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’ is a kind of
‘Public Venture Capital’, that would enable capital-less workers to self-organize
as Citizen Stewardship Collectives, and receive the funds required to procure
the means of production, etc., in accord with their Business Plan, via a ‘Social
Bank’, itself also a kind of, democratically self-managed, Citizen Stewardship
Equity cooperative, if their Business Plan and By -Laws meet statutory
requirements, e.g., of internal democracy, including the ‘recallability’ of
elected managers, and if they convince a ‘Social Bank’ to risk its own solvency by
underwriting their Business Plan and By-Laws.
Thus
underwritten, the Stewardship Collective would become a Stewardship Cooperative. Each Steward member of that Cooperative would
enjoy two streams of monthly income -- an equal share in net operating surplus
of their Cooperative, and compensation for their time worked therein, in
proportion to the value of their skills, as determined by competitive Skills
Markets.
That
Cooperative would compete with remaining capitalist firms, and with other
Stewardship Cooperatives, in their chosen product/service market(s). Those remaining capitalist firms, however,
would have to compete for workers with Cooperatives in which the workers decide
how they are treated. If the Stewards in
a given Cooperative were too easy on themselves, and/or not good enough to
their customers, their Cooperative would likely fail, and be dissolved.
Each Citizen
Stewardship Equity Producers’ Cooperative would hold its means of production,
not in local ownership, but in Stewardship, as an in-kind loan to them by
society. Each Stewardship Cooperative would
therefore pay a monthly ‘Social Rent’ on those means of production, also encouraging
economy in the use of means of production, and helping to finance the ‘Citizen
Birthright Equity’ trust funds.
The detailed
exposition of the constitutional human rights, property rights, and enabling
social institutions designed to support these “Three Pillars” is the purpose of
this series, and future installments will be devoted to each of these “Pillars
of Equitism”, as well as to their interactions and to their unity as a new
socio-political-economic system.
Happy Anti-Colonial
Independence Day!
Miguel
Detonacciones,
Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.],
Participant, F.E.D.
Special Council for Public Liaison,
Officer, F.E.D.
Office of Public Liaison.
Please post your comments on this blog-entry below!
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian insights, please see --
For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ -- see:
