Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY Series, Episode 1, Draft Script
Episode 1: Series Overview.
An introductory episode has been recorded and posted to YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4mJHJO3bMw
[Introduction] The forthcoming series introduced here
presents a detailed proposal for the constitutional and legislative infrastructure
needed for a more just successor system to the present capitalist system. The successor
system that we propose is neither one of a “state-less”, anarchist-localist
model, nor any variant of the presently-prevalent “Big Government” state-capitalist
model. The central focus of this series is
the achievement of greater social justice.
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 and
sequentially, to the county, state, regional, and national scales, and,
eventually, to the international scale. All of these scales of implementation are to
be achieved by entirely lawful, legislative reform and constitutional amendment
means, not by any hyper-costly and failure-prone path of bloody, law-less,
violent revolution, which would also potentiate the new dictatorships to which that
path tends to lead: “Meet the new boss;
same as the old boss”.
We do not
claim, in any way, that what we propose, once implemented, would produce a
“perfection”, or a “heaven on Earth”.
Reality is imperfection.
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 legal infrastructure for this successor system, to
resuscitate the “checks and balances” and “countervailing powers” founded in
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 --
subverted by a hyper-concentration of wealth that can buy out, and that,
arguably, has bought out, all three branches of political government, and yoked
them all to a singular, dictatorial directorate.
The way to the
resuscitation of these political checks and balances, we hold, is by adding
new, grassroots-democratic, ‘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 people and the politics 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 electorates, “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 more observant of human rights, than
capitalism today is, than it ever was, and than it ever even could be.
For the sake
of clarity, we call this successor system-design by the names ‘Generalized
Equity’, and ‘Political-Economic Democracy’.
We call the social, political, economic, and legal process that
implements this successor system by the name ‘The Equitarian Reform-Revolution’.
This
“Reform” is a “revolution”, not in the sense of violence in the streets, but in
the sense that, if implemented, by the legally-expressed will of the majority,
it would change the fundamental socio-economic relationship of the majority of
individuals in our society, to their sources of livelihood.
It would
change their primary social relation from that of “capital-only
equity”. That exclusive
form of equity means, for a minority, the ownership, for example, of financial
shares in the assets, hence profits, of capitalist enterprises. For the majority, it means a primary social
relation of wage-labor, or of salaried labor, in enforced service to that
capital-equity, and to its profitability, without any share in that
profitability.
It would
change that primary social relation to that of ‘generalized
equity’. That means a system of
all-citizens, universal, inclusive equity properties and rights, by way
of instituting three new, additional forms of all-citizens equity.
It also means
not outlawing, but including -- and also containing the downsides
of -- the old kind of equity, capital equity; equity for capital-owners only.
The social
impetus that has led us to this design is part of a growing recognition of the
increasing failures of “actually-existing capitalism”. We will, in the course of this series, delve
deeply into the many dimensions of those growing failures of “actually existing
capitalism”.
These
failures include the imposition of ever more severe global recessions and
depressions, and the promulgation, by the capitalist ruling class, of a “people
are pollution” ideology that puts the majority of humanity in their
cross-hairs.
We will also
introduce you, perhaps for your first time, to the dynamical “law of motion” of
this actually-existing capitalism, the dynamic that unifies these many problematic
dimensions as their singular -- albeit difficult to discern -- root cause. We name this law ‘the law of the tendency of
the rate of reproduction of capital’. By
capital reproduction, we mean the continual production of, and
investment of past profits in, new, for example, fixed capital plant and
equipment, to replace the old fixed capital, that has been consumed in the process
of production, or that has become competitively, technologically obsolete. By the rate of that reproduction, we
mean the periodic ratio of that new capital value added to the old capital
value, already accumulated and demanding its equitable share of profits.
This series
will also introduce you to the concept of an ‘ascendence phase’ of the capitalist
system, followed by its ‘descendence phase’. The former, ‘ascendence phase’, is already
behind us in history past. The latter,
‘descendence phase’ is the phase that surrounds and permeates and dominates our
lives today. During the ‘ascendence
phase’, now passed, the tendency of that rate of reproduction of capital was to
rise. From the beginning of the
‘descendence phase’, which now engulfs us, the tendency of that rate of capital
reproduction is to fall.
In response,
the owners of concentrated capital, threatened, due to that waning rate of reproduction
of their capital, with the non-reproduction of their power, and, due to that
loss of power, threatened also with the loss of all of the “perks” of their
rule, thereby, of course, institute -- largely in a stealth mode -- extreme
measures, in an attempt to reverse that fall, unfortunately in ways which
threaten the livelihoods, and the very lives, of the majority class.
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, state-terrorist and totalitarian, genocidal, permanent-war,
“national security” dictatorship.
George
Orwell perceived this tendency with unsurpassed clarity. He warned
us about it in his famous novel, 1984. President Eisenhower, himself a former
General of the U.S. Army, also perceived this threat. He warned the people of the U.S., in his Presidential
Farewell Address, of the danger to democracy inherent in the emerging
“military-industrial complex”, his name for it.
Some
symptoms of this tendency to totalitarianism include a declining
investment in public education, and a “dumbing down” of what education remains,
an increase in punitive social control, such as escalating rates of
incarceration, and in police militarization and armed forces imperial
militarism, an increase in internet censorship of all forms of free expression,
an increase in the seemingly permanent military invasion of other nations, and
an increase in the electronic surveillance of all citizens’ communications and
financial transactions, without even the slightest pretence of probable cause justification.
In the
transition from feudalism and monarchy to capitalism, in the fight against the brutal
feudal “ancien régime”, and in the early history of capitalism -- during
capitalism’s ‘ascendence phase’ -- many capitalists fought heroically for
greater individual liberty.
They fought for
the expansion of suffrage, and, ultimately, for universal adult suffrage, for
freedom of speech, for freedom of the press, for the right of the people to
bear arms as a potential check against abuses of power by their government, for
freedom of religion and prohibition of the establishment of any religion
by the state, for the rule of law, as opposed to arbitrary rule by “aristocratic”
kings and cults of personality, for human rights such as the right of the
assembly of citizens to petition their government for redress of grievances, for
trial by juries of peers, for the right to privacy, and for the right to the
protection of liberty and property by due process of law.
But with the
turn into the ‘descendence phase’, the most powerful faction of the
ultra-wealthy capitalist ruling class seems to have turned against all of this,
and appears to be 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 the negation of competition -- to oligopoly
and monopoly. Extreme capital wealth ownership
concentrates increasingly, and into ever fewer hands.
And those
ever fewer hands may act to undermine the political checks and balances, that,
alone, when they function as intended, help mightily to protect democracy from degenerating
into tyranny.
But with
sufficient concentration of gargantuan capital monetary wealth, the ever fewer
owners of that wealth can “buy out” all three political branches of government,
in a “hostile takeover”, overriding the intended ‘inter-mutually’ restraining
and “countervailing” powers of those three political branches of political
government.
The houses
of legislature become houses for the rubber-stamp approval of the agendas of
the owners of that hyper-concentrated capital wealth.
The also-compromised
executive branch becomes an agency promoting the interests of those ever fewer,
and ever more dominant, capital owners, against the interests of the
majority.
The
judiciary branch becomes an enforcer of the interests of that same capital-controlling
hyper-minority.
The “free”
press, the media in general, also owned and controlled mainly by that oligarchy,
become agents of the propaganda, and of the “divide-and-conquer” ideologies,
engineered by that plutocratic “1%-of-the-1%”. These ideologies are designed to
psychologically impair and to disempower the majority class. Race, religion, and any other discernible
differences within the majority population become means for these media to
“balkanize” the population into ever smaller divisions, with mutual hatreds
cultivated by those media among them all.
This
hyper-concentration of capital equity wealth ownership, and this growth of
oligopoly and monopoly, contains the potential for the subversion of the
political checks and balances that preserve liberty.
However,
they do not fully explain, in our view, why the strongest faction of the
ultra-wealthy seems to have opted 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 desperate anti-democratic agenda as well. To do so, we will have to unearth much of the
hidden history of the late 19th century, and of the 20th century.
The three “Pillars”
of the successor system that this series will present -- each of which is to be
both a newly-recognized, fundamental, constitutional, human right, and also
a new kind of, constitutionally-protected, universal, all-citizens property
right, are named by us (1) ‘Citizens Externality Equity’, (2) ‘Citizens
Birthright Equity’, and (3) ‘Citizens 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 increasingly exposes us, but against which it offers us
no effective remedies.
SOME
EXPECTED QUESTIONS, AND OUR RESPONSES.
We
have stated, and responded to, key ‘FAQs’ we anticipate listeners and viewers
will want answered. We encourage you to
send your actual questions, if not covered by these FAQs, incivilities
excluded.
Expected Question: How would this new system
impact individuals?
Response:
An individual citizen of the majority class would no longer be just
“capital-fodder”, valued only for work that makes profit for capitalists, and
otherwise discarded. Each individual
would be a valued part of the community, with material proof of that valuing in
the form of a ‘Citizen Birthright Equity Social Trust Fund’, plus a right to
pursue a ‘Stewardship Equity’ alternative to a wage or salary relationship to
that citizen’s livelihood, and a voting right to limit the imposition of
externalities upon that citizen by capitalist or Stewardship enterprises.
Expected Question: How would this new
system impact business?
Response: Citizens would have an option to
pursue ‘collective self-employment’, and ‘collective
entrepreneurship’, via ‘Stewardship Equity’, as well as to pursue traditional
capitalist wage work and salaried work relationships with remaining capitalist
firms. The economic “checks and balances” of market competition would be
conserved and, in fact, expanded.
Competition among capitalist firms would be supplemented by competition
among ‘Stewardship Cooperatives’, as well as by competition between
‘Stewardship Cooperatives’ versus remaining capitalist firms.
Expected Question: What would be the
status of private property within this successor system?
Response:
Private property rights would be retained, not outlawed. They would also be supplemented, by new kinds
of property rights. These would include ‘collective
property rights’, such as ‘Externality Equity’ voting rights. These would also include new ‘personal
property rights’, such as the right to a ‘Birthright Equity Social Trust
Fund’. These would include ‘social
property rights’, such as the right to the stewardship and usufruct of the
means of production of a Socialized Producers’ Cooperative per the ‘Stewardship
Equity’ property right. And these would
include the ‘individual property right’ of a Steward of a ‘Stewardship
Cooperative’ to that Steward’s individual membership in the undergirding
‘Stewardship Collective’ of that cooperative.
Expected Question:
What is the extent of government reform that would have to occur to
institute this new system?
Response:
For the United States, the reforms would extend to several
constitutional amendments, plus the institution of an “intermediate” level of
law in the form of an enabling law ‘constitutional annex’. The latter would be
less difficult to amend than the Constitution, but more difficult to amend than
a Congressional statute. We will make
our drafts of these proposed enactments available to our readers and viewers in
the course of this series.
Expected Question:
What level of consensus would people have to achieve to make this new
system happen?
Response:
For the United States, the majority class would have to be convinced --
despite all of the plutocracy’s media opposition, and their engineering of
“divide-and-conquer” ideologies -- that “actually existing capitalism”
is failing, and that what we call ‘revolutionary reform’ is necessary, in the
form of the constitutional amendments and enabling legislations that constitute
‘The Equitarian Reform’.
Expected
Question: What organizations stand in the way of implementing
this new system?
Response: All of the
organizations that are the organs of the increasingly democracy-subverting,
plutocratic, dictatorial rule of the minority class of dominant
capitalists. These include some
organizations that are secret, and some that are public, including the major
mass media organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council on
Foreign Relations, the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the “Democrat”
Party, the traditional “Republican” Party, etc.
They also include large swaths of the “standing bureaucracy”, that
survives any national election, in the Federal Executive branch, and that
typically represent the growing proto-police-state infrastructure of “our”
government -- the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, various “Black Ops” organizations, and
the industries and lobbies which prosper off of the burgeoning “National
Security State” and “Military-Industrial Complex”, as well as
Pentagon-equipped, hyper-militarized local police forces.
SOLUTION –
‘Equitist
Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’;
BOOK:
MARX’S MISSING
BLUEPRINTS
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