On Reparations, Albeit a Persistent Slavery

How do we demand reparations without out first demanding an end to the systems and conditions that perpetuate and sustain injury or better put slavery . Chattel slaves were the human capital that made capitalism and wage slaves are the human capital that sustains capitalism.

Abolition first, Reparations after we end slavery. This Representative Democracies Capitalism termed ‘Savage’ continues to ravage us with unconstitutional patterns, policies, practices and procedures doing us harm right now. American Decedents of Slaves remain excluded from the New Deal era constitutional entitlements that built the American Middle Class. We were excluded from the GI Bill, red lined and restricted from growth by the Federal Housing Administration.

Red lining continues today with less transparency with the passing of the Bank Lobbyist Act of 2018. The Drug War on Blacks persist along side Prison Chattel Slavery, along with the help of the Mainstream Media Demonetization of black folk and the manufacture of crimes without victims.

Reparations for what we are going through, have gone through or having to go through, or was forced to go through generationally and ancestrally? It all starts to resembles the paying of restitution while committing an injures act with the hopes of sustainability. My more UN-optimistic thoughts are that of perpetual slavery and genocide are now garnishing a wage.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) explains the history of banks discriminating against minorities, and how that will be become much easier if the Senate passes The Banking Lobbyist act, in which passed in Mar. 2018.

Tahirah Akila

Published on Jan 9, 2019

Before you buy a home from a lender, make sure they still report all HMDA data including Race, Income, Credit Score, Interest Rate and Loan Amount. Also, research your state for prior Redling and ensure you are not being taken advantage of. This public data (HMDA data) is important because they help show whether lenders are serving the housing needs of their communities; they give public officials information that helps them make decisions and policies; and they shed light on lending patterns that could be discriminatory. Racial profiling on mortgage loans has been and is currently happening. Racial profiling is crime within itself and it’s a form of segregation when considering the act of redlining.

Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations

Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist

10 Apr 2019

 

 

Reparations should not be a topic for national discussion until there is something akin to a consensus among black people about what to demand and how to do it. The justness of the cause isn’t complicated but the how and the why certainly are.

We have already seen politicians like former congressman John Conyers propose legislation to study reparationsuntil he was a committee chairman in the majority and had the power to move it. As often happens with Democrats he did nothing when he had the chance to back up what he claimed to want.

Now is the time for serious study among serious people and the wheel does not have to be reinvented. N’COBRA has already delved into the matter and declared that “reparations means full repair.” It is unlikely that those words mean anything to a scoundrel like Al Sharpton. He and his ilk must  stay out unless or until they are invited to have a seat at the table.

Continue to read great article: https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-scoundrels-and-reparations

Capitalism reformed from whips and chains to participate or starve coercion is supposed to be a kinder gentler slavery 2.0? “

Capitalism needs economic coercion for its job market to function” (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: OCAP)

https://theabolitionary.ca/2018/05/25/capitalism-needs-economic-coercion-for-its-job-market-to-function-ontario-coalition-against-poverty-ocap/ via @wordpressdotcom

The Color of Law – Richard Rothstein Interview – Tonetalks

 Tonetalks Published on Dec 20, 2018

Attorney Antonio Moore talks with UC Berkely Professor and author of the book “Color of Law The Forgotton History Of How Our Government Segregated America” on his book, race, and reparations. Moore ask Rothstein to analyze the Cosby Show in light of his book’s findings on FHA redlining. Support at http://www.patreon.com/tonetalks

The Roadmap to Reparations Explained by #ADOS — ADOS101.com

Antonio Moore  Apr 8

 

All too often we forget what slavery was as an institution. Slavery, it must be understood, served as the foundational pillar of American free market capitalism and was essential in shaping our core beliefs and attitudes about that economic system. It was one man using governmental legal advantage 

 

 

In recent weeks as Democratic candidates have announced their bid for the Presidential nomination of the party, the national discussion is shifting from the U.S.-Mexico border and DACA to a reckoning with America’s original sin: chattel slavery.

Senator Warren is suggesting she would include Native Americans in a reparations package, and Senator Bernie Sanders has put forth a stance that is tantamount to being against reparations altogether. A major driver for this discussion has been the online movement #ADOS, or American Descendants Of Slavery, which was founded by myself and Yvette Carnell.

Our movement aims to make U.S. descendants of slavery whole by foregrounding the necessity of recompense for the wide-ranging damages done to black America throughout our nation’s history. A justice claim beginning with slavery, and encompassing the legacy of disadvantage which reaches right up to the present.

Informative article continue to read: https://medium.com/@antoniomoore/the-roadmap-to-reparations-explained-by-ados-3577db752213

ADOS Shrinks Reparationist Politics to Fit the Cramped Horizon of Tribalism

Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor 15 Mar 2019

“ADOS followers throw away the internationalism of their forbears, embracing instead a sometimes polite, but always frank hostility toward immigrants of all nations on the grounds that they’re either economic competition for native-born blacks…”

Why can’t y’all just decide to be what you already are – more like us – a white co-worker named Travis asked me in the early 1980s. He was a diehard Southern Baptist, Reagan was the newly elected president, and we were working at the Chicago Pullman plant, laying on our sides all day or night, whatever shift it was, routing ducts and cabling in the tiny equipment rooms beneath Amtrak cars, talking politics and history. I’d just brought up the war in Vietnam, in which the US killed 3 million Vietnamese alone, and the murderous wars in Central America which were happening as we spoke. I probably threw in some references to the ongoing wars for liberation in southern Africa as well where the US was backing, financing and arming the wrong side as usual.

But you were born here, Travis insisted. Your parents and grandparents were born here, not over there. You’re an American, just like me. What are those people to you?

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ados-shrinks-reparations-politics-fit-narrow-horizon-tribalism\

 

A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America

https://www.npr.org/player/embed/526655831/526764151

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. We’re going to talk about how continuing racial inequality in America is in part a result of 20th-century policies that mandated housing segregation, including in the North. My guest Richard Rothstein is the author of the new book “The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America.” He writes about federal, state and local policies that help explain why new suburbs were predominantly white while housing projects became predominantly black and so many neighborhoods became – and remain – segregated. He also writes about how this mandated segregation has contributed to inequality in education, employment and income. Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Reparations Means Global Social  Transformation 

Glen Ford, BAR executive editor

21 Mar 2019

 

Reparations is not a token gesture of concern, apology or even solidarity; it seeks justice and redress of wrongs through the transformation of a people’s condition.

“An all-Black reparations debate is overdue.”

The Democratic presidential race has erupted in incomprehensible babble on reparations. Bernie Sanders says he’s not sure what people mean by the word. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker , the two Black U.S. senators, cynically put forward programs that bear no resemblance to reparations while claiming to be supporters. And Oprah favorite Marianne Williamson’s $100 billion reparations scheme is far too stingy  to “repair” 40 million descendants of slaves.

“A $100 billion reparations scheme is far too stingy to ‘repair’ 40 million descendants of slaves.”

It is no wonder that Democratic office-seekers feel free to conjure up their own versions of reparations, to arbitrarily endorse or reject. Although the general concept of reparations for slavery and its ongoing legacy of racial oppression is broadly endorsed by Black America, there has been no Black-wide debate on the issue. Until that happens, there can be no DEMAND put forward that is imbued with the authority of the wronged community — and power accedes only to demands. Therefore, at present, there is no such thing as a Black people-endorsed reparations program, to be supported or rejected by candidates during the upcoming electoral season. Reparations is not a token gesture of concern, apology or even solidarity; it seeks justice and redress of wrongs through the transformation of a people’s condition. Black folks need to study on that, and take all the time that is necessary to produce a coherent set of demands. Of necessity, this community-wide debate must be a deep and broad discussion of the current state of the Black political economy, and our people’s visions for the future.

“There has been no Black-wide debate on reparations.”

Clearly, an all-Black reparations debate is overdue when corporate servants like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker can masquerade as reparationists while campaigning on non-Black-specific programs like $500 per month income supplements (Harris’ tax credit  for all households making less than $100,000 a year) or “baby bonds” for all newborns (Booker’s scheme to narrow the racial wealth gap  by giving children yearly savings bonds, with larger amounts going to poorer kids up to age 18.) These proposals may or may not have merit, but they are not reparations and could only be pitched as such in an environment of abject political ignorance.

The starting signal for the Great Black Reparations Debate has already sounded, with 29 House members co-sponsoring John Conyers H.R. 40 reparations study bill , first introduced in 1989, later revised and improved and now sponsored by Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee. Less than half of the Black Caucus in the House has signed on to H.R. 40, and the actual reparations positions of even the signatories – including Jackson-Lee — are largely unknown. But that’s alright; the bill  provides only “to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.” The Black community-wide debate on Reparations and Black Futures must begin long before H.R. 40 passes in some future session of Congress, and will inform the study, itself.

“The debate must be a deep and broad discussion of the current state of the Black political economy, and our people’s visions for the future.”

Does Color of Law Book tell the Truth on Redlining? – Rothstein Solutions Critique

 Tonetalks Published on Dec 30, 2018

Attorney Antonio Moore talks with award winning urban planner Joshua Poe about his redlining finding, and his view of the book Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

 

“There is nothing parochial or provincial about the project to repair four centuries of Euro-American crimes and savagery.”

Most veterans of the reparations movement are internationalists, not narrow racialists or Black American chauvinists. They have played key historical roles in the liberation of all previously colonized and enslaved peoples. There is nothing parochial or provincial about the project to repair four centuries of Euro-American crimes and savagery, in the process of which capitalism was built and brought to its imperial zenith. 

In the most profound sense, reparations means total global social transformation – and you can’t buy that with Marianne Williamson’s $100 billion scheme, or Booker’s baby bonds, or Harris’ $500 a month stipends, or even with trillions of dollars. Real redress can only come when the system that cannibalized tens of millions of Black bodies and underdeveloped most of the world for the benefit of the Lords of Capital, is demolished root and branch and just settlements made among the people’s of the Earth.

We may have come here on a slave ship, but we’re not going down with this Titanic in imperialist decline.

Read the article the excerpts don’t do it justice.

https://blackagendareport.com/reparations-means-global-social-transformation

 

How African American WWII Veterans Were Scorned By the G.I. Bill

Who Controls You? Name the State of Mind

In every instance, regular ordinary people should be empowered to cooperate among themselves to bring about or create the change they need through voluntary democratic association, rather then allowing and even expecting governmental violence, force, coercion, or the carrot and stick penal approach of the state as remedy.

‘Anyone is a slave if obsessed with fulfilling an image or expectations of the irrelevant rather than cultivating the God force divinely planted within their souls. Slave mentality is defined by what you fear. Master’s mentality is just as easily identified by what you dare.” – CIRCLE CITY CONNECTION by Vernon A. Williams

Who Controls You?

  minivanjack 

Published on Apr 10, 2019

Inspirationally triggered by an article by Jeffrey A. Tucker, Jerry Day hits on some key ways we choose freedom or slavery for ourselves and society. Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director of the American Institute for Economic Research. The article by Tucker referred to in this video is posted at: https://www.aier.org/article/name-state This video is presented by FreedomTaker.com

Name the State

By Jeffrey A. Tucker Thursday, April 4, 2019 Economic Education

The number one problem of all public debate about politics and economics is the failure to name the state. If this would change, so would public opinion.

There is no shortage of examples. People talk about health care for all, solving climate change, providing security in old age, universal educational access, boosting wages, ending discrimination, and you can add to the list without end.

That’s one side.

The other speaks of national identity, protecting jobs, making us more moral, forming cultural cohesion, providing security against the foreign enemy, and so on.

Obfuscation

All of this, no matter how fancy the language, is obfuscation. What all of this really means is: put the state in charge. What’s strange is the unwillingness to say it outright. This is for a reason. The plans the politicians have for our lives would come across as far less compelling if they admitted the following brutal truth.

There really are only two ways to allocate goods and services in society: the markets (which rely on individual choice) and the state (which runs on compulsion). No one has ever found a third way. You can mix the two — some markets and some state-run operations — but there always is and always will be a toggling between the two. If you replace markets, the result will be more force via the state, which means bureaucratic administration and rule by force. If you reduce the role of the state, you rely more on markets. This is the logic of political choice, and there is no escaping it.

The above paragraph is the great truth of political economy. I’ve never seen any evidence to dispute it. And yet it is the great unsayable truth. Seasons of political rhetoric fly by with no frank discussion of what precisely this or that proposal would require of the state and how that will affect our lives, much less a serious analysis of the risks of making a problem worse by replacing market forces.

Great article continue reading >> https://www.aier.org/article/name-state

There is no escape: You are either SLAVE or MASTER mindset in this society

By

crusader – May 12, 2016

By Vernon A. Williams, Gary Crusader

It just donned on me this week. There are only two kinds of mentalities in American society, maybe even the world—SLAVE and MASTER. That’s it.

And the revelation is that it has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with race. It has nothing to do with education. It has nothing to do with social status. Those things don’t even matter.

It’s so simple that it’s ridiculous. Anyone enslaved by word, thought or deed has – by definition – a slave mentality. Anyone who has the capacity to face his or her demons unafraid, knowing that pain precedes victory, and does it anyway—embodies the master state of mind.

Let me illustrate my point.

Donald Trump, the billionaire who would be president, is enslaved. Think about how he has flip-flopped on issues. Think about people he has poured money into in the past that he now feels compelled to vilify in fulfillment of the marching orders of his puppeteers. He is no more than a caricature of the bigot mindset – a figment of hatred’s imagination – the quintessential slave concept.

Keeping it in politics, Richard Gordon Hatcher exemplifies the master mindset. He came to Gary and fought both the white-dominated Gary/Lake County machine and self-hating Negroes – intent on staying in their place – to maintain City Hall in Gary for two decades. During that time, he constantly rejected selling for “jobs” in Washington D.C., instead opting for self-determination.

Let’s bring this conversation out of the political realm into everyday life.

Anyone is a slave if obsessed with fulfilling an image or expectations of the irrelevant rather than cultivating the God force divinely planted within their souls. Slave mentality is defined by what you fear. Master’s mentality is just as easily identified by what you dare.

Continue reading CIRCLE CITY CONNECTION by Vernon A. Williams

Economic Democracy as One of many Solutions

• New Systems: Possibilities and Proposals

Democracy & Governance Democratic Ownership

This paper by David Schweickart, published alongside three others, is one of many proposals for a systemic alternative we have published or will be publishing here at the Next System Project. You can read it below, or download the PDF. We have commissioned these papers in order to facilitate an informed and comprehensive discussion of “new systems,” and as part of this effort we have also created a comparative framework which provides a basis for evaluating system proposals according to a common set of criteria.

What is Economic Democracy?

A brief elaboration of each of these key institutions:

Overview and basic model

The big challenges that capitalism now faces in the contemporary world include issues of inequality (especially that of grinding poverty in a world of unprecedented prosperity) and of “public goods” (that is, goods people share together, like the environment). The solution to these problems will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy.

So wrote Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen, sixteen years ago. Needless to say the intervening years have only strengthened his thesis—inequality and environmental degradation have gotten much worse and grinding poverty persists. But does there exist a viable alternative that might take us beyond the capitalist market economy, a new system that would preserve the strengths of competitive capitalism while at the same time eliminating, or at least mitigating, its worst features?

It is important to be clear and unequivocal: the answer is “Yes.” And it is simple enough to state. What we need to do is extend democracy to the economy itself. To formulate the project in terms of slogans, we need to

• Democratize labor!
• Democratize capital!
• Democratize democracy!

Check it out,, Economic Democracy: As a Solution.

Sharing Economy Accepting Donations Only: Truth As It Changes Donation Box PayPal.Me link

 

 

Criminal Justice Reform or Incremental Fascist Repression?

Police Accountability and Transparency as a reform?

Instead of the obvious problem with all, legal and illegal Organized Criminal Institutions and operations.

The “New” Criminal Justice System: State Repression from 1968 to 2001

By Parenti, Christian

“The new criminal justice system has every thing to do with the needs of capital and the ideology of white supremacy. More specifically, this repression is about two things: creating political obedience and regulating the price of labor. That is what the repression of the capitalist state has always been about, from the enclosures and the Atlantic slave trade, to the many bloody wars against organized labor, to the militarized ghetto of 2001. Capitalism was born of state violence and repression will always be part of its genetic code.”

The “New” Criminal Justice System: State Repression from 1968 to 2001

Article excerpt

Consider again the numbers: in the last twenty years the Justice Department’s budget grew by 900 percent; over 60 percent of all prisoners are in for non-violent drug crimes; an estimated one-in-three black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some type of criminal justice control or sought on a warrant; nationwide some 6.5 million people are in prison, on parole or probation. From the left it is clear that the United States is an over-policed, surveillance society that uses prison as one of its central social institutions.

But how are we to understand this? A common explanation, that spans the spectrum from the radical activists to the mainstream scriveners at the Wall Street Journal, portrays the prison boom as driven by direct and specific economic interests. For example we hear much about private prisons or prison labor. This economistic analysis is attractively simple, all one has to do is connect the dots: bad corporation here, human rights violations there. Unfortunately explaining prison in “anti-corporate” or other directly economic terms requires ignoring the facts. Private prisons are in crisis and losing money, prison labor is not profitable nor widespread, and most guards are not well organized or pushing their agenda on legislators. Nor do prison architects and medical providers, for the most part, mount huge lobbying operations that can be said to control policy. In short, prison is not profitable. [1]

Does this mean prison growth is simply irrational, with no coherent causal link to class exploitation and racism? Hardly. The new criminal justice system has every thing to do with the needs of capital and the ideology of white supremacy. More specifically, this repression is about two things: creating political obedience and regulating the price of labor. That is what the repression of the capitalist state has always been about, from the enclosures and the Atlantic slave trade, to the many bloody wars against organized labor, to the militarized ghetto of 2001. Capitalism was born of state violence and repression will always be part of its genetic code.

To understand the wider political effects of state violence it’s worth contemplating the opposite: state assistance for poor and working people. As Frances Fox-Piven and Richard Cloward wrote in the New Class War “the connection between the income-maintenance programs, the labor market and profits is indirect, but not complicated.” Too much social democracy, and people stop being grateful for poorly paid, dangerous work. So too with the converse, the link between state repression and labor markets and profits is indirect but not complicated. Repression manages poverty. Poverty depresses wages. Low wages increase the rate of exploitation and that creates surplus value, which is what it is all about… at least at one level.

This dynamic works at a macro-scale upon the society and economy as a whole. Policing and incarceration–directly profitable or more likely not–are thus part of a larger circuitry of social control. Incarceration is the motherboard but other components include county jails, INS detention centers, the militarized border, psych wards, halfway houses, hospital emergency rooms, homeless shelters, skid row, and the ghetto. All of these locations share populations and all serve to contain and manage the social impacts of poverty. But what is the specific history of the current crackdown and how does the central question of class struggle shape the story of the new criminal justice system? Answering that question requires a trip back to the late 1960s, because the current build up started then, plateaued briefly in the late seventies, and then began a second phase in the early 1980s, which has carried on into the present.

In The Beginning There Were Riots…

During one of the mid-sixties “civil disturbances,” an intrepid reporter, wanting to know why black people were looting, burning stores, and fighting cops, asked a young rioter: “What do you want? …

https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-77150227/the-new-criminal-justice-system-state-repression

Present day Context

As with all Organized Criminal Operations, No Accountability or Transparency is fostered by Illegal Fascist government institutions and operations. They offer that you should just trust them, while crimes are manufactured without victims around and criminalizing you.

State Lawmakers Press for Reforms Aimed at Police Accountability, Transparency

Democrats who sponsor those bills said Tuesday they expect members of both the state Assembly and Senate to begin discussions on the legislation in the coming weeks after having little movement on the measures during the first three months of this year’s legislative session.

By Dan M. Clark | April 09, 2019 at 05:19 PM

Lawmakers and advocates rally in Albany for a set of reforms related to information on law enforcement. Photlo: Dan M. Clark

New York state lawmakers are pushing for a new set of reforms they argue will provide more accountability over members of law enforcement by making the personnel records of those officers available to the public and tracking data on arrest and criminal patterns across the state.

https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2019/04/09/state-lawmakers-press-for-reforms-aimed-at-police-accountability-transparency/

3/31/19

The Perils of Criminal Justice Reform

News at Home
tags: reform, prisons, criminal justice system, advocacy
by Tony Platt

Tony Platt is a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society, University of California, Berkeley.  His most recent book is Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime & Punishment in the United States, published by St. Martin’s Press (January 2019).

Living facilities in California State Prison (July 19, 2006)

“When government officials and their allies call themselves reformers, it’s time to look out, and to look deeply and carefully at what is being proposed. Most government-sponsored reforms of criminal justice operations manage and rearrange existing institutions of power.

Not all reforms are manipulative and repressive. There is also a tradition of progressive grassroots reforms that try to make a difference in and empower people’s everyday lives. But these efforts to accomplish structural reforms typically are undermined in practice. Why have there been more failures than successes, and what is needed to reverse this sorry record? ”

I started working on Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States during the Obama presidency. I wanted to understand and hopefully explain why no substantial reforms of the carceral state occurred in the second decade of the 21st century, despite militant street protests against police killings and widespread consensus among liberals and libertarians that something needed to be done about the country’s unprecedented rate of imprisonment.

 

Reform is one of the most overused, misused, and Orwellian terms in the English language. “I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation,” wrote Charles Dickens in 1842 after he witnessed a Pennsylvania prison’s system of silent solitary confinement. But its outcome, he observed, was to subject prisoners to “torturing anxieties and horrible despair” that left them “dead to everything.”

 

This combination of benevolent rhetoric and punitive measures is a persistent theme in American criminal justice history. During World War I, for example, the federal Comission on Training Camp Activities claimed to be acting in the interest of “delinquent women and girls” by rounding up and detaining without trial some 30,000 of them suspected of spreading venereal diseases and perversion, while the men received health care and wholesome entertainment.

 

When government officials and their allies call themselves reformers, it’s time to look out, and to look deeply and carefully at what is being proposed. Most government-sponsored reforms of criminal justice operations manage and rearrange existing institutions of power.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171611

Nth Degree Destruction Agorism: Blockchain Technology

How Blockchain Technology Reduces Wall Street Risk & the Fallacy of Too Big To Fail!

If the root of our economic problem is the tendency toward centralized, globalist bureaucracies (like the EU and the WTO and the IMF and the World Bank) why does anyone believe the solution will be centralized, globalist bureaucracies (like the BRICS Bank and the EEU and the AIIB)? Today we look at a truly paradigm-shattering civilization-wide change taking place right now that has the potential to undermine the status quo: the peer-to-peer economy.

Solutions: The Peer-to-Peer Econom

Counter-economics: THIS is what a REAL revolution looks like

Many people have their own theory about the way the world should work, but few combine it with action. Today on The Corbett Report we explore the writings of Samuel Konkin, and how his central idea, agorism, combines the theory and practice of freedom through counter-economic action. Agora! Anarchy! Action!

corbettreport

Solutions: Agorism Counter-economics:

Perpetual Theft

WHAT IS PROPERTY? OR, AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRINCIPLE OF RIGHT AND OF GOVERNMENT.

By P. J. Proudhon

If I were asked to answer the following question: WHAT IS SLAVERY? and I should answer in one word, IT IS MURDER, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: WHAT IS PROPERTY! may I not likewise answer, IT IS ROBBERY, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first? WHAT IS PROPERTY? PROPERTY ROBBERY.

https://kevskewl.com/2019/04/06/what-is-property-property-robbery/ via @kevskewl

• Truth As It Changes DonationBox PayPal.Me link

•  

The Five Markets, Do No Harm !

The Fed, openly printing money out of thin air is theft of the value of our labor. It’s literally a confidence game. Stock buy backs are only possible with free and very cheap money from the banks. Imagine buying up your own product.

It’s obviously socialism already for the affluent and their corporate model. Government without a duty to protect or even the pretense of purposeful, for and by the people governance is called violence, theft by force.

Here are the 5 markets, have at it while doing no harm, or nothing changes. #Bitcoin #Blockchain #Silver #Gold

Solutions: Agorism Counter-economics

Published on Oct 19, 2015 – corbettreport

Agorism is a revolutionary political philosophy that advocates the goal of bringing about a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics. Counter-economics is the sum of all non-aggressive human action which is forbidden by the state.

Put The Corrupted Middleman Out on His Ass

Solutions: The Peer-to-Peer Econom

How Blockchain Technology Reduces Wall Street Risk & the Fallacy of Too Big To Fail!

“If the root of our economic problem is the tendency toward centralized, globalist bureaucracies (like the EU and the WTO and the IMF and the World Bank) why does anyone believe the solution will be centralized, globalist bureaucracies (like the BRICS Bank and the EEU and the AIIB)? Today we look at a truly paradigm-shattering civilization-wide change taking place right now that has the potential to undermine the status quo: the peer-to-peer economy.” corbittreport

1. What is P2P?

2. Calendar Reform

   Truth As It Changes DonationBox PayPal.Me link

   

Perpetual Theft

Why Property Is Theft and Why It Matters

In undertaking this explanation, it is perhaps helpful to let the reader (and apparently Sumner) in on the fact that the phrase “property is theft” comes from P.J. Proudhon’s magnum opus What Is Property? I’d love to take credit for such a pithy and correct turn of phrase, but alas I cannot.

Simplified Version of Proudhon’s Argument

In Proudhon’s period, the animating assumption of essentially all works on property was that God created the earth and gave it to mankind in common to use. This was the long-standing Christian view, which was notably reflected in Thomist thought and even received a ringing endorsement from John Locke. The Christianist idea of the common ownership of all of the earth is Proudhon’s starting point.

From there, a question arises: if God initially gave the entire earth to mankind to own in common, then how can you ever have individual property? Or, to borrow a line from Locke, since the earth is given to mankind in common, “it seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing.” The correct answer to this question, reached by Proudhon but not Locke, is that the only way to move from universal common ownership to individual private ownership is through theft. When an individual appropriates pieces of the earth (e.g. land) out of the commons and into private ownership, that individual steals from everyone else. Everyone else’s ownership share in that piece of the earth is taken from them, violently and without their consent.

Why Property Is Theft and Why It Matters

The Importance of Property Being Theft

The reason I bring up the fact that property is theft is because most actually-existing libertarian arguments are premised upon the idea that so-called laissez-faire capitalism is somehow voluntary and liberty-respecting. It is, of course, neither. The institutions that make up laissez-faire capitalism, the institution of private property especially, are imposed involuntarily on populations whether they want them or not. And to the extent that such involuntary impositions are enforced by violently attacking other human beings when they don’t comply, they are liberty-infringing.

This is not a novel point of course. Robert Nozick, an exception in the libertarian sphere, was very explicit about recognizing that the appropriation of property is liberty-destroying. He justifies such brutal attacks on human liberty with his paternalistic non-worsening proviso (that incidentally entails Rawlsian egalitarianism), but we can leave the particulars of that aside here.

Although it’s not novel, raising the point kills the voluntarist (and dare I say libertarian) justification for “libertarian” institutions. This then forces any such institutions to be justified on other grounds. And there aren’t any.

https://www.demos.org/…/why-property-theft-and-why-it-matte…

WHAT IS PROPERTY? OR, AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRINCIPLE OF RIGHT AND OF GOVERNMENT.

By P. J. Proudhon

If I were asked to answer the following question: WHAT IS SLAVERY? and I should answer in one word, IT IS MURDER, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: WHAT IS PROPERTY! may I not likewise answer, IT IS ROBBERY, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first? WHAT IS PROPERTY? PROPERTY ROBBERY.

https://kevskewl.com/2019/04/06/what-is-property-property-robbery/ via @kevskewl

Property Is Theft

Anekantavad

Published on Feb 23, 2012

——-

Society Has a Right to Seize Ill-Gotten Gains

New York Times Archives | MARCH 20,1993

To the Editor:

“The Court Slows Property Seizures” (editorial, Feb. 27) criticizes the efforts of law enforcement that you describe thus: “The Justice Department wanted to seize the home of a woman in Rumson, N.J., because it was bought with drug money, without giving her a chance to prove that she was an innocent party.”

However, the weight of legal tradition, fairness and logic argue that the gift recipient should not be allowed to keep the profits of the donor’s crime. For centuries, the law has recognized that someone who innocently receives a gift of stolen or embezzled property has a lesser right to that property than the original rightful owner. The reason is that the recipient — no matter how innocent — is given the property at no cost; to forfeit the property is only to surrender a windfall.

Few people would suggest that the original victim should continue to suffer wrongful deprivation so that the gift recipient can continue to benefit.

The same principle underlies this case.

New York Times Archives | MARCH 20,1993

Economic Democracy  @TheNextSystem

“The massive economic inequality that capitalism has generated has severely compromised our political system as well, making a mockery of the concept of “rule by the people.”

We need a new economic system if we, our children, and our grandchildren are going to live in a just, humane, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Economic Democracy  @TheNextSystem

The golden age When women ruled.
http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/warehouseb/id152.html

WHAT IS PROPERTY? PROPERTY ROBBERY.

WHAT IS PROPERTY? OR,

AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRINCIPLE OF RIGHT AND OF GOVERNMENT. By P. J. Proudhon

“Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments. It is in accordance with universal consent that I undertake to correct universal error; from the OPINION of the human race I appeal to its FAITH. Have the courage to follow me; and, if your will is untrammelled, if your conscience is free, if your mind can unite two propositions and deduce a third therefrom, my ideas will inevitably become yours. In beginning by giving you my last word, it was my purpose to warn you, not to defy you; for I am certain that, if you read me, you will be compelled to assent. The things of which I am to speak are so simple and clear that you will be astonished at not having perceived them before, and you will say: “I have neglected to think.” Others offer you the spectacle of genius wresting Nature’s secrets from her, and unfolding before you her sublime messages; you will find here only a series of experiments upon JUSTICE and RIGHT a sort of verification of the weights and measures of your conscience. The operations shall be conducted under your very eyes; and you shall weigh the result.”

By P. J. Proudhon

FIRST MEMOIR.

     Adversus hostem aeterna auctertas esto.

     Against the enemy, revendication is eternal. LAW OF THE
     TWELVE TABLES.

CHAPTER I. METHOD PURSUED IN THIS WORK.—THE IDEA OF A REVOLUTION.

If I were asked to answer the following question: WHAT IS SLAVERY? and I should answer in one word, IT IS MURDER, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: WHAT IS PROPERTY! may I not likewise answer, IT IS ROBBERY, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

I undertake to discuss the vital principle of our government and our institutions, property: I am in my right. I may be mistaken in the conclusion which shall result from my investigations: I am in my right. I think best to place the last thought of my book first: still am I in my right.

Such an author teaches that property is a civil right, born of occupation and sanctioned by law; another maintains that it is a natural right, originating in labor,—and both of these doctrines, totally opposed as they may seem, are encouraged and applauded. I contend that neither labor, nor occupation, nor law, can create property; that it is an effect without a cause: am I censurable?

But murmurs arise!

PROPERTY IS ROBBERY! That is the war-cry of ’93! That is the signal of revolutions!

Reader, calm yourself: I am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition. I anticipate history by a few days; I disclose a truth whose development we may try in vain to arrest; I write the preamble of our future constitution. This proposition which seems to you blasphemous—PROPERTY IS ROBBERY—would, if our prejudices allowed us to consider it, be recognized as the lightning-rod to shield us from the coming thunderbolt; but too many interests stand in the way!… Alas! philosophy will not change the course of events: destiny will fulfill itself regardless of prophecy. Besides, must not justice be done and our education be finished?

PROPERTY IS ROBBERY!… What a revolution in human ideas! PROPRIETOR and ROBBER have been at all times expressions as contradictory as the beings whom they designate are hostile; all languages have perpetuated this opposition. On what authority, then, do you venture to attack universal consent, and give the lie to the human race? Who are you, that you should question the judgment of the nations and the ages?

Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is TRUTH-SEEKER. 6 My mission is written in these words of the law: SPEAK WITHOUT HATRED AND WITHOUT FEAR; TELL THAT WHICH THOU KNOWEST! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?

Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments. It is in accordance with universal consent that I undertake to correct universal error; from the OPINION of the human race I appeal to its FAITH. Have the courage to follow me; and, if your will is untrammelled, if your conscience is free, if your mind can unite two propositions and deduce a third therefrom, my ideas will inevitably become yours. In beginning by giving you my last word, it was my purpose to warn you, not to defy you; for I am certain that, if you read me, you will be compelled to assent. The things of which I am to speak are so simple and clear that you will be astonished at not having perceived them before, and you will say: “I have neglected to think.” Others offer you the spectacle of genius wresting Nature’s secrets from her, and unfolding before you her sublime messages; you will find here only a series of experiments upon JUSTICE and RIGHT a sort of verification of the weights and measures of your conscience. The operations shall be conducted under your very eyes; and you shall weigh the result.

Nevertheless, I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.

One day I asked myself: Why is there so much sorrow and misery in society? Must man always be wretched? And not satisfied with the explanations given by the reformers,—these attributing the general distress to governmental cowardice and incapacity, those to conspirators and emeutes, still others to ignorance and general corruption,—and weary of the interminable quarrels of the tribune and the press, I sought to fathom the matter myself. I have consulted the masters of science; I have read a hundred volumes of philosophy, law, political economy, and history: would to God that I had lived in a century in which so much reading had been useless! I have made every effort to obtain exact information, comparing doctrines, replying to objections, continually constructing equations and reductions from arguments, and weighing thousands of syllogisms in the scales of the most rigorous logic. In this laborious work, I have collected many interesting facts which I shall share with my friends and the public as soon as I have leisure. But I must say that I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: JUSTICE, EQUITY, LIBERTY; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure; and, in fact, that this ignorance was the sole cause, both of the poverty that devours us, and of all the calamities that have ever afflicted the human race.

My mind was frightened by this strange result: I doubted my reason. What! said I, that which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor insight penetrated, you have discovered! Wretch, mistake not the visions of your diseased brain for the truths of science! Do you not know (great philosophers have said so) that in points of practical morality universal error is a contradiction?

I resolved then to test my arguments; and in entering upon this new labor I sought an answer to the following questions: Is it possible that humanity can have been so long and so universally mistaken in the application of moral principles? How and why could it be mistaken? How can its error, being universal, be capable of correction?

These questions, on the solution of which depended the certainty of my conclusions, offered no lengthy resistance to analysis. It will be seen, in chapter V. of this work, that in morals, as in all other branches of knowledge, the gravest errors are the dogmas of science; that, even in works of justice, to be mistaken is a privilege which ennobles man; and that whatever philosophical merit may attach to me is infinitely small. To name a thing is easy: the difficulty is to discern it before its appearance. In giving expression to the last stage of an idea,—an idea which permeates all minds, which to-morrow will be proclaimed by another if I fail to announce it to-day,—I can claim no merit save that of priority of utterance. Do we eulogize the man who first perceives the dawn?

Yes: all men believe and repeat that equality of conditions is identical with equality of rights; that PROPERTY and ROBBERY are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded, or rather usurped, in the name of superior talent or service, is iniquity and extortion. All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.

Before entering directly upon the question before me, I must say a word of the road that I shall traverse. When Pascal approached a geometrical problem, he invented a method of solution; to solve a problem in philosophy a method is equally necessary. Well, by how much do the problems of which philosophy treats surpass in the gravity of their results those discussed by geometry! How much more imperatively, then, do they demand for their solution a profound and rigorous analysis!

It is a fact placed for ever beyond doubt, say the modern psychologists, that every perception received by the mind is determined by certain general laws which govern the mind; is moulded, so to speak, in certain types pre-existing in our understanding, and which constitutes its original condition. Hence, say they, if the mind has no innate IDEAS, it has at least innate FORMS. Thus, for example, every phenomenon is of necessity conceived by us as happening in TIME and SPACE,—that compels us to infer a CAUSE of its occurrence; every thing which exists implies the ideas of SUBSTANCE, MODE, RELATION, NUMBER, &C.; in a word, we form no idea which is not related to some one of the general principles of reason, independent of which nothing exists.

These axioms of the understanding, add the psychologists, these fundamental types, by which all our judgments and ideas are inevitably shaped, and which our sensations serve only to illuminate, are known in the schools as CATEGORIES. Their primordial existence in the mind is to-day demonstrated; they need only to be systematized and catalogued. Aristotle recognized ten; Kant increased the number to fifteen; M. Cousin has reduced it to three, to two, to one; and the indisputable glory of this professor will be due to the fact that, if he has not discovered the true theory of categories, he has, at least, seen more clearly than any one else the vast importance of this question,—the greatest and perhaps the only one with which metaphysics has to deal.

I confess that I disbelieve in the innateness, not only of IDEAS, but also of FORMS or LAWS of our understanding; and I hold the metaphysics of Reid and Kant to be still farther removed from the truth than that of Aristotle. However, as I do not wish to enter here into a discussion of the mind, a task which would demand much labor and be of no interest to the public, I shall admit the hypothesis that our most general and most necessary ideas—such as time, space, substance, and cause—exist originally in the mind; or, at least, are derived immediately from its constitution.

But it is a psychological fact none the less true, and one to which the philosophers have paid too little attention, that habit, like a second nature, has the power of fixing in the mind new categorical forms derived from the appearances which impress us, and by them usually stripped of objective reality, but whose influence over our judgments is no less predetermining than that of the original categories. Hence we reason by the ETERNAL and ABSOLUTE laws of our mind, and at the same time by the secondary rules, ordinarily faulty, which are suggested to us by imperfect observation. This is the most fecund source of false prejudices, and the permanent and often invincible cause of a multitude of errors. The bias resulting from these prejudices is so strong that often, even when we are fighting against a principle which our mind thinks false, which is repugnant to our reason, and which our conscience disapproves, we defend it without knowing it, we reason in accordance with it, and we obey it while attacking it. Enclosed within a circle, our mind revolves about itself, until a new observation, creating within us new ideas, brings to view an external principle which delivers us from the phantom by which our imagination is possessed.

Thus, we know to-day that, by the laws of a universal magnetism whose cause is still unknown, two bodies (no obstacle intervening) tend to unite by an accelerated impelling force which we call GRAVITATION. It is gravitation which causes unsupported bodies to fall to the ground, which gives them weight, and which fastens us to the earth on which we live. Ignorance of this cause was the sole obstacle which prevented the ancients from believing in the antipodes. “Can you not see,” said St. Augustine after Lactantius, “that, if there were men under our feet, their heads would point downward, and that they would fall into the sky?” The bishop of Hippo, who thought the earth flat because it appeared so to the eye, supposed in consequence that, if we should connect by straight lines the zenith with the nadir in different places, these lines would be parallel with each other; and in the direction of these lines he traced every movement from above to below. Thence he naturally concluded that the stars were rolling torches set in the vault of the sky; that, if left to themselves, they would fall to the earth in a shower of fire; that the earth was one vast plain, forming the lower portion of the world, &c. If he had been asked by what the world itself was sustained, he would have answered that he did not know, but that to God nothing is impossible. Such were the ideas of St. Augustine in regard to space and movement, ideas fixed within him by a prejudice derived from an appearance, and which had become with him a general and categorical rule of judgment. Of the reason why bodies fall his mind knew nothing; he could only say that a body falls because it falls.

With us the idea of a fall is more complex: to the general ideas of space and movement which it implies, we add that of attraction or direction towards a centre, which gives us the higher idea of cause. But if physics has fully corrected our judgment in this respect, we still make use of the prejudice of St. Augustine; and when we say that a thing has FALLEN, we do not mean simply and in general that there has been an effect of gravitation, but specially and in particular that it is towards the earth, and FROM ABOVE TO BELOW, that this movement has taken place. Our mind is enlightened in vain; the imagination prevails, and our language remains forever incorrigible. To DESCEND FROM HEAVEN is as incorrect an expression as to MOUNT TO HEAVEN; and yet this expression will live as long as men use language.

All these phrases—FROM ABOVE TO BELOW; TO DESCEND FROM HEAVEN; TO FALL FROM THE CLOUDS, &C.—are henceforth harmless, because we know how to rectify them in practice; but let us deign to consider for a moment how much they have retarded the progress of science. If, indeed, it be a matter of little importance to statistics, mechanics, hydrodynamics, and ballistics, that the true cause of the fall of bodies should be known, and that our ideas of the general movements in space should be exact, it is quite otherwise when we undertake to explain the system of the universe, the cause of tides, the shape of the earth, and its position in the heavens: to understand these things we must leave the circle of appearances. In all ages there have been ingenious mechanicians, excellent architects, skilful artillerymen: any error, into which it was possible for them to fall in regard to the rotundity of the earth and gravitation, in no wise retarded the development of their art; the solidity of their buildings and accuracy of their aim was not affected by it. But sooner or later they were forced to grapple with phenomena, which the supposed parallelism of all perpendiculars erected from the earth’s surface rendered inexplicable: then also commenced a struggle between the prejudices, which for centuries had sufficed in daily practice, and the unprecedented opinions which the testimony of the eyes seemed to contradict.

Thus, on the one hand, the falsest judgments, whether based on isolated facts or only on appearances, always embrace some truths whose sphere, whether large or small, affords room for a certain number of inferences, beyond which we fall into absurdity. The ideas of St. Augustine, for example, contained the following truths: that bodies fall towards the earth, that they fall in a straight line, that either the sun or the earth moves, that either the sky or the earth turns, &c. These general facts always have been true; our science has added nothing to them. But, on the other hand, it being necessary to account for every thing, we are obliged to seek for principles more and more comprehensive: that is why we have had to abandon successively, first the opinion that the world was flat, then the theory which regards it as the stationary centre of the universe, &c.

If we pass now from physical nature to the moral world, we still find ourselves subject to the same deceptions of appearance, to the same influences of spontaneity and habit. But the distinguishing feature of this second division of our knowledge is, on the one hand, the good or the evil which we derive from our opinions; and, on the other, the obstinacy with which we defend the prejudice which is tormenting and killing us.

Whatever theory we embrace in regard to the shape of the earth and the cause of its weight, the physics of the globe does not suffer; and, as for us, our social economy can derive therefrom neither profit nor damage. But it is in us and through us that the laws of our moral nature work; now, these laws cannot be executed without our deliberate aid, and, consequently, unless we know them. If, then, our science of moral laws is false, it is evident that, while desiring our own good, we are accomplishing our own evil; if it is only incomplete, it may suffice for a time for our social progress, but in the long run it will lead us into a wrong road, and will finally precipitate us into an abyss of calamities.

Then it is that we need to exercise our highest judgments; and, be it said to our glory, they are never found wanting: but then also commences a furious struggle between old prejudices and new ideas. Days of conflagration and anguish! We are told of the time when, with the same beliefs, with the same institutions, all the world seemed happy: why complain of these beliefs; why banish these institutions? We are slow to admit that that happy age served the precise purpose of developing the principle of evil which lay dormant in society; we accuse men and gods, the powers of earth and the forces of Nature. Instead of seeking the cause of the evil in his mind and heart, man blames his masters, his rivals, his neighbors, and himself; nations arm themselves, and slay and exterminate each other, until equilibrium is restored by the vast depopulation, and peace again arises from the ashes of the combatants. So loath is humanity to touch the customs of its ancestors, and to change the laws framed by the founders of communities, and confirmed by the faithful observance of the ages.

Nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est: Distrust all innovations, wrote Titus Livius. Undoubtedly it would be better were man not compelled to change: but what! because he is born ignorant, because he exists only on condition of gradual self-instruction, must he abjure the light, abdicate his reason, and abandon himself to fortune? Perfect health is better than convalescence: should the sick man, therefore, refuse to be cured? Reform, reform! cried, ages since, John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. Reform, reform! cried our fathers, fifty years ago; and for a long time to come we shall shout, Reform, reform!

Seeing the misery of my age, I said to myself: Among the principles that support society, there is one which it does not understand, which its ignorance has vitiated, and which causes all the evil that exists. This principle is the most ancient of all; for it is a characteristic of revolutions to tear down the most modern principles, and to respect those of long-standing. Now the evil by which we suffer is anterior to all revolutions. This principle, impaired by our ignorance, is honored and cherished; for if it were not cherished it would harm nobody, it would be without influence.

But this principle, right in its purpose, but misunderstood: this principle, as old as humanity, what is it? Can it be religion?

All men believe in God: this dogma belongs at once to their conscience and their mind. To humanity God is a fact as primitive, an idea as inevitable, a principle as necessary as are the categorical ideas of cause, substance, time, and space to our understanding. God is proven to us by the conscience prior to any inference of the mind; just as the sun is proven to us by the testimony of the senses prior to all the arguments of physics. We discover phenomena and laws by observation and experience; only this deeper sense reveals to us existence. Humanity believes that God is; but, in believing in God, what does it believe? In a word, what is God?

The nature of this notion of Divinity,—this primitive, universal notion, born in the race,—the human mind has not yet fathomed. At each step that we take in our investigation of Nature and of causes, the idea of God is extended and exalted; the farther science advances, the more God seems to grow and broaden. Anthropomorphism and idolatry constituted of necessity the faith of the mind in its youth, the theology of infancy and poesy. A harmless error, if they had not endeavored to make it a rule of conduct, and if they had been wise enough to respect the liberty of thought. But having made God in his own image, man wished to appropriate him still farther; not satisfied with disfiguring the Almighty, he treated him as his patrimony, his goods, his possessions. God, pictured in monstrous forms, became throughout the world the property of man and of the State. Such was the origin of the corruption of morals by religion, and the source of pious feuds and holy wars. Thank Heaven! we have learned to allow every one his own beliefs; we seek for moral laws outside the pale of religion. Instead of legislating as to the nature and attributes of God, the dogmas of theology, and the destiny of our souls, we wisely wait for science to tell us what to reject and what to accept. God, soul, religion,—eternal objects of our unwearied thought and our most fatal aberrations, terrible problems whose solution, for ever attempted, for ever remains unaccomplished,—concerning all these questions we may still be mistaken, but at least our error is harmless. With liberty in religion, and the separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, the influence of religious ideas upon the progress of society is purely negative; no law, no political or civil institution being founded on religion. Neglect of duties imposed by religion may increase the general corruption, but it is not the primary cause; it is only an auxiliary or result. It is universally admitted, and especially in the matter which now engages our attention, that the cause of the inequality of conditions among men—of pauperism, of universal misery, and of governmental embarrassments—can no longer be traced to religion: we must go farther back, and dig still deeper.

But what is there in man older and deeper than the religious sentiment?

There is man himself; that is, volition and conscience, free-will and law, eternally antagonistic. Man is at war with himself: why?

“Man,” say the theologians, “transgressed in the beginning; our race is guilty of an ancient offence. For this transgression humanity has fallen; error and ignorance have become its sustenance. Read history, you will find universal proof of this necessity for evil in the permanent misery of nations. Man suffers and always will suffer; his disease is hereditary and constitutional. Use palliatives, employ emollients; there is no remedy.”

Nor is this argument peculiar to the theologians; we find it expressed in equivalent language in the philosophical writings of the materialists, believers in infinite perfectibility. Destutt de Tracy teaches formally that poverty, crime, and war are the inevitable conditions of our social state; necessary evils, against which it would be folly to revolt. So, call it NECESSITY OF EVIL or ORIGINAL DEPRAVITY, it is at bottom the same philosophy.

“The first man transgressed.” If the votaries of the Bible interpreted it faithfully, they would say: MAN ORIGINALLY TRANSGRESSED, that is, made a mistake; for TO TRANSGRESS, TO FAIL, TO MAKE A MISTAKE, all mean the same thing.

“The consequences of Adam’s transgression are inherited by the race; the first is ignorance.” Truly, the race, like the individual, is born ignorant; but, in regard to a multitude of questions, even in the moral and political spheres, this ignorance of the race has been dispelled: who says that it will not depart altogether? Mankind makes continual progress toward truth, and light ever triumphs over darkness. Our disease is not, then, absolutely incurable, and the theory of the theologians is worse than inadequate; it is ridiculous, since it is reducible to this tautology: “Man errs, because he errs.” While the true statement is this: “Man errs, because he learns.”

Now, if man arrives at a knowledge of all that he needs to know, it is reasonable to believe that, ceasing to err, he will cease to suffer.

But if we question the doctors as to this law, said to be engraved upon the heart of man, we shall immediately see that they dispute about a matter of which they know nothing; that, concerning the most important questions, there are almost as many opinions as authors; that we find no two agreeing as to the best form of government, the principle of authority, and the nature of right; that all sail hap-hazard upon a shoreless and bottomless sea, abandoned to the guidance of their private opinions which they modestly take to be right reason. And, in view of this medley of contradictory opinions, we say: “The object of our investigations is the law, the determination of the social principle. Now, the politicians, that is, the social scientists, do not understand each other; then the error lies in themselves; and, as every error has a reality for its object, we must look in their books to find the truth which they have unconsciously deposited there.”

Now, of what do the lawyers and the publicists treat? Of JUSTICE, EQUITY, LIBERTY, NATURAL LAW, CIVIL LAWS, &c. But what is justice? What is its principle, its character, its formula? To this question our doctors evidently have no reply; for otherwise their science, starting with a principle clear and well defined, would quit the region of probabilities, and all disputes would end.

What is justice? The theologians answer: “All justice comes from God.” That is true; but we know no more than before.

The philosophers ought to be better informed: they have argued so much about justice and injustice! Unhappily, an examination proves that their knowledge amounts to nothing, and that with them—as with the savages whose every prayer to the sun is simply O! O!—it is a cry of admiration, love, and enthusiasm; but who does not know that the sun attaches little meaning to the interjection O! That is exactly our position toward the philosophers in regard to justice. Justice, they say, is a DAUGHTER OF HEAVEN; A LIGHT WHICH ILLUMINES EVERY MAN THAT COMES INTO THE WORLD; THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PREROGATIVE OF OUR NATURE; THAT WHICH DISTINGUISHES US FROM THE BEASTS AND LIKENS US TO GOD—and a thousand other similar things. What, I ask, does this pious litany amount to? To the prayer of the savages: O!

All the most reasonable teachings of human wisdom concerning justice are summed up in that famous adage: DO UNTO OTHERS THAT WHICH YOU WOULD THAT OTHERS SHOULD DO UNTO YOU; DO NOT UNTO OTHERS THAT WHICH YOU WOULD NOT THAT OTHERS SHOULD DO UNTO YOU. But this rule of moral practice is unscientific: what have I a right to wish that others should do or not do to me? It is of no use to tell me that my duty is equal to my right, unless I am told at the same time what my right is.

Let us try to arrive at something more precise and positive.

Justice is the central star which governs societies, the pole around which the political world revolves, the principle and the regulator of all transactions. Nothing takes place between men save in the name of RIGHT; nothing without the invocation of justice. Justice is not the work of the law: on the contrary, the law is only a declaration and application of JUSTICE in all circumstances where men are liable to come in contact. If, then, the idea that we form of justice and right were ill-defined, if it were imperfect or even false, it is clear that all our legislative applications would be wrong, our institutions vicious, our politics erroneous: consequently there would be disorder and social chaos.

This hypothesis of the perversion of justice in our minds, and, as a necessary result, in our acts, becomes a demonstrated fact when it is shown that the opinions of men have not borne a constant relation to the notion of justice and its applications; that at different periods they have undergone modifications: in a word, that there has been progress in ideas. Now, that is what history proves by the most overwhelming testimony.

Eighteen Hundred years ago, the world, under the rule of the Caesars, exhausted itself in slavery, superstition, and voluptuousness. The people—intoxicated and, as it were, stupefied by their long-continued orgies—had lost the very notion of right and duty: war and dissipation by turns swept them away; usury and the labor of machines (that is of slaves), by depriving them of the means of subsistence, hindered them from continuing the species. Barbarism sprang up again, in a hideous form, from this mass of corruption, and spread like a devouring leprosy over the depopulated provinces. The wise foresaw the downfall of the empire, but could devise no remedy. What could they think indeed? To save this old society it would have been necessary to change the objects of public esteem and veneration, and to abolish the rights affirmed by a justice purely secular; they said: “Rome has conquered through her politics and her gods; any change in theology and public opinion would be folly and sacrilege. Rome, merciful toward conquered nations, though binding them in chains, spared their lives; slaves are the most fertile source of her wealth; freedom of the nations would be the negation of her rights and the ruin of her finances. Rome, in fact, enveloped in the pleasures and gorged with the spoils of the universe, is kept alive by victory and government; her luxury and her pleasures are the price of her conquests: she can neither abdicate nor dispossess herself.” Thus Rome had the facts and the law on her side. Her pretensions were justified by universal custom and the law of nations. Her institutions were based upon idolatry in religion, slavery in the State, and epicurism in private life; to touch those was to shake society to its foundations, and, to use our modern expression, to open the abyss of revolutions. So the idea occurred to no one; and yet humanity was dying in blood and luxury.

All at once a man appeared, calling himself The Word of God. It is not known to this day who he was, whence he came, nor what suggested to him his ideas. He went about proclaiming everywhere that the end of the existing society was at hand, that the world was about to experience a new birth; that the priests were vipers, the lawyers ignoramuses, and the philosophers hypocrites and liars; that master and slave were equals, that usury and every thing akin to it was robbery, that proprietors and idlers would one day burn, while the poor and pure in heart would find a haven of peace.

This man—The Word of God—was denounced and arrested as a public enemy by the priests and the lawyers, who well understood how to induce the people to demand his death. But this judicial murder, though it put the finishing stroke to their crimes, did not destroy the doctrinal seeds which The Word of God had sown. After his death, his original disciples travelled about in all directions, preaching what they called the GOOD NEWS, creating in their turn millions of missionaries; and, when their task seemed to be accomplished, dying by the sword of Roman justice. This persistent agitation, the war of the executioners and martyrs, lasted nearly three centuries, ending in the conversion of the world. Idolatry was destroyed, slavery abolished, dissolution made room for a more austere morality, and the contempt for wealth was sometimes pushed almost to privation.

Society was saved by the negation of its own principles, by a revolution in its religion, and by violation of its most sacred rights. In this revolution, the idea of justice spread to an extent that had not before been dreamed of, never to return to its original limits. Heretofore justice had existed only for the masters; 7 it then commenced to exist for the slaves.

Nevertheless, the new religion at that time had borne by no means all its fruits. There was a perceptible improvement of the public morals, and a partial release from oppression; but, other than that, the SEEDS SOWN BY THE SON OF MAN, having fallen into idolatrous hearts, had produced nothing save innumerable discords and a quasi-poetical mythology. Instead of developing into their practical consequences the principles of morality and government taught by The Word of God, his followers busied themselves in speculations as to his birth, his origin, his person, and his actions; they discussed his parables, and from the conflict of the most extravagant opinions upon unanswerable questions and texts which no one understood, was born THEOLOGY,—which may be defined as the SCIENCE OF THE INFINITELY ABSURD.

The truth of CHRISTIANITY did not survive the age of the apostles; the GOSPEL, commented upon and symbolized by the Greeks and Latins, loaded with pagan fables, became literally a mass of contradictions; and to this day the reign of the INFALLIBLE CHURCH has been a long era of darkness. It is said that the GATES OF HELL will not always prevail, that THE WORD OF GOD will return, and that one day men will know truth and justice; but that will be the death of Greek and Roman Catholicism, just as in the light of science disappeared the caprices of opinion.

The monsters which the successors of the apostles were bent on destroying, frightened for a moment, reappeared gradually, thanks to the crazy fanaticism, and sometimes the deliberate connivance, of priests and theologians. The history of the enfranchisement of the French communes offers constantly the spectacle of the ideas of justice and liberty spreading among the people, in spite of the combined efforts of kings, nobles, and clergy. In the year 1789 of the Christian era, the French nation, divided by caste, poor and oppressed, struggled in the triple net of royal absolutism, the tyranny of nobles and parliaments, and priestly intolerance. There was the right of the king and the right of the priest, the right of the patrician and the right of the plebeian; there were the privileges of birth, province, communes, corporations, and trades; and, at the bottom of all, violence, immorality, and misery. For some time they talked of reformation; those who apparently desired it most favoring it only for their own profit, and the people who were to be the gainers expecting little and saying nothing. For a long time these poor people, either from distrust, incredulity, or despair, hesitated to ask for their rights: it is said that the habit of serving had taken the courage away from those old communes, which in the middle ages were so bold.

Finally a book appeared, summing up the whole matter in these two propositions: WHAT IS THE THIRD ESTATE?—NOTHING. WHAT OUGHT IT TO BE?—EVERY THING. Some one added by way of comment: WHAT IS THE KING?—THE SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE.

This was a sudden revelation: the veil was torn aside, a thick bandage fell from all eyes. The people commenced to reason thus:—

If the king is our servant, he ought to report to us;

If he ought to report to us, he is subject to control;

If he can be controlled, he is responsible;

If he is responsible, he is punishable;

If he is punishable, he ought to be punished according to his merits;

If he ought to be punished according to his merits, he can be punished with death.

Five years after the publication of the brochure of Sieyes, the third estate was every thing; the king, the nobility, the clergy, were no more. In 1793, the nation, without stopping at the constitutional fiction of the inviolability of the sovereign, conducted Louis XVI. to the scaffold; in 1830, it accompanied Charles X. to Cherbourg. In each case, it may have erred, in fact, in its judgment of the offence; but, in right, the logic which led to its action was irreproachable. The people, in punishing their sovereign, did precisely that which the government of July was so severely censured for failing to do when it refused to execute Louis Bonaparte after the affair of Strasburg: they struck the true culprit. It was an application of the common law, a solemn decree of justice enforcing the penal laws. 8

The spirit which gave rise to the movement of ’89 was a spirit of negation; that, of itself, proves that the order of things which was substituted for the old system was not methodical or well-considered; that, born of anger and hatred, it could not have the effect of a science based on observation and study; that its foundations, in a word, were not derived from a profound knowledge of the laws of Nature and society. Thus the people found that the republic, among the so-called new institutions, was acting on the very principles against which they had fought, and was swayed by all the prejudices which they had intended to destroy. We congratulate ourselves, with inconsiderate enthusiasm, on the glorious French Revolution, the regeneration of 1789, the great changes that have been effected, and the reversion of institutions: a delusion, a delusion!

When our ideas on any subject, material, intellectual, or social, undergo a thorough change in consequence of new observations, I call that movement of the mind REVOLUTION. If the ideas are simply extended or modified, there is only PROGRESS. Thus the system of Ptolemy was a step in astronomical progress, that of Copernicus was a revolution. So, in 1789, there was struggle and progress; revolution there was none. An examination of the reforms which were attempted proves this.

The nation, so long a victim of monarchical selfishness, thought to deliver itself for ever by declaring that it alone was sovereign. But what was monarchy? The sovereignty of one man. What is democracy? The sovereignty of the nation, or, rather, of the national majority. But it is, in both cases, the sovereignty of man instead of the sovereignty of the law, the sovereignty of the will instead of the sovereignty of the reason; in one word, the passions instead of justice. Undoubtedly, when a nation passes from the monarchical to the democratic state, there is progress, because in multiplying the sovereigns we increase the opportunities of the reason to substitute itself for the will; but in reality there is no revolution in the government, since the principle remains the same. Now, we have the proof to-day that, with the most perfect democracy, we cannot be free. 9

Nor is that all. The nation-king cannot exercise its sovereignty itself; it is obliged to delegate it to agents: this is constantly reiterated by those who seek to win its favor. Be these agents five, ten, one hundred, or a thousand, of what consequence is the number; and what matters the name? It is always the government of man, the rule of will and caprice. I ask what this pretended revolution has revolutionized?

We know, too, how this sovereignty was exercised; first by the Convention, then by the Directory, afterwards confiscated by the Consul. As for the Emperor, the strong man so much adored and mourned by the nation, he never wanted to be dependent on it; but, as if intending to set its sovereignty at defiance, he dared to demand its suffrage: that is, its abdication, the abdication of this inalienable sovereignty; and he obtained it.

But what is sovereignty? It is, they say, the POWER TO MAKE LAW. 10 Another absurdity, a relic of despotism. The nation had long seen kings issuing their commands in this form: FOR SUCH IS OUR PLEASURE; it wished to taste in its turn the pleasure of making laws. For fifty years it has brought them forth by myriads; always, be it understood, through the agency of representatives. The play is far from ended.

The definition of sovereignty was derived from the definition of the law. The law, they said, is THE EXPRESSION OF THE WILL OF THE SOVEREIGN: then, under a monarchy, the law is the expression of the will of the king; in a republic, the law is the expression of the will of the people. Aside from the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly identical: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of a will; it ought to be the expression of a fact. Moreover they followed good leaders: they took the citizen of Geneva for their prophet, and the contrat social for their Koran.

Bias and prejudice are apparent in all the phrases of the new legislators. The nation had suffered from a multitude of exclusions and privileges; its representatives issued the following declaration: ALL MEN ARE EQUAL BY NATURE AND BEFORE THE LAW; an ambiguous and redundant declaration. MEN ARE EQUAL BY NATURE: does that mean that they are equal in size, beauty, talents, and virtue? No; they meant, then, political and civil equality. Then it would have been sufficient to have said: ALL MEN ARE EQUAL BEFORE THE LAW.

But what is equality before the law? Neither the constitution of 1790, nor that of ’93, nor the granted charter, nor the accepted charter, have defined it accurately. All imply an inequality in fortune and station incompatible with even a shadow of equality in rights. In this respect it may be said that all our constitutions have been faithful expressions of the popular will: I am going, to prove it.

Formerly the people were excluded from civil and military offices; it was considered a wonder when the following high-sounding article was inserted in the Declaration of Rights: “All citizens are equally eligible to office; free nations know no qualifications in their choice of officers save virtues and talents.”

They certainly ought to have admired so beautiful an idea: they admired a piece of nonsense. Why! the sovereign people, legislators, and reformers, see in public offices, to speak plainly, only opportunities for pecuniary advancement. And, because it regards them as a source of profit, it decrees the eligibility of citizens. For of what use would this precaution be, if there were nothing to gain by it? No one would think of ordaining that none but astronomers and geographers should be pilots, nor of prohibiting stutterers from acting at the theatre and the opera. The nation was still aping the kings: like them it wished to award the lucrative positions to its friends and flatterers. Unfortunately, and this last feature completes the resemblance, the nation did not control the list of livings; that was in the hands of its agents and representatives. They, on the other hand, took care not to thwart the will of their gracious sovereign.

This edifying article of the Declaration of Rights, retained in the charters of 1814 and 1830, implies several kinds of civil inequality; that is, of inequality before the law: inequality of station, since the public functions are sought only for the consideration and emoluments which they bring; inequality of wealth, since, if it had been desired to equalize fortunes, public service would have been regarded as a duty, not as a reward; inequality of privilege, the law not stating what it means by TALENTS and VIRTUES. Under the empire, virtue and talent consisted simply in military bravery and devotion to the emperor; that was shown when Napoleon created his nobility, and attempted to connect it with the ancients. To-day, the man who pays taxes to the amount of two hundred francs is virtuous; the talented man is the honest pickpocket: such truths as these are accounted trivial.

The people finally legalized property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they did! For fifty years they have suffered for their miserable folly. But how came the people, whose voice, they tell us, is the voice of God, and whose conscience is infallible,—how came the people to err? How happens it that, when seeking liberty and equality, they fell back into privilege and slavery? Always through copying the ancient regime.

Formerly, the nobility and the clergy contributed towards the expenses of the State only by voluntary aid and gratuitous gift; their property could not be seized even for debt,—while the plebeian, overwhelmed by taxes and statute-labor, was continually tormented, now by the king’s tax-gatherers, now by those of the nobles and clergy. He whose possessions were subject to mortmain could neither bequeath nor inherit property; he was treated like the animals, whose services and offspring belong to their master by right of accession. The people wanted the conditions of OWNERSHIP to be alike for all; they thought that every one should ENJOY AND FREELY DISPOSE OF HIS POSSESSIONS HIS INCOME AND THE FRUIT OF HIS LABOR AND INDUSTRY. The people did not invent property; but as they had not the same privileges in regard to it, which the nobles and clergy possessed, they decreed that the right should be exercised by all under the same conditions. The more obnoxious forms of property—statute-labor, mortmain, maitrise, and exclusion from public office—have disappeared; the conditions of its enjoyment have been modified: the principle still remains the same. There has been progress in the regulation of the right; there has been no revolution.

These, then, are the three fundamental principles of modern society, established one after another by the movements of 1789 and 1830: 1. SOVEREIGNTY OF THE HUMAN WILL; in short, DESPOTISM. 2. INEQUALITY OF WEALTH AND RANK. 3. PROPERTY—above JUSTICE, always invoked as the guardian angel of sovereigns, nobles, and proprietors; JUSTICE, the general, primitive, categorical law of all society.

We must ascertain whether the ideas of DESPOTISM, CIVIL INEQUALITY and PROPERTY, are in harmony with the primitive notion of JUSTICE, and necessarily follow from it,—assuming various forms according to the condition, position, and relation of persons; or whether they are not rather the illegitimate result of a confusion of different things, a fatal association of ideas. And since justice deals especially with the questions of government, the condition of persons, and the possession of things, we must ascertain under what conditions, judging by universal opinion and the progress of the human mind, government is just, the condition of citizens is just, and the possession of things is just; then, striking out every thing which fails to meet these conditions, the result will at once tell us what legitimate government is, what the legitimate condition of citizens is, and what the legitimate possession of things is; and finally, as the last result of the analysis, what JUSTICE is.

Is the authority of man over man just?

Everybody answers, “No; the authority of man is only the authority of the law, which ought to be justice and truth.” The private will counts for nothing in government, which consists, first, in discovering truth and justice in order to make the law; and, second, in superintending the execution of this law. I do not now inquire whether our constitutional form of government satisfies these conditions; whether, for example, the will of the ministry never influences the declaration and interpretation of the law; or whether our deputies, in their debates, are more intent on conquering by argument than by force of numbers: it is enough for me that my definition of a good government is allowed to be correct. This idea is exact. Yet we see that nothing seems more just to the Oriental nations than the despotism of their sovereigns; that, with the ancients and in the opinion of the philosophers themselves, slavery was just; that in the middle ages the nobles, the priests, and the bishops felt justified in holding slaves; that Louis XIV. thought that he was right when he said, “The State! I am the State;” and that Napoleon deemed it a crime for the State to oppose his will. The idea of justice, then, applied to sovereignty and government, has not always been what it is to-day; it has gone on developing and shaping itself by degrees, until it has arrived at its present state. But has it reached its last phase? I think not: only, as the last obstacle to be overcome arises from the institution of property which we have kept intact, in order to finish the reform in government and consummate the revolution, this very institution we must attack.

Is political and civil inequality just?

Some say yes; others no. To the first I would reply that, when the people abolished all privileges of birth and caste, they did it, in all probability, because it was for their advantage; why then do they favor the privileges of fortune more than those of rank and race? Because, say they, political inequality is a result of property; and without property society is impossible: thus the question just raised becomes a question of property. To the second I content myself with this remark: If you wish to enjoy political equality, abolish property; otherwise, why do you complain?

Is property just?

Everybody answers without hesitation, “Yes, property is just.” I say everybody, for up to the present time no one who thoroughly understood the meaning of his words has answered no. For it is no easy thing to reply understandingly to such a question; only time and experience can furnish an answer. Now, this answer is given; it is for us to understand it. I undertake to prove it.

We are to proceed with the demonstration in the following order:—

I. We dispute not at all, we refute nobody, we deny nothing; we accept as sound all the arguments alleged in favor of property, and confine ourselves to a search for its principle, in order that we may then ascertain whether this principle is faithfully expressed by property. In fact, property being defensible on no ground save that of justice, the idea, or at least the intention, of justice must of necessity underlie all the arguments that have been made in defence of property; and, as on the other hand the right of property is only exercised over those things which can be appreciated by the senses, justice, secretly objectifying itself, so to speak, must take the shape of an algebraic formula.

By this method of investigation, we soon see that every argument which has been invented in behalf of property, WHATEVER IT MAY BE, always and of necessity leads to equality; that is, to the negation of property.

The first part covers two chapters: one treating of occupation, the foundation of our right; the other, of labor and talent, considered as causes of property and social inequality.

The first of these chapters will prove that the right of occupation OBSTRUCTS property; the second that the right of labor DESTROYS it.

II. Property, then, being of necessity conceived as existing only in connection with equality, it remains to find out why, in spite of this necessity of logic, equality does not exist. This new investigation also covers two chapters: in the first, considering the fact of property in itself, we inquire whether this fact is real, whether it exists, whether it is possible; for it would imply a contradiction, were these two opposite forms of society, equality and inequality, both possible. Then we discover, singularly enough, that property may indeed manifest itself accidentally; but that, as an institution and principle, it is mathematically impossible. So that the axiom of the school—ab actu ad posse valet consecutio: from the actual to the possible the inference is good—is given the lie as far as property is concerned.

Finally, in the last chapter, calling psychology to our aid, and probing man’s nature to the bottom, we shall disclose the principle of JUSTICE—its formula and character; we shall state with precision the organic law of society; we shall explain the origin of property, the causes of its establishment, its long life, and its approaching death; we shall definitively establish its identity with robbery. And, after having shown that these three prejudices—THE SOVEREIGNTY OF MAN, THE INEQUALITY OF CONDITIONS, AND PROPERTY—are one and the same; that they may be taken for each other, and are reciprocally convertible,—we shall have no trouble in inferring therefrom, by the principle of contradiction, the basis of government and right. There our investigations will end, reserving the right to continue them in future works.

The importance of the subject which engages our attention is recognized by all minds.

“Property,” says M. Hennequin, “is the creative and conservative principle of civil society. Property is one of those basic institutions, new theories concerning which cannot be presented too soon; for it must not be forgotten, and the publicist and statesman must know, that on the answer to the question whether property is the principle or the result of social order, whether it is to be considered as a cause or an effect, depends all morality, and, consequently, all the authority of human institutions.”

These words are a challenge to all men of hope and faith; but, although the cause of equality is a noble one, no one has yet picked up the gauntlet thrown down by the advocates of property; no one has been courageous enough to enter upon the struggle. The spurious learning of haughty jurisprudence, and the absurd aphorisms of a political economy controlled by property have puzzled the most generous minds; it is a sort of password among the most influential friends of liberty and the interests of the people that EQUALITY IS A CHIMERA! So many false theories and meaningless analogies influence minds otherwise keen, but which are unconsciously controlled by popular prejudice. Equality advances every day—fit aequalitas. Soldiers of liberty, shall we desert our flag in the hour of triumph?

A defender of equality, I shall speak without bitterness and without anger; with the independence becoming a philosopher, with the courage and firmness of a free man. May I, in this momentous struggle, carry into all hearts the light with which I am filled; and show, by the success of my argument, that equality failed to conquer by the sword only that it might conquer by the pen!

CHAPTER II. PROPERTY CONSIDERED AS A NATURAL RIGHT

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     PROPERTY CONSIDERED AS A NATURAL RIGHT.—OCCUPATION AND
     CIVIL LAW AS EFFICIENT BASES OF PROPERTY. DEFINITIONS.

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Title: What is Property?
       An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government

Author: P. J. Proudhon

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[PDF] What Is Property Pierre Joseph Proudhon

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what is property pierre joseph proudhon is available in our digital library an online access to it is set … An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.

Paycheck to Paycheck, Human Capital Wage Slaves, Break the Choke Hold

∴ (Q1) Do you live to work?

Living to work is slavery. Humans have always been slaves to Nature, a beautiful, symbiotic  and light burden in most cases but no doubt a burden just the same. Humans have also always been forced, coerced and exploited into the abomination of working for another as slaves.  Voluntary or involuntary, if a slave does not work, the slaves does not get the necessities to live, all the way up and trough no real choice, shelter, clean water, or health care, to unholy starvation.

This is only possible through the theft that is private property and with that human capital slavery and taxes. It’s all about theft but of what really?

One can chop up individual stations of slavery or servitude into different degrees of brutality but the slave whatever labelled or called, from chattel slave or serf, to wage slave, a slave is bound to work for another to eat.

Renting human capital for an hourly wage is slavery. Usurping the value of human capital labor outside of the market, through fiat private currency debasement, is more theft and still slavery.

To brush up on slavery and it’s characteristics click thru to; Mike Leung on Abolition of Slavery and Human rentals in a discussion on financing and worker cooperatives. 

Noam Chomsky: Wage Slavery = Chattle Slavery

  turnbeutelvergesserB   Published on Jul 2, 2008

Activist, Linguist and renowned interlectual Professor Noam Chomsky about wage slavery, illegitimacy of power, legitimate use of force and violance; and libertarian anarchism.

Standing Up To Slavery and Human Trafficking So Others Can Live A Life of Abundance – John Rafferty

From abundance to slavery and back again to abundance looks like ending the age old failed concepts and misconceptions at the root levels of theft and subsequently all forms of theft. Private property is theft as well as slavery and taxes.

I’ll briefly offer some concepts and understandings that I’ve gained and quantifying links as resources.

Capitalism’s requirement of economic exploitation and coercion of human capital amounts to slavery.

To quantify my above repeated assertion that capitalism is slavery.

I’ll start with some relevant quotes from a book refuting the relativist, “postmodern” notion that historical reality is not objective fact, but a “social construct.”

Telling the Truth about History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, all history teachers at UCLA.

“One of the distinguishing features of a free-enterprise economy is that its coercion is veiled. . . . The fact that people must earn before they can eat is a commonly recognized connection between need and work, but it presents itself as a natural link embedded in the necessity of eating rather than as arising from a particular arrangement for distributing food through market exchanges. . . . Presented as natural and personal in the stories people tell about themselves, the social and compulsory aspects of capitalism slip out of sight and out of mind. . . . Far from being natural, the cues for market participation are given through complicated social codes. Indeed, the illusion that compliance in the dominant economic system is voluntary is itself an amazing cultural artifact.” – Telling the Truth about History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, all history teachers at UCLA.

Statute of Liberty, ankles remain chained through today.

“Capitalism needs economic coercion for its job market to function” (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: OCAP)

The abolitionist Basic Income May 25, 2018 4 Minutes

In a previous post, I pointed out that the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) explicitly indicated that economic coercion or force is a basic condition for capitalism to continue to exist (Basic Income: A Critique of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s Stance ).  The following quote agrees with OCAP in so far as economic coercion or economic blackmail characterizes modern capitalist society, but Kay implies that, as a consequence, it is necessary to redefine the nature of poverty. Many social-reformist organizations define poverty exclusively in terms of the level of income, with the poverty line (defined according to a certain level of income) separating those who are defined as poor by the social-reformist left and the rest, who are supposedly the middle class. Such a definition, according to OCAP’s own recognition of the economic coercion required in the job market, is inadequate.

Consequently, OCAP should, in accordance with its own recognition of the economic blackmail characteristic of capitalism, start to organize for the purpose of eliminating poverty conditions that require such economic blackmail. It should, in other words, start to engage in the formation of a movement for the abolition of the power of employers as a class and the corresponding economic, social and political structures.

The social-reformist left, however, will probably not acknowledge the need for a redefinition of poverty that includes the economic coercion of the vast majority of workers. They prefer to deal in platitudes, such as calling the work characteristic of economic coercion “decent work,” or reforms in employment standards and increases in the minimum wages (all necessary, of course) “fair,” or claiming that they are fighting for “economic justice” (while not engaging in any activity that moves towards abolishing the economic coercion characteristic of the capitalist job market dominated by a class of employers).

Read further on >> “Capitalism needs economic coercion for its job market to function” (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: OCAP)

Eye opener:

Voluntary Servitude by Deception

  JustAboutMyPolitics Published on Nov 5, 2007

The TRUTH About W-4 WITHHOLDING

When you contract to be a U.S. citizen, you agree to become a voluntary slave to help collect revenue. Similarly, when you agree to work for the government, a privilege, you also agree to be a voluntary slave/employee. After all, for this privilege, you also get to pay a Public Salary Tax and get to have that tax withheld from your wages in advance. The government can dispose of a part of your labor, the tax withheld, and you cannot do anything about it, because you voluntarily chose to work for the government.

The TRUTH About W-4 WITHHOLDING

Slave. A person who is wholly subject to the will of another; one who has no freedom of action, but whose person and services are wholly under the control of another. One who is under the power of a master, and who belongs to him; so that the master may sell and dispose of his person, of his industry, and of his labor, without his being able to do anything, have anything, or acquire anything, but what must belong to his master. (Black’s Law Dictionary – 6th Edition)

Person. In general usage, a human being (i.e. natural person), though by statute term may include labor organizations, partnerships, associations, corporations, legal representatives, trustees, trustees in bankruptcy, or receivers.
Scope and delineation of term is necessary for determining to whom Fourteenth Amendment of Constitution affords protection since this Amendment expressly applies to “person”.
Aliens. Aliens are “persons” within meaning of Fourteenth Amendment . . .
Corporation. A corporation is a “person” within meaning of Fourteenth Amendment . . .” (Black’s Law Dictionary 6th Edition)

According to these definitions, a slave is a ‘person’, and a person can be an alien or a corporation. The 13th Amendment abolishes ‘involuntary’ slavery, but not ‘voluntary’ slavery. A U.S. citizen is a voluntary slave, with no rights to acquire property or income and must “return” a portion of his ‘wages’ every April 15.

14th Amendment. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.

Since slaves are persons, could this be read all ‘slaves’ born or naturalized . . .? A U.S. citizen’s name is spelled in all caps. A name spelled in all caps indicates a corporation or a corporate citizen (property).

Remember, if you don’t owe any tax, or did not receive ‘wages’, or are not a foreign person, then you are not subject to withholding of tax! But you can volunteer!Continue reading @ resource: The TRUTH About W-4 WITHHOLDING

∴ (Q2) Do you support the Abolition of capitalism as a form of slavery? 

How Black Abolitionists Changed A Nation

February 26, 201511:16 AM ET

Linton Weeks

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman, circa 1860-1875

H.B. Lindsley/Library of Congress

This year we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — abolishing slavery. So it’s worth pointing out that the emancipation movement in 19th century America was pushed forward by many different forces: enlightened lawmakers, determined liberators of captive slaves and outspoken abolitionists — including an influential number who were black.

With the national debate over slavery escalating toward civil war, explains history professor Roy E Finkenbine at the University of Detroit, Mercy, the militant abolitionist movement, which was largely championed by Northerners, battled an aggressive defense of slavery that was based mostly in the South.

In the midst of this societal schism, “black abolitionists were the one set of voices that could bring credibility to the debate. This was especially true of those who had experienced slavery — ‘felt the lash’ and ‘worn the shoe,’ as it were,” Finkenbine says.

∴ Bellow is an excerpt from Slavery and the Abolition Society Also referred as the Abolition Society, provided by The Ben Franklin Historical Society documenting Franklin’s changing view of slaves, slavery and his Abolitionist opposition to the peculiar institution in his later days. I would just remind that slaves were forbid education, to be taught or to teach themselves in the early Americas.

Economic Democracy the Next Sytem

We need a new economic system if we, our children, and our grandchildren are going to live in a just, humane, peaceful, and sustainable world. The transition can be envisaged as a democratic, nonviolent restructuring of basic economic institutions.

Although workplace democracy should be the norm throughout society, it needn’t be the case that all businesses conform to this norm.

Economic Democracy @TheNextSystem

Click thru to a Great Resource at Economic Democracy The Next System

 

 

Early American slavery abolition

Few are aware of early American Abolition’s strong opposition to slavery. I like to give a few short examples that you can research fully yourselves just to show there was always opposition to the enslavement of human capital and that this opposition took on many forms.

Benjamin Lay the “Quaker Comet” Was the Greatest Abolitionist You’ve Never heard of.

Overlooked by historians, Benjamin Lay was one of the nation’s first radicals to argue for an end to slavery

Benjamin Lay said he was “illiterate,” but his antislavery arguments were erudite. This portrait, commissioned by Lay’s friend Benjamin Franklin, shows him with a book. (Benjamin Lay by William Williams, Sr. (1750-1758) / National Portrait Gallery, Si; Binoculars: Michele Marconi)

By Marcus Rediker

Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
September 2017

On September 19, 1738, a man named Benjamin Lay strode into a Quaker meetinghouse in Burlington, New Jersey, for the biggest event of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He wore a great coat, which hid a military uniform and a sword. Beneath his coat Lay carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice. Because Quakers had no formal minister or church ceremony, people spoke as the spirit moved them. Lay, a Quaker himself, waited his turn.

He finally rose to address this gathering of “weighty Quakers.” Many Friends in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had grown rich on Atlantic commerce, and many bought human property. To them Lay announced in a booming voice that God Almighty respects all peoples equally, rich and poor, men and women, white and black alike. He said that slave keeping was the greatest sin in the world and asked, How can a people who profess the golden rule keep slaves? He then threw off his great coat, revealing the military garb, the book and the blade.

A murmur filled the hall as the prophet thundered his judgment: “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.” He pulled out the sword, raised the book above his head, and plunged the sword through it. People gasped as the red liquid gushed down his arm; women swooned. To the shock of all, he spattered “blood” on the slave keepers. He prophesied a dark, violent future: Quakers who failed to heed the prophet’s call must expect physical, moral and spiritual death.

The room exploded into chaos, but Lay stood quiet and still, “like a statue,” a witness remarked. Several Quakers quickly surrounded the armed soldier of God and carried him from the building. He did not resist. He had made his point.

********** Continue reading Smithsonian.com

How Black Abolitionists Changed A Nation

February 26, 201511:16 AM ET Linton Weeks

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman, circa 1860-1875

H.B. Lindsley/Library of Congress

This year we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — abolishing slavery. So it’s worth pointing out that the emancipation movement in 19th century America was pushed forward by many different forces: enlightened lawmakers, determined liberators of captive slaves and outspoken abolitionists — including an influential number who were black.

With the national debate over slavery escalating toward civil war, explains history professor Roy E Finkenbine at the University of Detroit, Mercy, the militant abolitionist movement, which was largely championed by Northerners, battled an aggressive defense of slavery that was based mostly in the South.

In the midst of this societal schism, “black abolitionists were the one set of voices that could bring credibility to the debate. This was especially true of those who had experienced slavery — ‘felt the lash’ and ‘worn the shoe,’ as it were,” Finkenbine says.

∴ Bellow is an excerpt from Slavery and the Abolition Society Also referred as the Abolition Society, provided by The Ben Franklin Historical Society documenting Franklin’s changing view of slaves, slavery and his Abolitionist opposition to the peculiar institution in his later days. I would just remind that slaves were forbid education, to be taught or to teach themselves in the early Americas.

Click thru to con: How Black Abolitionists Changed A Nation

“What to the Slave is 4th of July” Frederick Douglass Speech

Excerpts from: Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist movement

Frederick Douglass and the anti slavery movement

Douglass joined the American Anti Slavery Society in 1841 as an agent. His role was to travel and deliver speeches, distribute pamphlets and get subscribers to the Liberator. He traveled the country for four years until 1845 when he found himself in a dangerous situation as a fugitive slave.

During the years Douglass toured the country many had started to doubt if he was truly who he said he was, a fugitive slave. Because he was so eloquent and knew to how to read and write many doubted his story was true. With the support of friends he was motivated to write his autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” which was published in 1845.

Afraid for his safety he had to flee to the United Kingdom. He toured England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales giving speeches and networking. Here he met many supporters. Ellen Richardson and Henry Richardson raised funds to buy Douglass’ freedom which protected him from the fugitive slave laws of 1793 and 1850. He was a free man.

He was one of many supporters of the Underground Railroad, harboring fugitive slaves many times in his own house. At one time he had 10 runaways hiding in his home.

The Quakers

The first call for the abolition of slavery in America came in 1688 from the Quakers in Pennsylvania. The Quakers formed the first American Abolition Society in 1775. In 1787 Benjamin Franklin became president of the Society. In 1790, two months before his death, Franklin petitioned Congress, for the first time, to eliminate slavery in his famous “Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery”. The petition was immediately rejected by pro-slavery congressmen, mostly from the south. A committee assigned to its study claimed that the 1787 Constitution refrained Congress from abolishing slavery or its trade.

In 1807 President Jefferson prohibited the international trade of slaves, however internal trade was allowed. The abolitionist movement was largely unorganized and scattered achieving some success.

During the 1820s and 1830s the American Colonization Society established the colony of Liberia in Africa and by 1865 over 10,000 African American slaves had migrated to Liberia. Supporters included Henry Clay, James Monroe and Abraham Lincoln.

Second Great Awakening and the Church

In the 1830s a drastic change took place in the abolitionist movement. The Second Great Awakening, a religious revival, stressed the morals of upholding God’s will in society. Slavery was considered a sin. Churches, specially the Evangelical Protestant church, were the starting point to the emergence and spread of abolitionist ideas in northern society. Nathaniel Taylor, Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher were some of the leaders of the Second Great Awakening.

Frederick Douglass Heritage The Official Website

Slavery and the Abolition Society

Early view on slavery

Like most citizens of his time Benjamin Franklin owned slaves and viewed them as inferior to white Europeans, as it was believed they could not be educated. His newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette advertised the sale of slaves and frequently published notices of runaways. However, he also published antislavery ads from Quakers.

Franklin owned slaves from as early as 1735 until 1781. The Franklin household had six slaves; Peter, his wife Jemima and their son Othello, George, John and King.

After 1758 Franklin gradually changed his mind when his friend Samuel Johnson brought him to one of Dr. Bray’s schools for black children. Dr. Bray Associates was a philanthropic association affiliated to the Church of England. In 1759 he joined the association by donating money.

Continue reading >> The Ben Franklin Historical Society

Economic Democracy

We need a new economic system if we, our children, and our grandchildren are going to live in a just, humane, peaceful, and sustainable world. The transition can be envisaged as a democratic, nonviolent restructuring of basic economic institutions.

Although workplace democracy should be the norm throughout society, it needn’t be the case that all businesses conform to this norm.

Economic Democracy @TheNextSystem

Click thru to a Great Resource at Economic Democracy The Next System

 

W-4 Voluntary Servitude War by Deception in Perpetuity

The TRUTH About W-4 WITHHOLDING

When you contract to be a U.S. citizen, you agree to become a voluntary slave to help collect revenue. Similarly, when you agree to work for the government, a privilege, you also agree to be a voluntary slave/employee. After all, for this privilege, you also get to pay a Public Salary Tax and get to have that tax withheld from your wages in advance. The government can dispose of a part of your labor, the tax withheld, and you cannot do anything about it, because you voluntarily chose to work for the government.

See: PBS Reconstruction – The Fragility of Democracy

Eyeopener:

Voluntary Servitude by Deception

JustAboutMyPolitics Published on Nov 5, 2007

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The TRUTH About W-4 WITHHOLDING

Slave. A person who is wholly subject to the will of another; one who has no freedom of action, but whose person and services are wholly under the control of another. One who is under the power of a master, and who belongs to him; so that the master may sell and dispose of his person, of his industry, and of his labor, without his being able to do anything, have anything, or acquire anything, but what must belong to his master. (Black’s Law Dictionary – 6th Edition)

Person. In general usage, a human being (i.e. natural person), though by statute term may include labor organizations, partnerships, associations, corporations, legal representatives, trustees, trustees in bankruptcy, or receivers.
Scope and delineation of term is necessary for determining to whom Fourteenth Amendment of Constitution affords protection since this Amendment expressly applies to “person”.
Aliens. Aliens are “persons” within meaning of Fourteenth Amendment . . .
Corporation. A corporation is a “person” within meaning of Fourteenth Amendment . . .” (Black’s Law Dictionary 6th Edition)

According to these definitions, a slave is a ‘person’, and a person can be an alien or a corporation. The 13th Amendment abolishes ‘involuntary’ slavery, but not ‘voluntary’ slavery. A U.S. citizen is a voluntary slave, with no rights to acquire property or income and must “return” a portion of his ‘wages’ every April 15.

14th Amendment. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.

Since slaves are persons, could this be read all ‘slaves’ born or naturalized . . .? A U.S. citizen’s name is spelled in all caps. A name spelled in all caps indicates a corporation or a corporate citizen (property).

Remember, if you don’t owe any tax, or did not receive ‘wages’, or are not a foreign person, then you are not subject to withholding of tax! But you can volunteer!

Continue reading @ resource: The TRUTH About W-4 WITHHOLDING

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War – The Fragility of Democracy