Odds and ends.

Resistance to tyranny often finds its ultimate sanctuary in religion and religious buildings. Churches and Sundays played a prominent role in the battle for Civil Rights, in the victory of Poland’s Solidarnosc victory, and in the overthrow of apartheid. So it should not be surprising that mosques and Fridays gave the tempo for Mubarak’s downfall in Egypt and Ben Ali’s in Tunisia. The difference occurred once the tyrant was gone. Christians have an old habit of separating worldly and spiritual matters. Their various churches have an undeniable ideological influence on government and legislation but, outside of the Vatican, they do not run the state. Islam does not have this tradition. Commander of the Faithful is a function that cumulates temporal and eschatologic powers. So that Moslem clergy have no qualms about going into politics and governing. However, the West can never admit that valid alternatives exist.

As usual the 1% are claiming that their massive appropriation of riches – some two-thirds of GDP over the last couple of decades – is in no way responsible for the present situation. The culprits are the borrowers not the lenders, those who spend more than they have, not those who have more than they can spend. They have unlimited means to get their message across, but who will believe them?

 

Bankers are getting the blame for the catastrophic situation the world finds itself in. Yesterday’s fat cats are to-day’s scape-goats, though all they did was to supply liquidity to a runaway process based on extreme inequalities. Considering the present uproar, it is fortunate that lending is no longer restricted to an ethnic minority.

There are those who own the means of production and those who labour. There are those who own their means of production and provide the labour. They are salaried share-holders and cooperative workers, but their influence on decision making is rarely more significant than that of organised labour anywhere. And there are those whose tool is the mind, those who acquire knowledge in social institutions and use it as a means to produce value. The liberal professions, professors and middle management, the petite bourgeoisie sits on the fence and, because of this particular ownership and the pecuniary advantages it brings, usually sides with property. Should their privileged position be challenged politically or economically, middle class intellectuals react by forming the vanguard of opposition and, occasionally, of revolution. Thinkers of all nations! Sharpen your pens and join the rabble.

When reading the classics of socialism (Proudhon, Marx, Luxemburg, Lassalle, etc.), their focus on property is striking. To-day’s progressists have completely abandoned the subject, because to-day’s middle class have their equity, their pension funds and their life insurances. They have become capitalist investors, and none of them are going to suggest that the means of production should not be privately owned and exploited. It would endanger their savings.

No one complains when immigrants come in to do the dirty back-breaking jobs that no one wants, and accept to be under-paid. It is only when they climb the first rungs of the social ladder that there is a general outcry. Servile labour is never far away in the Western mindset.

The property of the means of production concerns all natural resources and all man-made tools. For as long as tools were rudimentary, property was based on land tenure. Historic accounts of 19^th century villages in India and of American native societies before their destruction tell the same tale of communal ownership of land, where particular fields were distributed by lottery on a yearly or multi-annual basis. The produce was also communal and was distributed according to particular needs. Tribute and taxes were paid by the community. Archaeological excavations in Northern Europe seem to present traces of a similar mode of production, and the old Russian “Mir” was a communal structure. This may have been the rule for agricultural societies everywhere. Primitive communism will not help to imagine a more effective form of property. It just shows that the present regime is not the only on possible.

The exchange of goods and services needs money as a standard intermediary of value. This money is used to measure one exchange after another in a perpetual process. So that the measured value of exchanges depends on the quantity of money in circulation and the speed at which it circulates. When the value of exchanges grows, so must the money to measure them. Either there is more of it or it moves faster, or both. The passage from metal to paper resolved the question of quantity, with some notable abuses. Then electronics began accelerating circulation and, for a few decades, the increasing speed of payments allowed them to multiply. To-day’s nanosecond trading can go no faster, which might explain the massive monetary creations of quantitative easing. As money cannot circulate faster than light, its quantity has to grow. Of course, the monetary destruction of the Great Credit Default must also be taken into consideration.