Too big to grow

When the means of production, starting with land, become the property of a minority, there arises the question of controlling the propertyless majority. This “social control” (Allen) is basically brute force, justified by legislation that favours and protects private property. But, being so few, the owning class needs an intermediary mercenary group to apply the forceful control and enact the rules. It must employ soldiers and clerks. This necessity produces a three tiers society, a labouring majority, the armed forces and the ideologues, and the propertied rulers. The ruling class relies on the middle class for its dominion and ideas. This dangerous dependency is resolved by division. Clerk and soldier are kept in conflictive tension, where it is uncertain whether the pen commands the sword or the other way round.

Property subjects labour with guns and gods, with might and mystification (Engels adds misogyny), and it masters these instruments by constantly shifting dominion from one to the other. A pendulous movement that follows the ups and downs of the power struggle with labour. When labour is strong, property has recourse to unheld promises and revocable concessions. Its speakers offer the sky. When labour is weak, force suffices. But propertyless labour’s only possible strength is unity, and property’s major task is to disrupt all unifying endeavours. Ruling is dividing. The original split between have and have-not perpetuates itself by provoking chaos, by pitting all against all in perpetual conflict.

Private property, with its unavoidable accumulation, makes social cohesion impossible and acerbates conflicts to maintain its empire. A constant goading that regularly leads to bloodshed. Either the military fights labour or labour is pressed into fighting itself, in the name of national property, for a mother/father land it will never inherit. The pressure exerted by private property (rent, usury and dividend) and its divisive tactics provoke turmoil of varying intensity, which is probably linked to the trickle-down flows of wages and credit. When technology increases productivity and the value produced, property and labour receive their usual disproportions, and both of them are growing. Once the new technology is in place, the extra gains in productivity become marginal and the value produced stabilises. But property and labour are eager for more, whipped on by futuristic dreams and emulation. So property takes more by reducing wages and social benefits and, to avoid a social breakdown, it grants huge amounts of credit to labour and government.

Supposing that property is not completely mindless, the accumulation of debt to allow the continued accumulation of capital could only be a temporary solution. It offered a way to tide over until the next technological jump and a new growth cycle. The trouble is that speed and size, the two motors of productivity, have material and economic limits. Information is transmitted at the absolute speed of light, and though trains, trucks, ships and planes could still get bigger and faster, they all seem to have reached or passed their maximum cost effectiveness, as have big factories and high-rise buildings. If productivity is in its ultimate stage, the future growth that is supposed to resolve the debt crisis will not materialise. Unfortunately, the savagery of capitalist accumulation is only attenuated by a general increase in the value produced. In the past, property has shown its rapacious ferocity with every global recession, but each time technology was able to set off a new growth cycle with bigger and faster production. But, beyond the extremes of size and speed, this form of salvaging is no longer possible.

Private property was founded by violence and has shown no qualms about its continued use. Property’s last stand will be a messy affaire that might be attenuated if its demise is accepted as an unavoidable outcome. So far there are no signs of such a change of outlook, with crowds of ideologues waffling on about 2050, 2100 and beyond, projecting yesterday’s expansion into the distant future as a fundamental article of faith. Turning that round before everything goes haywire is at best an unlikely probability.

Theodore Allen. The Invention of the White Race (1994)

Friedrich Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)