A Harper’s magazine was presented to me for my entertainment and education just two weeks ago. I have read one article and made a profound change in the thoughts I have about the future and the past of our human existence and our governments.
Considering the choice of an economy based on property or labor had not been a focus of my attention. Now it is. The advances and retreats on so many day-to-day issues in politics and governance can come down to this difference.
For property, we have natural and anthropogenic. The naturals are the earth and life forms it produces. The anthropogenic are the tools, machines, ideas, governments, and economies people make. There may be some that appear hybrids that are actually man-made like cultivated food crops – natural in origin and guided by human effort (tools, thoughts).
For labor, we have the people themselves. Their power to design, build, transport, and operate machines to manipulate property to care for themselves and accept stewardship of the natural property.
Property is not the base of an economy unless there are people who claim to own it. How people claim title to property is an economic system. So people are the first requirement for an economy. All economies work to the benefit of the people making the rules.
For some reflection on the past but more insight into our future, please ponder the twists exposed by the following abstract.
“The Silenced Majority: Can America still afford democracy?” by Rana Dasgupta, Harper Magazine: Essay, December 2020, page 47. (Concluding five paragraphs condensed by R. C. Masterson)
The assault on American democracy will … be engineered – even if unintentionally – by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley.
Facebook posses the greatest potential to restore the political balance of the eighteenth-century. Its inflated market capitalization is based not only on its future earnings but also on its capacity for global political management. In this sense, it is laughable to worry only about Russians or Chinese infiltrating American politics: it is already fully infiltrated by Big Data. Instead of mass rallies and totalitarian cults, society will fragment into mutually incomprehensible bubbles, and only celebrities will possess the transcendental power necessary to deliver electoral numbers.
Tech firms will not just transform the nature of democratic access. Like their eighteenth-century predecessors, they will alter the nation-state itself, placing ever more of its functions under unelected control. Silicon Valley offers new political and economic arrangements that are irreconcilable with the old. Antitrust measures by the U.S. government against them are, in this sense, epochal: they represent not just regulation as usual but a battle between competing forms of life. And if the state has the power to discipline the corporations, the reverse is also true. Silicon Valley’s global influence is waxing just as America’s conventional imperial power wanes; there will certainly be those in government who would prefer to exploit the power of these monopolies than break them up.
Over time, tech firms will build a more complete social and economic system, competing more aggressively with the state and further diminishing its ability to deliver material assistance to its citizenry. They are already attempting to end the state’s monopoly on issuing currency. Facebook’s embryonic currency, the libra, could provide a means of exchange for two billion Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users.
The real political battle in America today is not between a “liberal” left and a “fascist” right. It is between the people and a grandiose private system of social, economic, and political management that has the power to bring to an end the democratic certainties on which Americans have come to rely. If we wish to preserve those certainties, we will have to do a lot more…
Economic systems and commerce have developed to share assets for our food and shelter. Governance grows out of a desire to organize the actions of commerce with rules. This puts corporations in their place as synthetic entities formed by the authority of a government. That is corporations are defined by people, and therefore responsible for every detail of their existence and operation to benefit people.
Anything more? Please comment.
