An excerpt from John McMurtry's book Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 66-69
"The regulating idea of capitalist private property was first philosophically explained by John Locke in a treatise which was published the year after the English bourgeois revolution deposing James II in 1688. What Locke argued in The Second Treatise of Government was that all right and legitimacy whatever was the right and legitimacy of private property. Even 'life' was and remains for this mind-set another form of private property: hence payment for its loss was and remains an exchangeable asset, worth only the sum of money it can be marketed for if still alive.
The public good in this system is also conceived in private property terms. It is the property security of property-holders erecting government as their legislative and executive 'deputy'. No other right or obligation exists. 'Political power', Locke asserts (emphases added), 'is the right of making laws with penalties of death and all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property.'
Reason is defined in this world view as the capacity to obey these laws of private property. If someone does not obey these laws of 'right reason', then he is judged to have 'put himself into a state of war' (section 18) with the one whose property he transgresses, or the state representing him.
To understand another as 'putting himself into a state of war' with society by transgressing an individuals' property right is an extreme position. Its fix on exclusionary possession, which may itself have no ground in work or just desert, is also blind to the needs of life, e.g., the needs of the poor. Consider, in contrast, the redistribution of unneeded property for life need—as Jesus, Robin Hood and progressive tax systems have in part stood for. Or consider the first peoples who had their lands seized from them by Europeans. For them, the privatisation of nature into exclusionary private property was understood as a violent offence against the earth and fellow members of the community. The price that indigenous peoples' paid for these private property rights was centuries-long genocide—a genocide that persists at lower intensity today across the world, and is symbolised by large populations of native people behind bars.
The primitive accumulation of private property in Europe over much the same period was in some ways similar. Violent invasions and enclosures of common and fief lands drove millions of people off their traditional lands by legal enactments of an absolutist state. After these enclosures, the state punished the tens of thousands who did not work for employing 'masters' by such methods of punishment as public mutilation and hanging.
Such examples have never much disturbed the value-set of the money-property party because the facts are selected out of view. This repression of fact deepens as corporate privatisation of native lands and resources still advances in core regions of Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia.
Locke, who was a lawyer, first systemically expressed the proprietary mind-set that eventually developed into the corporate privatisation of the world; but Locke, like Milton Friedman and many others since, had to conceal the regulating principles of this system under pretenses of constructive individual freedom. By a theoretical shell-game that has been ideologically overlooked since, every one of the property principles he declares as justifications are surreptitiously transformed into their opposite meaning without notice.
Locke begins his treatise on property and punishment by putting three sensible limits to private property possession first, which—once reasoned through to win the readers acceptance—are all reversed by 'the introduction of money'.
1. Private property must be the outcome of 'mixing one's labour' with what's is 'appropriated from nature' (section 26).
2. Private property must always leave 'enough and good in common for others' to do likewise (section 27).
3. Private property must not 'be allowed to spoil' (section 31).
Locke then abolishes these reasonable limits on private property by a simple device, the substitution of money-demand possession for real property. He says or implies (from section 37 on) that the introduction of money nullifies all three of these provisos of lawful property.
According to Locke and the ruling system his treatise speaks for, money's use expresses the 'tacit agreement' and 'consent' of men to distribute wealth by the possession of money-demand rather than labour contribution. Since money can buy others' living labour, the owner's labour mixed with the property is no longer required. The absolute right of the non-producer of property against everyone else, including the actual producer, is thereafter presupposed as absolute. Money possession rather than work contribution now rules the social order, and is subsequently sanctified as 'the cornerstone of human society and civilization.'
Punishment of all who transgress this unqualified money right remains, however, fully intact. Anyone who infringes its claims—even if these are unearned, financially levered and in absentee demand—is still read as 'putting himself into a state of war' with the property owner and the state.
Since money-property does not 'spoil', its possessors also have the right to unlimited amounts, even if most others have none. As for 'enough and good left over' for these others, this third proviso of private property right also disappears from view. It is submerged in an argument (section 50) that all inequality of money possession, however many may have none or have more than they need, is rightful since (emphasis added) 'it is plain that men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth' by their 'tacit and voluntary consent to the use of money'.
This inequality has no bound in theory or law. It is perfectly consistent with it, for example, that a few have exclusive title to dispose of all that exists 'of the earth', while the rest all owe them more money to compound this inequality further. Such a condition is not far off realisation today.
Accordingly, punishment of all those who transgress this doctrine's absolute right to accumulate limitless money-demand property is imposed on more and more people, who are left with insufficient property to enable them to live. This 'free market', as it is called in the psych ops of the doctrine, has in fact become the opposite of the justifications made for it. Far from protecting the realm of life security for all, it has become a reign of terror over increasing numbers of poor people. The 2 million people we now see in American prisons, the many millions more who are on parole from it or in danger of it, the exponential increase in prisoner numbers since 1975, and intensification of people's anxiety about their economic future, are downstream effects of this property-and-punishment doctrine in the world's leading market order.... Locke and his successors... hide the fact that consent to money or anything else requires an option before it is 'voluntary consent'. Neither do they acknowledge that what is justified here means that ever fewer people can have ever more property, and ever more people can have little or none.... The concept of 'property' with which the doctrine began—a sphere of personal right to enjoy a domain of earth unmolested by all others including the king—becomes in this way completely decoupled from its traditional normative meaning, and indeed turned into its opposite. The right to enjoy private property free from the interference of others becomes the right to expropriate and harm others' property by the force of money right. Yet this mutant right of money property is viewed as absolute, and with no limit to its demand by self-multiplication...."
An Excerpt from John McMurtry's book Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 52-54
"On the surface, preference for 'the global free market' is dinned into the heads of publics by slogans saturating the corporate media around the clock, and by clubbings, tear-gas and rubber bullets if the slogans don't imprint; but underneath the instituted violence and propaganda, a primitive syntax of value equations is always at work preparing the public mind for acquiescence. Freedom is equated with 'the free market', and 'globalisation' is, in turn, equated with transnational corporate rights to all of the world's resources. Thus, the question is permanently made to arise against the opposition to this global occupation: How could any sane person not believe in the self-evident principles of freedom and global interconnection? Although the slogans trail in their wake the regulating principles of cultural genocide as their system of meaning, this way of seeing masks the destructive consequences as the triumph of freedom.
Those who oppose 'free trade' and, thus, 'the free market', are by the same value-set inversion perceived as opposed to human freedom and cross-cultural exchange. The only issue for those governed by this frame of reference is how to ensure rapid acceptance of this 'freedom' across human borders. This is the global marketeers' autistic circle, and nothing breaks into its final certidude—as long as it is acquiesced in. Conformity to the value-set is all the while perfected by media and academic idealisation, whose function is to reproduce this group-mind circle, while repelling all facts which expose its life-destructive effects.
Freedom = the Free Market is the grounding equation of this ruling doctrine and the system it legitimises. The further equivalence of the free market to the global corporate system is, in turn, unthinkingly assumed. What is not seen in these non-sequitur transitions is that the free market is, in fact, the opposite of the global corporate system. For the free market in principle rules out the domination of supply by corporate oligopolies and intra-firm international trade which now rule trade and investment across the world. Just as foundationally, any true free market rules out the domination of demand by oligopolist firms' pervasive advertising, domination of public regulators by political funding and media control, and semi-monopoly of public contract bids. Yet these contradictions between the ruling doctrine and the structure of reality are contradictions that the regulating mind-set cannot discern because it rules out reflection of itself.
The grounding equation of the system thus becomes extended to mean an extraordinary and absurd master assumption: Freedom = the Free Market = the global Corporate System. Conversely, it allows from this primitive regulating equation that those who oppose the global corporate system must also oppose the free market and are, thus, the Enemy to human freedom itself. Consequently, the negative corollary of the grounding equation of the doctrine becomes Opponents of the Global Corporate System = Opponents of the Free Market = Opponents of Freedom. We have seen the genocidal terror for dissenting societies which this primeval value-set has entailed over much of the last century. The world's indigenous and subsistence farming peoples have been suffering it for over five hundred years.
This primitive assumption-set has, in the surface world of global market ideology, many elaborations of substitution and reversal which together generate an entire omnibus ideological programme. In place of 'Freedom', the basic syntax of the doctrine also substitutes for the prime term 'Democracy', 'Prosperity', and 'Development'. One can discern the locks of linkage here by trying to find where any of these declared master values is anywhere publicly distinguished, or conceived as in opposition. Each of these concepts, that is, is substituted for any other in the primitive set of equations. The convenience of ideological defence or aggression then triggers this programme of false equivalences into repetitive assertion.
At the same time, the mind-set inverts, at will, the order of equations so that the following structure of equations simultaneously becomes the automatic and overriding programme of 'Free World' discourse: Global Corporate System = Free Market = Freedom = Democracy = Prosperity =Development. Accordingly, in converse, opponents of the global corporate system become the Enemy of each and all of these goods as invalidation requires, so that the original equation becomes by negation: Opponents of the Global Corporate System = Opponents of the Free Market = Opponents of Freedom = Opponents of Democracy = Opponents of Prosperity = Opponents of Development.... Precocious assumption of the doctrine's foundational false equations has fatal consequences. The opposition fails to target what it opposes in public, so the remainder of the chain of false equations which the public has been conditioned to assume recoils on their criticism. Because they say they are opposed to 'free trade' and 'globalisation', they are assumed by conditioned minds to be opposing freedom and international interconnectedness as such—an impossible position to defend. It is as if the opponents of human slavery were to assert in compliance with the slaveownner's language game that they opposed 'the rights of private property'."
As a supplement I recommend the videos provided below on discussions with Noam Chomsky regarding what socialism and libertarianism actually mean.
An Excerpt from John McMurtry's book, Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 25-26.
"The key to keeping the audience on side in the total morality play is the disconnection of act from consequence—the master meta-theme of this era which defines its fanatic character. This disconnection is necessary because, as the Vietnam War showed, the citizens of the smaller and weaker country whose heavens and earth are rained with fire for weeks on end from above must not be seen in the agony connected to the bombing if demonstration of the universal forces is to work. The underlying life-ground of humanity will not tolerate it in the end. The unspeakable programme of distruction of a different economic order can only proceed if the terror and the destruction of peoples' lives is blinkered out from home view. Since Vietnam, therefore, war on the poor has been packaged like a one-way video game. One trumph of power after another by 'our boys kept out of harm's way', blanket control of all news-gathering and reports in the name of 'security', and selection of all media facts and reporters of acts, sustain the toal illusion down the omnipresent TV screen.
Since the home majority never sees the terror and the ruin of poor people's lives by image control around the clock, only those who make it their business to find out—the heroes of the global civil commons—learn the truth."
I recommend viewing the documentary Militainment, Inc.: Militarism & Pop Culture as a supplement to the quote.
For news updates regarding geopolitics I would recommend visiting the website http://stratrisks.com/.
