In these times I think it is ever more important that we pull together and stand up for each other.
I reject Trump’s use of “both sides” rhetoric and pledge to always get to the truth.
I pledge to attain, interrogate, critique, and transform measures of attitude, perception and belief revealing epistemological conclusions about the nature of what people know, and thereby stay on my way.
Locke’s labor theory of value.
In the 17th century, John Locke wrote his two treatises on government. In chapter five of the Second Treatise, he describes the labor theory by which property is created. Labor and labor alone removes from a state of nature and into man’s belonging the fruits of nature admixed with man’s labor and this is how come property exists.
God gave the fruits of the Earth to man in common. But private property can arise out of common ownership. In a hunt, man may take a rabbit, or gather apples or acorns, and it is his labor in doing so that makes those resources his property. By mixing his labor with the fruits of nature, man has removed them from the state of nature and acquired a right to have them. Private property, however, is distinct from the things of nature from whence it was created; labor is a creative force and the ne plus ultra of private property.
“As much as can be enjoyed, with enough and as good left for others” can be removed from the state of nature by the labor of men. When admixed with labor things from the state of nature are transformed into property that has ten times the value of unimproved waste land. If not for the invention of money, this rule would have limited no one. (§36 of Locke).
Money evolved from the simple exchange of produce for durable goods, money being the most durable good of all, whose only intrinsic value is the exchange value it has from the common acclaim of all. Money is a great spur to produce more by labor and is the main accelerant to enclosure of waste land. Many great holdings could now expand.
The holding of property is only too large if anything perishes uselessly in someone’s possession. Otherwise so long as property is used and does not take away from the common stock there is no limit to how much a man may have. The division of labor that is so unequal would not be possible without “putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money” (§50, 11-16).
A fundamental principle undergirds this argument from the great Locke. That is the axiom that every person has a property in their own person, or differently phrased, that everyone has an ownership in the property of their own person. This ownership then extends to the ownership of their labor. But it is self-evident that labor can only belong to the person who labors and is not severable from him, even so far as to be suitable as cause for claiming a property right from things that were once Nature’s.
Thus labor makes property and money also arises out of this system as a durable good that does not spoil, and encourages more labor to be done to create more property. The real force in this system comes from labor, which both creates and justifies property.
Henry George and the real wages of work
Following from Locke, labor is the real producer of value, while money is simply some form of durable good that disperses value throughout the economy and prevents spoilage. If that be the case, a very interesting problem arises when considering work for hire. This problem was laid out by the American economist Henry George and practically speaking, works out to this statement: if money be paid for work for hire, then the value created by labor must be dispersed elsewhere throughout the economy rather than contained in the wages of work. A fundamental question then arises in political economy, which is: given that value, the produce of labor, is not mentioned in the system of work for hire and is replaced by monetary denominations, is there not a theft of true value from the worker when wages paid in money are arbitrarily determined by the employer to be lower than the true value created?
Once we accept the possibility of this, we must accept the reasonableness of collective bargaining agreements. Only the workers who labor to produce value know the true value they are creating. If they are paid in money, the money for which their produced value is exchanged should permit them to buy the equivalent amount of value that their labor produced on the job. One of the stated ideals among those in the auto industry unions is that the workers who build the cars should be able to purchase the cars that they make using their own wages paid in money. That is an example of this. But too often throughout the economy this is not the case and workers are underpaid relative to the value they create, which leads to inequality in the economy and society. This shows that more often than not, when working for hire without the workplace representation that would lead to contracts for equal wages to value created, the true value of labor is at least partially stolen away from workers by their employers through the use of money to pay for hired work. Collective bargaining agreements are a way for workers to demand the return of their true wages which have been stolen from them by the institutionalization of wages paid in money.
John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness
The calculus of John Rawls shows that man makes use of his limited free will to make certain contracts that will to his eyes better his situation by a series of reasoned steps that converge on the function of increasing average utility. In other words association with other men is done for its social benefits. and by seeking them out man tends to increase, by increments, his average utility. (Rawls, 163).
Because the purposive nature driving the making of contracts and associating with other men is for increasing average utility fairness in contracts is justice in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nominalist and Realist
Intervening in an obscure Platonic disputation, Emerson states that in American life, there are universals that exist above and beyond all particulars and reveals another development in theory.
Emerson says: “Property keeps the accounts of the world and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been.”
Emerson points to evidence of the guiding principles found in these places: “If you go into the markets, and the customs-houses, the insurers and notaries offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspectors of provisions, — it will appear as if one man had made it all.”
But, he says, no matter how accomplished a man may be in public assemblies, such a man “goes into a mob, into a banking-house, into a mechanic’s shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is better than an idiot: other talents take place and rule the hour.”
Tocqueville’s administrative comments
On public assemblies in the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville made note of New England township administration in the Early Republic in his study known as Democracy in America. He took special notice of the essential division of sovereign power at its most basic level as Americans’ most essential guarantee of democracy. The circle of elected officials in the township are the foundation of political power, and it is already divided there among “many hands”. Each successive level already displays evidence of the multiple obligations constituted at the local level. Moreover, the judicial magistrate exercises the power to hold the elected officials in check. The truth of this organization is that beyond the very local power of the township the administrative power ends and governmental power is the only thing that remains. The administrative function is divided among local magistrates, including judicial magistrates. who are tasked with holding the other magistrates in check to the rule of law. Thus all actions by citizens or the government is amenable to correction by the judicial magistrates to conform to the rule of law.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. On the Common Law.
In Plato’s The Laws, the conversation is centered on the guiding role of intelligence. Those making the law do so with piety, rituals, and virtue.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. takes a different view in describing the law that is actually in practice in the United States. The law of the magistrates of the Anglo-American system developed from early forms of legal procedure that were grounded in vengeance. Both Roman and Germanic law, Holmes states, started from the blood feud — and the feud led to some arrangement by which the feud was bought off, and this procedure eventually became compulsory.
In certain primitive tribes if a man fell from a tree, the tree was deodand, and was chopped into straw for the offense of taking a man’s life. In other tribes, if a tiger kill a man, the clan of the slain had to hunt down the tiger and kill it or their honor was forfeit. (Holmes, 13). In Edward the First’s time, if a man drowned in a well, the well was to be filled up. If a sword was used to kill someone, the sword was forfeit, though the owner of the sword was not necessarily at fault. (Holmes, 15).
The legal response which would lead to the feud being bought off, would involve some analysis of the wrong done in the incident and the appropriate recompense for it, and some agreement arrived at that would provide satisfaction to the injured party and the interests of maintaining the peace.
The truth of the legal status of the word “possession” in the common law tradition is that possession denotes the facts and connotes the consequence while property and contract denotes the consequence and cannote the facts. If possession is used to analyze a legal problem but is not the same kind of right as property or contract, what is it?
Holmes says: “To gain possession, then, a man must stand in a certain physical relation to the object and to the rest of the world, and must have a certain intent. These relations and this intent are the facts of which we are in search.”
The answer, then, to what could possession mean in the context of the law, is simply put that it relates to, and fundamentally is, the labor exerted over some material substantive thing in much the same way as in the labor theory of value from Locke. Possession of a thing often characterizes property in that thing, but just as it has been possible in the English tradition of law to assert title in court proceedings over something in someone else’s possession, possession can be thought of as separate from the property right, and is most closely related with the labor theory of value from Locke.
Julian Assange is a free man. That is not a thing many people thought they would ever say. This has to be admitted. Although through his long imprisonment many hoped and worked to get him free, this will set a precedent in history I think, as a victory for human rights and civil liberties. I was just thinking that the image many people saw of Julian being carried out of the Ecuadorian embassy with two books clutched in his hand, that image looks different now that he’s free. As far as what the public at large saw, the story led from that image to the plea entered on Saipan where he said that he believed the Espionage Act and the First Amendment were still in contradiction with one another. And it shows or should show, Julian’s bravery throughout this process.
All I can add, is that through it all, Julian stayed ever the intellectual in the broadest sense of the term.
“So brothers and sisters, that’s where we’re at. We are at a pivotal moment in American history. And what we are talking about is something pretty simple. The status quo. The current economy. The current political system which is dominated by billionaires. It is working very well for the people on top. They love the status quo. And they’re going to do everything they can to protect the status quo. And our job is the very opposite. What they have nightmares about is that workers stand up and fight back for a nation that works for all of us. That is their nightmare. And our job is to make sure that that nightmare takes place.”
Bernie Sanders, UAW CAP conference 1/22/2024
Nov. 17, 2023
Moody's turns negative on US credit rating, draws Washington ire | Reuters
The ratings agency Moody downgrades the United States’ credit rating, citing “continued political polarization” basically saying to stop the political infighting in Congress. A voice on the radio says, “the dysfunction is all that is going on right now.”
September 21, 2024
The problematic with current labor organizing is Wall Street greed. It’s hard to target the owners of the economy because they are insulated behind financialization. But if we can successfully reframe the narrative — who knows? The labor movement has stepped up to address the two key questions of the 21st century: information technology and the just transition to green energy. Welcome to the 21st century: an information revolution powered by green energy. There is no alternative! It takes more democracy to operate more advanced technology. It’s just as simple as that. When we finally live in the world we would like to see exist, should that day ever come, we will have this organized labor movement to thank for it.
