“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence
Article I
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (Article 1). The Declaration also recognizes “the inherent dignity and… equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” suggesting such things are “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (preamble).
John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government described the state of nature as one of “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.” He suggested that we are all “born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties” and that we “should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” With the existence of the State, we come easily to the point where such lack of subordination or subjection is inherently impossible. The very notion of civilization—taken as constructed under Locke’s idea of the Social Construct or taken as something perhaps more sinister (even a warlord requires administrators and organization having undertaken charge of a population with enough numbers)—requires that some be subordinated by others, that some be in charge, some make the decisions and some simply follow along to get along.
Now, in indigenous peoples around the world—those few who have been allowed to remain inasmuch as they can—we can see various versions of this, some more controlling than others, some leaning toward complexity like our own industrialized, capitalistic society, some depending only on temporary reigns (if that is even the word to use) of a “big man” who is little more than an arbiter of disputes. Societies around the world and throughout history range, of course, from despotic to utopian, from Takers to Leavers (to borrow the parlance of Daniel Quinn). Inevitably, as civilization takes on more complexity, takes on more numbers, there is found inequality. Unfortunately, it is, arguably, an inherently human trait to want more, to want more food, to want more influence… to want more money in the modern age. The truth of this trait’s inherency is the subject for a separate tract; for now, let us assume that this impulse toward increasing consumption is natural. In Marxist terms, let us assume then that “the essential condition or the existence and for the rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of private individuals, the formation and expansion of capital” (emphasis mine). The world has the resources, but there are some of us (whether it be the natural condition or not; more on that in Article III) who choose to use more of those resources than others do. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “the Earth provides enough resources for everyone’s need, but not for some people’s greed.” Is is this greed that gives us capitalism, and that, quite unrestrained, has brought us to an era of conspicuous consumption by the richer folk of the world, the Core (taking into account the terminology of World Systems Theory) conspiring unconsciously (and far too often consciously) to keep down the Periphery, the poor peoples of the world who work in our factories, who farm our staple products, who serve as cannon fodder for political leaders and religious ideologues.
Natural or not, at a certain point, capitalist development became inevitable. Even Marxist notions allow for, nay, require capitalist development. As John Isbister puts it, “Marx himself believed that capitalism was a necessary stage in social evolution, for although it was exploitative, it was the only mode capable of developing the productive resources of a country… Socialism, he believed, would follow the self-destruction of the mature capitalist system… Marx was a student of capitalism, not of communism.” It is inherent in the theoretical construct of Marxism that a society progresses (with all the positive notions that word entails, but of course with some negative connotations as well, given reality) toward capitalism. At some point, at or around that point we would call the beginning of civilization, when the agricultural revolution rears its head and we decide we need surplus and we need to lock up our food, power settles into the hands of the priests and the politicians, those who hold the key to the food stores and open the chutes only when the rest of us work for our “share.” But, it isn’t a “fair” share. Earlier, before the agricultural revolution, or on small communes around world today, or among certain indigenous tribes today, there might be such a thing as a “fair” share. But, in a capitalist world, or in the world slouching toward capitalism, fairness was gradually and consistently eroded. Vandana Shiva refers to the closing of the Commons, the point in a society’s development in which common land, common property is appropriated for government-dictated use. She suggests in Earth Democracy that “the transformation of common property rights into private property rights implicitly denies the right to survival for large sections of society.” She further argues that “the globalized free market economy, which dominates our lives, is based on rules that extinguish and deny access to life and livelihoods by generating scarcity.”
To understand this, one must realize that the sustenance economy has been throughout human history the primary means of survival. Only, as civilization developed, this became an still becomes less and less true. As Shiva puts it, “nature shrinks as capital grows.” But, capitalism must have more fuel to expand. This fuel comes in an increasing amount of resources consumed, the increasing amount of wage laborers employed or enslaved (the negligible difference between those two options in the face of Global Capitalism will be discussed more fully in Article II). And, perhaps an even greater human toll than enslavement—resources depletion, when the more powerful nations have the infrastructure to redistribute to themselves the resources of those they can push around, leads to food shortages, to starving peoples around the world, to political unrest… and not necessarily to the Marxist revolution that is supposed to be the natural response to this capitalist accumulation. Capitalism may lift some up—and under the guise of the American Dream, or whatever version thereof so many other capitalist States must have, there is a sense that it can lift anyone up if one just puts in the work—but it must also put others down. Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet argued that it was “ the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live.” He went on to further suggest that it is “ want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him.” This easy comparison between wage slavery, wage labor, and chattel slavery will be discussed further in Article II, but it is necessary to hint at it now in order to understand that equality is simply not possible in our modern world because we have adopted systems and practices that mandate inequality to operate.
We have locked away the food (to borrow from Quinn) and closed the Commons (to borrow from Shiva). And, as a result, “the more the poor [have been] dispossessed of their means to provide their own sustenance, the more they [have] had to turn to the market to buy what they had formerly produced themselves” (Shiva). Now, if wages were sufficient enough that every worker could readily afford the same supplies, the same foodstuffs, the same shelter, the same healthcare… or if not the same then at least sufficient amounts of these things, then this would not necessarily be a negative thing. But, wages are not equal. Too many live in poverty, even those who have work. And, this leads not toward some increased effort to achieve and rise up out of poverty—though, logically, that is a possibility—but more often dire consequences. Poverty.com says:
About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a half seconds, as you can see on this display. Unfortunately, it is children who die most often.
Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone. The problem is that hungry people are trapped in severe poverty. They lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished, they become weaker and often sick. This makes them increasingly less able to work, which then makes them even poorer and hungrier. This downward spiral often continues until death for them and their families.
One has to wonder why more people are not enraged by the notion that there is food enough for everyone—in fact, there is arguably a limited amount of biomatter, making it impossible for the world to sustain more life than it can feed, as tautological as that should sound—and yet some go hungry. And, while a lot of the rest of us get to eat, we deplete the world of vital resources in order to have surplus that gets, at least in part, wasted. We find comfort in the notion that our modern agriculture is efficient—and, given the aforementioned supply of food enough to feed everyone, it would seem that we need only advance our means of distribution, except then State borders get in the way, varied local politics get in the way, and again, greed rears its head as well. Vandana Shiva describes how in 2002, 47% of children’s deaths in India were the result of a lack of food even as 65 million tons sat rotting in storage containers. She says: “we now have a world where the grain giants take our food at half the price that the poor pay for it and dump it on someone else’s market.”
But, it is worth mentioning that modern industrial agriculture wears a misleading mask. “The efficiency and productivity of industrial agriculture hides the costs of depletion of soils, exploitation of groundwater, erosion, and extinction of biodiversity” (Shiva). And, our “better” use of modern agriculture in developed nations supplies us with our choice of food in the grocery aisle, leading us to ignore the exploitation and disenfranchisement of farmers around the world who in the past could have has a successful sustenance farming livelihood. And, in 2004, 16,000 farmers committed suicide in India. Shiva suggests this suicide epidemic amounts to “the genocide of small farmers through the rules of globalization.”
Basic Marxist terminology must be understood to continue. Essentially, as Marx put it in his Theories of Surplus Value, “the rich have taken possession of all the conditions of production; [hence] the alienation of the conditions of production, which in their simplest form are the natural elements themselves.” Taken further, John Isbister has this to say in Promises Not Kept:
The feudal classes were transformed into capitalist classes by the process of ‘alienation’ of labor… They ‘enclosed’ the commons—that is, they fenced off the land and drove the serfs from it. This was the alienation, or separation, of labor from the means of production. In feudalism, workers had assured access to land and to tools; it was their birthright. Capitalism arose when the workers lost this access and were left with nothing but their own hands.
Thus arose the two fundamental capitalist classes: the working class, which did not own or have access to any of the means of production and therefore had to enter into a wage contract with the capitalists, and the capitalist class, which owned the means of production and hired the workers for wages. Capitalist exploitation occurred through the wage, which represented much less than the full value of what the workers produced.
The alienation of the worker from his product is essential to modern capitalism. Further complicating things, as I wrote a few years back,
…social relationships are defined by the values placed on commodities. Labor is traded for money which is traded for commodities. The social nature of society is destroyed by the abstraction of commodities--the separation of use-value and exchange-value (e.g. a pearl of no use worth more than a wrench of practical use). The purchaser of an item is alienated from a social relationship with the maker of said item, creating a "false consciousness" as to the nature of capitalism and the value of material goods and human life (or the social or societal value thereof).
Producers are separated from what they produce, and the true value of a given thing is lost. “When markets are replaced by the market, society is replaced by capital and the market becomes the anonymous face of corporations, real people, exchanging what they create and what they need, are replaced by the abstract and invisible hand of the market” (Shiva). And, we trust blindly in this hand that is already invisible and pretend that inequality is the result of inefficiency, the result of simple human failings instead of grand human schemes.
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