Freedom Equality & Private Property Ruthless Criticism

Liberty, Equality and Private Property:
As Good As Their Reputation?

If individuals want to survive in bourgeois society, they must constantly pursue their own material private interests. At the same time, they collide with a lot of other individuals who operate exactly the same way: it is also their concern to organize their personal advantage - with the help of whatever means are available to them. The inevitable competition of everyone over portions of social wealth, over the exclusion of other people from it, forces everyone to damage others, to opposite interests. If interest stands against interest and the fulfillment of mutual needs is therefore impossible, the society must keep an arbitrator to oversee the competition, first of all simply by force. This procedure must not be carried out directly physically (the most viscous shooting and bombing would hardly result in a modern economy), but by a political power that grants rights to all participants, in that it subjects them all equally: the bourgeois state. This sets the reason for the clash of interests into the world and at the same time determines the conditions for their legitimacy: Individual wills count only to the extent that they are granted permission, and that the means they avail themselves of do not negate the validity of the wills of others in principle (this does not mean that others’ wills have to be satisfied!). So it decrees certain means to all individuals: Its regulations formulate what is allowed, and this already contains its negative implication (“you may seek your livelihood through free choice - but you alone are responsible. You just must see what you can get.“). If everyone is permitted in this same way, those who do not secure their advance with these means go under.

The state thus seems to play a heavy role when negotiating the impositions that are typical of the bourgeois world. The principles introduced by it determine the conditions in which the bourgeois individual establishes himself, sometimes more, sometimes less successfully. As its highest principles, the state implements and guarantees: freedom, equality and private property.

Freedom

In a social division of labor (such as capitalism represents, if not in a conscious form) the realization of the political program of “freedom” has a by far more determined and unpleasant content than most people think. Because of it, the interdependence of the individuals that exists in the social division of labor is completed not as a reasonable production and distribution of consumer products, but it introduces a completely different social yardstick: Each person is entitled to a strictly individual sphere of activity within which he can freely pursue his interests, i.e. he may follow his free will to the extent that he can undertake something with his private property. Everyone is thus granted the right to thoroughly refrain from interdependence from the start. It comes into play only when the interests of the others can be used for one’s own advantage, to make profit from them. Thus it is clear that the interests of others are considered at all only as vehicles for one’s own requirements (despite all ideas about the harmonious “distribution effects” of the invisible hand of the market).

Freedom therefore means the authorization and thus the obligation to organize one’s existence in the competition with whatever means one has. Differently expressed: It concerns the freedom to pursue one’s private interests against all the other subjects. So success or failure is made the responsibility of the individuals, those who must carry out the requirements of the competition by themselves and against others.

Anyone who considers this freedom to be a good thing must also want its restrictions. Because without state regulations over which forms of activities in the pursuit of interests are legal and which are illegal -- because they damage the basis of the competition -- the free calculation cannot be maintained. The demand for a “strong state” has its starting point here, where the private person nearly always at the same time cultivates the suspicion that politics limits him too much and lets the others get away with too much -- this is an example of the typical nationalistic fault finding at the “unfair” state, which imputes the suffered damages to a malfunctioning of the state ruler. However, the frequently lamented egoism of the private individuals is not a bitter necessity for the management of a society, but a result of a social organization that leaves individuals no other choice than to try to push through their own interests against all other rivals; if organized differently, the wish for a “more humane sense of responsibility” would be redundant because nobody would have to presuppose such an animosity of interests.

The main procedural form that results from the free spheres of clashing hostile interests, the locking by contracts between two sides with different wills, enjoys sovereign protection: The state is on alert to guarantee the freedom of contract so that the meeting of free single wills runs in an organized way. Everyone can negotiate according to their free business decision; therefore both sides commit to recognize the results of their animosity. The state guarantee of freedom obligates acceptance of subjection to it, and to its damages as well, because needs run contrary to the results of the whole affair.

Equality

The state guarantees equal treatment of all who are subjected to the capitalist system. The guarantee of equality defines an access relationship of the state to its citizens: From its interest in the activity of the “equals” as competitive subjects, it lets them advance in the free competition of property owners as equals measured by an impartial yardstick. It ensures equality before the law so that it does not serve the promotion of a group of humans by privileges, but by this directly creates by the basis for the hardships that develop if poor and rich are equally forbidden to sleep in subway stations. It is not enough that there are rich and poor - their equal treatment means in addition the systematic disadvantage of those who lack suitable means for the competition of the free and equal subjects. (This applies also to everyday physical differences; for example, if one expects the same of tall and less tall people for taking an object from a high cabinet, it becomes clear that equal treatment falsely possesses a good reputation: it simply depends on the means that are available to pursue a purpose.) If a beautiful life for everyone would be the purpose for the whole thing, such a state guarantee of equality would not at all be necessary – applied to their unequal possibilities, it guarantees that these also remain so. And in this regard the bourgeois state is precisely a “class state”: not by unfair preference for some, but directly by the fair and equal treatment of everyone, after it orders them to free competition and its results.

Equal chances, frequently called for with a critical intention, for a long time have been carried out in bourgeois society to some extent, as all citizens in principle have the same chance for advancement in the law - abstracting from all individual conditions and from what those individuals can then begin with these beautiful opportunities. Something pleasant does not come about with this indifference to the actual possibilities of those involved. That the seizure of chances entails the possible successful assertion against the competitor is already predetermined; the sorting will be left to the competition. The idealized equal chances then directly reproduce the unequal starting conditions. Someone who advocates for it makes clear that they do not have a fundamental criticism of the hierarchical structuring of the society -- it seems to be sufficient that all possess the same chance to take the upper positions within the hierarchy. That the majority of people have nothing more than this abstract chance and are found from now on in the lower positions, seems appropriate to these democratic fundamentalists.

Private Property

By the state guarantee of private property, a completely determined relationship between the owners of commodities is installed: First of all, all receive a just title to determine in free decision over what they would like to do with their property guarantee. On the other hand, this means that an obligation exists to recognize the other subjects as owners of their respective commodities and as free persons. What sounds abstract has extremely concrete effects: Anyone who wants to make use of a thing for which another person possesses the title deed must receive it through an exchange. In this both sides know only their own interest, which consists of wanting to extract an advantage for themselves, to make the will of the other the means for their own benefit. No one wants to make a deal "at any price" because everyone takes part in it only to the degree that it does not damage them but promises a benefit. Because commodities are exclusively produced in order to be profitably transformed into money on the market – this is obviously why the trumping of any possible competitor is necessary.

The consequence is that in civil society a human need counts for something only if a person can provide a return in the form of a sum of money (to have money means therefore to possess a state guaranteed power of access to alien wealth) - this is the barrier to the satisfaction of needs. Otherwise, the need remains unfulfilled; a fact which becomes obvious not only in the existence of homeless people.

Mutual recognition and the definition of the appropriate forms of circulation can only be established by an authority that does not represent any single interest during the exchange process, but has an interest in the exchange process itself - the state: The guarantee of the inviolability of property and person by an independent force prevents (as a rule) the employment of direct physical force or else the continuation of the free competition is put in question on the part of the exchangers. From this state function the fact results that all participants must want the maintenance of the guarantee, and thus the state, if they want to remain owners and exchangers of commodities. As private subjects they look only for the benefit that they can draw from these conditions; as state citizens, however, they abstract from this egoism and add completely general reasons for the fact that they regard the state as a necessary to extremely useful thing.

Critics who want to abolish the capitalistic mode of production (and thus become public enemies) should be able to prove that the state guarantee serves not the purpose of the general prosperity of humankind, but the maintenance of the property order – a big difference. Because to exclude others from the use of commodities, i.e. to only manufacture these at all in order to monopolize them and in such a way be able to extort others, is a state guaranteed right -- with very unpleasant effects for those who are dependent on the manufactured objects of daily use. Private property in the means of production makes it possible for their owner to employ those who only possess the property of being able to work as hired hands, to the extent that they are profitable. And not even against their will, because they are dependent on the sale of their labor. (People do not have to be whipped to work, but the opposite, they even usually want to do overtime because they need the money.) Thus their modest interest in the financial possibilities for the acquisition of the goods of daily need can be made serviceable. The means available for the decree fall very differently if there is on the one hand those who are wage dependent and on the other hand capital owners interested in as profitable a use of them as possible – also a result of freedom!