[A-List] Property & the State (was:On the Role of Gold)

["Sherry & Stan Goff" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

I hear Anne insisting on "poverty as the natural state of 'man'," but the
definition of poverty is still very stylized:

Anne:  "My argument applies to all men, no matter where they are born or the
culture that was created by those peoples living in the territory of the
man's birth... ...I repeat - poverty is the natural state of mankind.  A man
born into nature is poor, he must forage for food, shelter, and a covering
of some sort lest he burn from the sun, or freeze in the cold.  The
structures the most primitive family could provide must still be maintained,
even if they are not improved upon. Wealth - as in infrastructure and the
ability to produce - must be created, and man has succeeded in doing so.  It
matters not whether he was born
into France in the 16th century, or Ecuador just last year - his natural
state is poverty, and only through the wealth created earlier did any
creature ever escape being born impoverished. Maybe the real question is
whether or not man, whose
natural state is poverty, is doomed to die in poverty? If not, why not?"

In fact, it is served up as a tautology; poverty is the lack of "wealth",
and the lack of wealth is poverty.  Then there is a reiteration of the
original statement that it is 'man's' natural state.

I return to my challenge of the notion of "natural" here.  I contend that it
is meaningless, because our existence within and as part of nature is given,
in all times and places, and inescapable.  Generalizations (caricatures)
about burning in the sun and freezing in the cold are not only unhelpful,
they serve to obfuscate certain "natural" phenomena and they implicitly
dichotomize "man" and "nature".  Homo sapiens is an animal, a mammal, and a
primate.  The forces of nature that gave rise to all animals, mammals, and
primates are the very same forces that formed our species and continue to
contain it.  We do not exist apart from it.  Our peculiarities are
johnnie-come-lately attributes, and they include upright bipedalism, manual
dexterity, enhanced frontal lobe capacity, and a very effective larynx, as
well as a number of historically conditioned social formations.  The
maximization of our niche to its present state is directly related to our
"nature" as heterotrophs who combined our physical and social attributes to
exploit energy extrasomatically.  That's as far as I'll take generalization
with regard to "human nature."  Questions of property and the state can not
be hypothesized at this level of generalization, and those hypotheses can
not be confirmed into theory without historcial specificity.  So the
differences between 16th Century France and modern-day Ecuador damn well DO
matter.  Dismissing this specificity is fallacious.  It is an evasion.  The
poverty of a South African who can still subsistence farm and doesn't have
to work in the gold mine is a poverty with choices, and it is different from
the poverty of that same subsistence farmer when he is pushed off the land
by the state, that intentionally deprives him of his means of subsistence in
order to force him into wage dependency.  This is precisely why the
generalization "poverty" is, to say the least, problematic.

We can tackle the generalization of "wealth" later, but we must tackle it.

Property.  Property is a legal fiction.  I can not be fixed as some law of
nature.  It is a purely social construction.  And it is a purely political
construction.  A LEGAL fiction.  While the generalization of "wealth" is
inadequate to understand this, the specific social forces that lead to an
accumulation of property (wealth) in conjunction with specific divisions of
labor, evolving over time, lead to polarizing antagonisms (propertied and
property-less), and the ability to hang onto property, whose legal fiction
is likely to be challenged by those without, begins to hang on the ability
to exercise control, including coercive force.  The monopolization of that
force, and the codification of that authority, on behalf of the dominant
class, constitutes the formation of the state.  This is where I disagree
with Henry's contention that the state exists to level the playing field.
The state is not a referee, it is a partisan.  It's very existence is tied
to social polarization into classes, and when we examine the evolution of
classes in history, we find not that poverty is some constant that abides
independent of specific social systems, but that it is actually developed
and enforced by dominant classes and imposed on their counterparts for the
specific purpose of maintaining class dominance.  The South African
subsistence farmer HAD to be de-propertied (from the point of view of the
dominant class) in order to push him into the "free labor" pool that worked
the mines.

Gotta go.

To be continued...

Stan