| The political will for private property |
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| Written by Ianko Stoianov |
| Saturday, 27 September 2008 23:40 |
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The political will for private property
a. On private property
In this chapter we will first and foremost examine the philosophical foundations of the institution of private property. Since time immemorial the institution of private property has been developed in practical politovolia. Willing to gain the greatest possible freedom of the individual for all creative activities in and through which the individual comes into his own, unknown men and women willed to have private property and proclaimed the principle of private property to be one of the highest principles of a truly ethical order. They started the march of the institution of private property in World History, in which the World Will developed both private property and common ? public ? property as equally substantial moments of universal economic and political freedom. As for ancient theoretical politovolia, Aristotle is a great upholder of private property. Taking into consideration both common property and private property he concludes: ?It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition. Again, how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured.?1 Aristotle does not fail to express how much delight there is in the consciousness of the fact that something belongs to you. He resolutely and with a fiery energy revolts against Plato: ?For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfil.?2 Aristotle knows perfectly well that people take care mainly of what belongs to them personally; they care less for what is common, or they care to the degree, they are concerned. This is a superb determination; law and ethics must be connected with people's personal interest. Being a wise rational man, who appreciates the temperance, prudence and ethical perfection of each person, Aristotle considers, that an ethical virtue in man's activity is a mastering of the medium; the extremes ? surplus and defect in deeds and passions ? are inherent to viciousness. He fairly lashes egoism as an excessive love towards the self and in his praise of moderate love towards the self he says: ?And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property. These advantages are lost by excessive unification of the state? No one, when men have all things in common will any longer set an example of liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use which is made of property.?3 That is all very well but ... what is the absolute beginning, the absolute creator of private and common property? The only true and unconditional beginning of property as such is the greatest that exists in general ? the Absolute Volition and its self-determining and self-actualising Rational Will; and there is no other source of the right to possess property. It is the only true, which in its eternal creativity and eternal vitality causes its reality ? the objective world ? and sublates this reality in itself; that is why the immediate being ? as mediated by the absolute volition ? is a finite, untrue being. A lower rank has the thing that is caused compared with what causes it. So the body of a living creature is not enough to itself, but it needs something other; it holds a limited content; it is not the total and united purposeful activity of its creator - the Absolute Volition. It is an infirm and created thing in comparison with the might of the creator. All finite things are the volition and are not the volition. They are the volition, because they originate from it: in its eternal life the volition causes them and sublates them, returns them back in itself; i.e. they are born by the volition and in it they find their end. They are not the volition, because it gives them existence since only it exists in and for itself. The volition alone is totally in and for itself. The finite is not in and for itself; it has no independent reality. It is created; it is only the realization of the volition, but only the volition, as the truly infinite is in and for itself, it and it alone is the immortal. The volition alone has absolute being. If the finite thing needed nothing else and was enough for itself, as a totality it would be in-and-for-itself and as effectus sui it would be the endless infinite coming back in itself, i.e. it would be for itself, the absolutely free and the self-determining, that sets its reality by itself, realizes itself; it would be the eternal and the immortal; it would be what only the absolute volition, is. But it is not; only the volition is the truly infinite, which in its endless creative energy causes the world and sublates it in itself and eternally re-creates it time and time again. It is namely in its absolute determination as individuality that the absolutely infinite and unconditionally universal exists as free for itself: in living nature as a principle of individualization, and in its supreme form of rational will as a principle of the individual personality of the human being as such. In individuality the absolute volition is at home with itself, in and through it the infinitely free volition gives existence to itself, possesses itself. The unconditionally actual, the volition as a self-determining and preserving itself unity, is the total; in the individual person the absolute volition reaches the highest, infinite freedom, which it is able to have in general, since it is the pure person that is the supreme form of its absolute principle "Will yourself." In personality the volition self-determines itself to a cognising itself and possessing itself Rational Will and true Freedom. On its own account personality ? as the caused, the created, and as a subject of the principle ?Will yourself?, ? has the infinite necessity to be a master of himself and his surrounding world, to cognise and take possession of the all-creating absolute volition, and in so doing to have it as its property. This principle is the supreme and sovereign organizing beginning of the true right of property, power and freedom of the individual person. This absolutely universal principle is the source of the subjective, private property of each individual person; it and it alone is the principle of the great human right to private as well as common property, freedom and Rational Will. The essential purpose and destiny of man is to be free in his own politovolical activity in a community, a polity, a res publica, to be a master of himself, to be the owner of his will, wishes, aspirations, knowledge, consciousness, of his whole life. ?Master yourself? ? the highest determination of Rational Will - can only be realised as the total unity of private and common property in its complete reality as a state ? a polity, a res publica, i.e. as an organisation of the objective common property of a community. Man is necessary to be regarded as a private property of himself. The latter is one of the moments of the absolute unity of private and universal property, man and man alone is this absolute unity. Man in his free individualization is private property of his absolutely actual personality: of his body, soul, Spirit and Will, of the whole universally accessible wealth of the Absolute Rational Will. In a just society Man has as much of this wealth as he takes in possession of due to his abilities, efforts, merits, talents and passions. As far as the degree of possessing, using and disposing of this infinite wealth is concerned, we are only unequal. Each man has his inner, individual life, his personal values; he is in possession of himself. To deprive man of property is equivalent to his physical extermination. The right of property ? private as well as public ? is sacred and inviolable, and the state as organization of rational freedom provides a categorical defense of the inviolability of private property. Each individual, personal will possesses the infinite value of the absolute rational will, which in and through man has its absolute purpose for itself; a principle of the free, infinite person. This principle acts in the history of society, state, political systems and law eternally; it is the absolute beginning, which in its self-determination and realization forms and creates them; it is the basic principle of politovolia of all times. As a principle of the general for all persons absolutely rational will this as much realized as eternally realizing itself principle of personal freedom necessarily connects them all in an ethical unity. Thus, as a principle of private law as well as public law, it organizes personalities ? for and through them ? in an actual world of political freedom; a world in which the private Will of each individuality overcomes its particularism and fills with an universal content, so that it subordinates to the common Will, to the laws of its rational law, has them as its own, finds in them itself, it is at home with itself and thus achieves its true freedom: a rational, free, mutual relation between persons, each of whom ?is therefore universal and objective, and possesses the real nature of universality as reciprocity, in that it knows itself to be recognized by its free counterpart, and knows that it knows this in so far as it recognizes the other and knows it to be free,?4 and therefore, man ?behaves in a universally valid manner with regard to others, and acknowledges each as the recognized free person he wants to be himself.?5 Civil society, in which the person realizes himself and is acknowledged as a person, is namely the determinate way of organization of subjective freedom. The free rational individuality subordinates himself to the common, takes part in it and at the same time wants to find thoroughly himself, his absolute ?I?, his total wealth as a predetermined for him property, to be a member of a society and in this way to fuse with himself in and through society, to work with passion and pleasure for his own, private interests and purposes, which are only moments of substantial public interests and purposes, to devote to his own activity, to his own deed with an energy just equal to the degree it is his own deed, to strive for the absolute, to love the Absolute Volition with all his rational will, and therefore, to love the very himself. What the free person's will wants to acquire, the most superb and the best for him, must come out just from him, must be his own desire and independent, free choice of the way towards his purpose, so that being master of himself to take decisions on his own account and bear a full responsibility for his deeds, with which he creates his own fate. The individual Will is in a possession of its absoluteness, of the absolute final purpose and nothing else but the total self-possession of this will is the source of his freedom; only when he is in possession of his own will, he is free. The independently acting free person manifests himself as a vigorous will for success during the realization of his private purposes and interests, for free private initiative and enterprise; he rises as his flag his sovereign and in the highest degree sacred right to form his life activity on the basis of his own responsibility for himself: for his deeds, family and business initiatives. He wants to find his own personal road to success. In its private property over the means of economic activity the free person's Will has its outer reality which all other people recognise as inviolable and exclude themselves out of it; everyone admits the right of property, because everyone wishes to possess and possesses property in strictly individual proportions, of which he disposes freely, uses it and develops it. And since each rational person knows himself as entirely determined by the absolute volition and has its unconditional and universal absolute freedom as his own, everybody recognizes the other one's entire personal freedom of his way of living, his eternal human right to a free and true self-determination and free Will as well as his inviolable right to choose freely and to develop himself economically and politically in all directions he considers significant and important to him. Everybody highly appreciates his own absolute independence and readily admits the right of freedom and respects it, not as some particular subject's freedom, but as freedom of man in general, as freedom, which is an absolute right. As Hegel says: ?It is only thus that true freedom is established, for since it consists of the being identified with what is mine, I am only truly free when the other is also free, and is recognized as such by me. This freedom of one within the other unites men inwardly, whereas need and necessity only bring them together externally.?6 Great and sacred is the right of the socialised individual, of every person who is a member of a political community, to have subjective freedom, to be the owner of his Spirit and Will, to have the right to choose and be entitled to possess property and have it at his disposal freely, to have freedom of thought and Will: in other words to have the total circle of freedom, which is the essence of law and order. The circle, determined by private property, is not yet the highest circle of freedom, which man is able to have in general, but it is absolutely necessary for every person's dignity. Hegel cannot but express the absolute necessity of private property: ?While the state may cancel private ownership in exceptional cases, it is nevertheless only the state that can do this; but frequently, especially in our day, private property has been re-introduced by the state. For example, many states have dissolved the monasteries, and rightly, for in the last resort no community has so good a right to property as a person has.?7 It is superb and true; such is the requiring unconditional obedience strict discipline of the logic of the very politovolical object, private property provides better way of managing it. It is a wisdom as old as the world; it is expressed in folk proverbs, which are a peculiar form of politovolia. History is first and foremost the practical self-realization of politovolia in time. Freedom of property is a logically necessary development and supreme demonstration of the principle of personal freedom. This politovolical principle is the absolute beginning of private law; its deeds find an expression in all the politovolical norms, which arrange the interests and relations in an ethical community by giving autonomy and freedom to private initiatives of different persons. Already the Roman private law had strictly individualistic character; it protected the individual rights of owner and the right to property. The individual had the freedom to sign various contracts. In 1804 Napoleon's code proclaimed the freedom of private property and determine the right to private property as, in principle, unlimited right of the owner to have entire disposal of his property. The person as such wants to have the freedom to act for himself; the greater this freedom is, the more rational and more vital is the organization of the ethical community, in which the absolutely powerful principle of personal freedom realizes itself as rationally ethical and, therefore, constitutionally regulated free competition among all the competing with themselves independent persons. Each of them wants to outdo the others in possession of the absolute volition; this is the determinate way in which the self-cognising and self-possessing absolute volition actualises itself as objective possession of each person. This principle is the basis of the energetic Will of the person to develop himself in a vital, dynamic and expansive way and it is manifested in his passion towards competition as such and as an enormous desire for success in increasing the wealth of each person and the community as a whole. Rational free competition is absolutely necessary for each healthy social organism, because it guarantees the members of the community the highest possible freedom of action. The absolute subject of state is the cognising himself and possessing himself person, so that the first, absolutely organizing principle is the person, and the state is only the actual organization of political freedom. In the field of private relations the purpose of the state and the law is to guarantee strengthening and free disposal of private property, a uniform law for all subjects of business life, providing the greatest ethical freedom of trade and industry. The legal form of being in possession of the world of goods has a purpose: to enable development of the entire activity of man; unreasonable limits of any kind in using of the private property, which is possessed by individuals, would impede individual activity in the process of accumulating common wealth. And if, likewise Plato and Marx, someone wants to equalize properties and in general to destroy the very institution of private property, he wants the unachievable. As Aristotle says: ?The legislator ought not only to aim at the equalization of properties, but at moderation in their amount. Further, if he prescribes this moderate amount equally to all, he will be no nearer the mark; for it is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized, and this is impossible, unless a sufficient education is provided by the laws.?8 He must make equal the aspirations, the strivings, the wills of men which are impossible to be equalized: ?For appetite is in its nature unlimited, and the majority of mankind live for the satisfaction of appetite.?9 The Will to acquire great wealth is absolute: ?And the riches that are derived from this art of wealth-getting are truly unlimited; for just as the art of medicine is without limit in respect of health, and each of the arts is without limit in respect of its end (for they desire to produce that in the highest degree possible)? so also this wealth-getting has no limit in respect of its end, and its end is riches and the acquisition of goods in the commercial sense? The cause of this state of mind is that their interests are set upon life but not upon the good life; as therefore the desire for life is unlimited, they also desire without limit the means productive of life. And even those who fix their aim on the good life seek the good life as measured by bodily enjoyments, so that inasmuch as this also seems to be found in the possession of property, all their energies are occupied in the business of getting wealth.?10 These are the philosophical foundations of the institution of private property. Now let us examine briefly the total development of the institution of private property in World History. We will see in the following chapters that having the infinite elasticity of the Absolute Rational Will, the will for private property wills to reconcile with and, therefore, with necessity reconciles itself with its opposite, the will for public property. Its development starts with the greed and thirst for wealth, which Aristotle so superbly describes above; they are the basis of the very first acts of the institution of private property. No sooner had it been established than it became private property of exploiting type and led to private ownership of one man by another and the institution of slavery. Thus, the transformation of huge masses of humanity into totally deprived of property people began; people, who have always been ruthlessly exploited. The existence of big labour armies of people without the right of ownership of the means of production had enormous consequences in the history of mankind. The principle of naked egoism, the principle of individualism ? according to which everybody is an end for himself, ? is in force in societies based on the principle of private property of exploiting type. Everything else has a meaning only insofar as it can be a mean for the realisation of his end. These are societies of economic and political Darwinism, in which some satisfy their desires and their interests at the expense of the others. The institution of private property almost immediately created a class-oppressor, an exploiting dominating class, which has always been in possession of the state order it created to defend itself ruthlessly ruling and breaking the resistance of the slaves, and ? in later historical epochs ? the resistance of the subjects (the serfs) and the working class. The will of the dominating classes to exploit them was as cruel as its desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of the robbed classes was infinite . Taken in its one-sidedness as private property of exploiting type, the principle of private property is absolutely inhumane; the whole world history is a manifestation and presentation of its true nature. And by its very nature this institution cannot but enslave Man and humanity as such and create people with slavish psyche; all kinds of master-slave relationships have only been modifications of this type of private property so far. Humanity has suffered its consequences for ages. Historically speaking, that is the reason why humanism has always been, is and will be absolutely necessary. History has proved that if the monstrous egoism of the rich classes is not subdued they are prone to the most unimaginable crimes. It all began in ancient Greece with the enslaving of the free. Solon was the hero, who gave the Greeks a new constitution, performed the necessary reforms and freed the slaves. In the XIX Century the working class was exploited equally mercilessly and forced to work for 14-16 hours a day; the horror of this exploitation was superbly described by Marx and Engels in their works. This time it was the working class that took the role of Solon and, due to its heroic fights, won the right of an eight hours working day, universal suffrage, etcetera and wrote the constitutions of XX Century and led to the establishment of the state of welfare. Like Plato, Marx grasped the substantial of his time. In The Capital ? a work of genius ? he described the mechanism of exploitation of the proletariat by the Big Bourgeoisie. Frankly speaking, today the mechanism of exploitation is still very much the same; it has been incredibly developed but has not changed its wolfish nature. At the same time, like the proletariat at the time of Marx, the contemporary political proletariat still does not know much about this mechanism because being put under the monstrous propaganda of the Big Bourgeoisie it is totally brainwashed and easily manipulated. The history of mankind shows that all previous state orders based on the principle of private property of exploiting type aimed at creating the ?private? personality, i.e. personality, which is totally immersed in its private life, exists only for the private and not only is alienated, i.e. expropriated from the product of its labour, as Marx superbly teaches but ? as this Manifesto aims at showing and teaching ? is also alienated and expropriated from its highest property, namely, the state, its public property. This is one of the aims of this manifesto: to show the inhumanity of the highest form of private property known to mankind so far, namely the private property of capitalist type; it is inhumane for it promotes exploitation of man by man, theft of public property, greed and monstrous egoism, on the basis of which no true ethics could be created ? there is nothing sacred, nothing can withstand its destructive energy because money is the God of Big Bourgeoisie, money is the measure of all values. The prophets of neo-liberalism are loud in their praises of free competition in the world of private property of exploiting type and resist state interference because the dominating class needs the state first and foremost to ensure their virtually illimitable freedom of exploitation and oppression of the masses. Such are the bourgeois rule of law and its philosophy of right. What right! The right of the stronger to rob and expropriate with impunity. The right to enslave souls and treat people as things, as objects, not as subjects. What rights of Man! The right to be a private person only, not a citizen. The right to be a citizen by name only. The right to go to football matches and rock concerts! And countless duties; first and foremost the duty to keep quiet, to be an obedient and law-abiding sheep in the hands of the wolfish species. This is to be changed! Once and forever. Modern Humanists have the courage to declare their goal crystal clear: The principle of private property of exploiting capitalist type deserves to be abolished and will be abolished by a new truly just private property of humanist type. The world-historical mission of today's oppressed class is to become a class-liberator and implement this higher form of private property. A new humanist teaching has appeared in the world and it is bound to realise its ends for they are ends of the absolute rational will.
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