Public Property

Being interested in developing the concept of property and bearing in mind that the concept of state is an essential part of this development, for the needs of our examination here, let us retrace in a few words the history of state. Here over and over again the infinite speculative Rational Will of the absolute material actuality acts in strict accordance with its own method and passes the same way revealed up to now; it cannot be otherwise. In its self-organization as an ethical community, the absolute volition starts its development with the universal common property of the primitive (tribal) community. Being an embodiment of the willing itself Absolute Rational Will and, therefore, having the absolute ends of the human species, the men and women who belonged to this community understood that the universal common property is still one-sided and ineffective. Willing to develop their will for property in its totality, they also desired its other, its utterly opposite moment ? private property. The had to do it; it was absolutely necessary.

Together with the origin of the institution of private property, however, appeared its opposite, the public good, the state. Not surprisingly, from the very beginning of the development of their state life the ancient Greeks were interested in the public sphere and wholly engaged in the politics and ethos of their city-state. They made the Athenian polis great since citizens working for the good of the political community always make their political system great and virtuous because of their direct interest in the common affairs and their prodigious patriotism so that they all can profit and glory in common success. So much were the affairs of the polis in the centre of their theoretical and practical political will that they coined a special term - Politeia, which literally translated meant "the things that concern the polis", "the matters of the polis". Translated by the ancient Romans into Latin as Res Publica, ?the public thing,? it referred to what individuals in a political community hold in common or place above their self interest - the "public affairs" and the general system of governing a state.

The decline of the Roman res publica led to a deep political crisis and after long years of social and political fights for power in the I century BC, Octavian established an autocratic form of ruling with a view to taking possession of absolute power. Later the Roman rulers decisively overthrew all Roman republican institutions and created a new social order, in which the emperors reigned supreme.

After the decline of the Roman empire the early feudal state becomes private property of the ruler. At that time the monarchy had a patrimonial character. Not only was the king a ruler, but he also was an owner of the state. The power of the absolute ruler in the state was deduced from private law. According to that conception, over the land of a given territory spread the unlimited power of its owner, the economic and political well-being of the state depended on the ?private will? of the owner, who ruled freely and was the master of the kingdom and regarded it as his private property. Private Will triumphed over public law. However, it was neither capable of grasping the concept of public affairs from the point of view of the common interest of the whole country nor of realizing that the state included all its citizens and state authority had to act in the interest of all. There existed no legal order to protect the interests of private individuals, who were called subjects in the times of feudalism; the subject of the country had no legal base to defend his rights and could not look for justice in case of his rights being infringed by ruling authorities.

Later this state of affairs changed radically. The idea of state as a common ? public ? good spread again. According to this idea, the state is a sovereign constitutional person and possesses authorities expressing its Will. A conception begins to blaze a trail, that the nation expresses the Will of the state, while the monarch is only its mediating organ. In point of fact, however, the sovereignty was still concentrated in the personality of the ruler. The absolute monarchy appeared when a more modern conception of state citizenship with public and legal character was formed. The relations between the state and its subjects were no more dominated by personal relations, and all the subjects of the country were unconditionally subordinated to the state government. The monarch possessed absolute uncontrolled power over the state and was not accountable for his actions. His total power included all spheres of social life: the whole executive power, the legislature and the judicial power as well as the economy and the educational system; it was even occupied with small-minded regulation of social life, including the private ? home and family ? life of the subjects. The total administrative activity of the state, which was more a regime of arbitrariness than a legal order, made the subjects entirely defenceless, was called ?police?. The absolute monarchy gained the character of a police state; it limited the subjects' freedom extremely. The subject was only an object of public law; his role in relation to the state was based on the one-sided duty to subdue to the resolutions of the authorities.

Meanwhile, new dynamic revolutionary classes had appeared on the political stage. The time had come for them to start a victorious and absolutely necessary political revolution, to overthrow feudalism and the absolute monarchy in order to force the government of the state out of the hands of the privileged feudal aristocracy and liquidate the absolute all-power of the monarch, being illimitable master of the property and the lives of the subjects and in this way violating their sacred and inviolable private property with impunity; a revolution called to create a world of freedom. But at first this revolution was expressed in its scientific politovolical form. The starting point of the first theoreticians of capitalism in England and France as well as all philosophers of the Enlightenment was the eternal and unalterable right of nature, in which first and foremost they saw the basis for the unlimited freedom of the individual owner, subdued till then by the despotism of the ruling aristocracy. John Locke considered that man bears in himself eternal and unalterable rights by birth: a right of life, freedom and property. For him private property is a natural right prior to the state, which is created for its defence. In 1762 in his work The social contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected whatever kind of compromise with the absolute monarchy, enlightened or not, and recognised the nation as sovereign, not the king. According to Hegel Rousseau examined what the absolute justification of the state is, and proclaimed that free Will is the principle of that justification.

And this bourgeois-democratic revolution was accomplished. The theory of the sovereignty of the people, the constitutional guarantee of citizens' rights, introduced by the Declaration of the rights of man and citizen and by the first French constitutions as well as the theory of division of power were the main programme fundamentals of bourgeois democracy and laid the foundations of state constitution. Constitutionality was an incarnation of the principle of the rule of law; a principle, which demanded law regulations to be faultlessly observed by citizens as well as by state authorities. The absolute police state and arbitrary acts of the authorities were replaced by the constitutional state, which subordinated to law all the activities peculiar to the police state.

The victorious Great French Revolution made subjective freedom the principle of the modern world. The conception that the purpose of every political organization is to defend the inviolable and natural rights of man triumphed; for the first time in world history the relationship person-state became bilateral: the subject became a citizen. The citizen became a subject of the public ? constitutional and administrative, ? law, which guaranteed the subjective public rights of each person. Every person could appear in court as a litigant in defence of his rights on an equal base with the state. In accordance with the theory of division of power courts of justice became independent and were able to try cases impartially, all the more that citizens had the right to initiate legal proceedings against the state.

Now man can participate actively in the functioning of the political system. This is his new constitutional status, which is guaranteed by universal suffrage, the right of equal access to public services, freedom of speech, freedom of assemblies and associations, freedom of religion. The competences of the authorities must be subordinated to civil rights, not vice versa. Freedom can be preserved in society only when law and respect to man?s dignity and his ethical freedom guide the government. Thus, the subjective public rights of every person, his civil rights and freedoms determine the limits of state's competences and, at the same time, they are a guarantee directed against the state's interference in the sphere of free decisions and free choice of the person, in other words, in the sphere of his free Will. The last is recognised by the legal state order, which with the creation of administrative legal procedures guarantees the defence of subjective public rights and the interests of the human person preserved by the law. An article 4 of The declaration of the rights of man and citizen defines freedom as a right to do everything that does not harm other men; it is limited only by the freedom of other people, as well as the interest and security of state.

This idyllic lullaby of the modern capitalist state as such ? presented in the previous two paragraphs ? is the official song of bourgeois politovolia. However, by no means is the truth about the contemporary bourgeois state in the epoch of neo-liberalism that idyllic.

The freedom of the owners of private property of capitalist type is the main idea of The declaration of the rights of man and citizen, not the freedom of the people, which is refused actual freedom and actual equality, and consequently, has not yet attain its highest position ? the position of sovereign, which by right belongs to it. The Declaration is permeated with capitalist liberalism; the rights of man, which it proclaims, are not in the least genuinely universal rights of Man, but first and foremost bourgeois privileges. State power ? which this Manifesto defines as public property ? was dominated by the Big Bourgeoisie at the time and still is. The people as such ? which was used as cannon-fodder in the wars, ? did not have and still does not have the right to actual participation in the rule of its country. In fact, even the so much praised Swiss democracy has never ever attained to the standpoint of actual participation of the people of Switzerland in political power: referenda and petitions are not all of what people can achieve.

It cannot have been otherwise. The state which the dominating and exploiting bourgeois class established for itself was busy with the organisation of the principle of private property of capitalist type and led to almost total alienation of all rights of the labouring classes. Even today the task which still confront us is the Man to emancipate himself, to enter in possession of his rights and duties in the newest humanistic state organisation of the political community and defend them against all aspirations of the dominating class. A right and a duty of the ethical ? humanistically thinking and willing ? individual is to will a true social and political freedom based on a humanistic social contract as an ethical actuality of the freedom of the self-determining and self-ruling community.

Thus, we come to the point at which we have to say what is to be done so as to express the aspirations and cravings of humanist will and develop the politovolia of the third millennium. With that end in view we have to reinvigorate and bring one of the most fundamental and oldest categories of political will back to life, namely public property.

We have already presented in broad outlines the history of state ? the great deed of our predecessors in the field of practical Politovolia so far; this presentation is absolutely indispensable. For we cannot but notice that their Political Will still does not go beyond the boundaries of finite rational Will. The determinations in which this Will takes possession of itself ? private property and subjective public rights, ? are only finite determinations; each of them differs from its other, but neither of them contains in itself the other as sublated. At this stage the Rational Will wills itself mainly as private property. Having their will still overwhelmed by the principle of private property, human societies time and time again allow one particular class ? the Big Bourgeoisie, ? to become the dominating class and enter into possession of the public good ? the state. The victorious Big Bourgeoisie makes the principle of private property ? the heart of hearts of its class will, ? the supreme organising principle of the public good, of the state with the result that the latter is denigrated to the role of a defender of the principle of private property.

At this as yet unfinished stage in world history the World Will still fails to understand the state as public property, a totally different kind of property, which is the unconditional limit of private property. Consequently, the Rational Will moves only within the sphere of private property. Being determined by the division of human society into classes, the Rational Will still has the state ? res publica, the complete public organisation, ? as something other, as its limit and, therefore, it still wills itself as only limited finite property. The Will has not yet managed to expand this sphere, to include it in the state in its truth and to manifest itself as the carried out into practice Universal Will. In other words, the Will has not performed and achieved the total process of its absolute self-owning yet. The Rational Will still thinks and wants itself in the categories of private property, it masters itself as private property of itself only, and completely fails to grasp the state and the subjective public rights as the developed and eternally developing possession and use of its own totally rational-willed nature. Since times immemorial the Rational Will has been predominantly thinking itself in the terms of private property and private law and, consequently, so profoundly has it been leaving its mark and deep groove in politovolia that no other property is willed and can be thought of but private property, and even the politovolia of today still does not think of calling the subjective public rights and the state a property ? a subjective public property, ? of the human person as such.

Yet, it will soon become clear that the Universal Rational Will has come to a new point in its development in which it wills to examine and realize the same content from the point of view of a completely new but genuinely supreme principle of the Rational Will; owing to it a completely new, more intensive and deeper argumentation becomes possible so that the concept of property can be developed further. Development invariably entails revealing new moments; in this case it involves introducing new politovolical categories and terminology. For the first time in its newest World-History the Rational Will is at the point of developing the fruitful idea of public property, not in its material and substantial sense only as it is usually done - and then as a public property is considered the state's nature with its land, mountains, air and waters, as well as public roads and public enterprises, - but also as the totality of determinations of a political community of human beings, who possess, use and have at their disposal their own spiritual-willed nature. By public property we are going to understand the total self-organization of the possessing itself universal Rational Will; a self-organization, which results in freedom of Will, i.e. the state is public property for it is the state that is the determinate way of this self-organization and its result. This broadest definition of public property includes in itself the living, acting constitution as a system of determinations and organization of justice and public freedom in each concrete state. It includes the principles and the organization of power, observing the common state interest and the stipulations of law, the rational state life as a totally developed world of freedom and a guarantee of public freedom and the subjective public rights as a universal good as well as the sovereignty of the state. Thus, the Rational Will has come to its newest universal determination, to its better defined universality, and is now busy dealing with the process of establishing itself as the Universal Will, which considers the Earth and everything on it as well as the state and its complete organisation as universal public property.

The World History shows the ever-lasting development of the Rational Will entering into bigger and bigger possession of its freedom in the permanently expanding sphere of rule of its own absolute law. The Rational Will is in the continuous process of its self-liberation, i.e. in the process of coming into possession of its ever-expanding sphere of freedom. It has no other property but freedom. The politically strong-willed person?s public property is property of freedom, i.e. property of political capital invested in the state. The nations as concrete human communities continually develop their actual freedom in the state; they aim at taking possession of common, public property and, due to it, they achieve ever freer possession, use and disposal of their supreme property. That is why it is true that each nation has such a government what it deserves, because the government is the determinate way, in which a nation uses and is a master of its public property. The sovereignty of the political community as an unlimited and actually possessed might to create its laws, constitution, way of ruling, government and freedom, to reign supreme, in other words, to be a master of its public property without any restrictions, is of absolute importance.

World history also presents the course of development of public property from only the abstract universality of public property during the primitive order through the private public property (of one only in the early feudal state or of several only in the early capitalist state) to the concrete, truly universal and really public property of all by means of general election, common participation in political life, equal access to social and government posts and last but not least general equality before the laws. It was not until the Great French Revolution that the World-Will began its advance to common possession, use and disposal of public property; the subjective public rights are just a part of this way and a great achievement of capitalism since then. But the self-developing Rational Will is still in its very beginning; the march of history does not end up to here. With universal suffrage and equality before the laws, the person as such becomes a subject of public property and begins attaining his absolute subjective public property ? sacred and inviolable, because it is the having itself absolute volition. A new politovolical category is coined here in the Manifesto: subjective public property. We cannot but pay close attention to it since it presents the new task that Rational Will sets itself. From now on, the Rational Will of the absolute personality is to develop, cognise and possess better itself as its subjective public property.

Thus, the supreme principle of the absolute ?I? ? ?Will yourself? ? at last in its development begins to realize itself as a property of each individual; the right of subjective public property, to which belong the constitutional law and all the rights and freedom of modern democracies, is a universal right, a right of every human person. The human rights and freedoms, the principles and the infinite wealth of Rational Will by right are a property of every rational Will; and only when the latter takes possession of and is in genuine possession of its property, it is free. The right of subjective public ? i.e. political ? property is uniformly and inseparably interwoven with the right of private property and along with private property it creates the supreme and sovereign property of the ethical personality. Like private property, which gives its bearer, the owner, the right to possess it, to use it and to be master of it, public property also gives each person the right to possess it, to use it, that is to say to practise it participating in the political life of the state and to be master of it not only during free parliamentary elections but at any time of his political life.

Much in the same manner as contemporary Western conservative thought, ? which regards equality as only equality before the laws, not as an abstract economical equality, more as an universal spiritual-willed one than as material equality, ? the will for property in its dialectical self-movement from and through itself sublates the only abstract common property over the means of production and puts on its place a concrete and truly legal public property of each person. This subjective public property is inalienable; man is predetermined ? to have property, to have freedom in and through society, in and through a political community. He is vitally interested in the best organization of society as a constitutional state, to which he strives for constantly and which he will tirelessly perfect as a guarantee of freedom, justice and general prosperity; a state, which is based on the principle of subjective public property. According to the latter every human person has at his disposal a well-deserved part of public power and together with others takes a part in the government of the state; the principle of subjective public property is bound to realize itself, to become a principle of the world.

This is the direction to which world-history marches nowadays. It will change the model of modern western parliamentary democracy. Theoretically the latter is regarded as a rule of public opinion ? a power higher than the government and the parliament; to a certain degree it is true. Parliamentary democracy provides open discussions of problems and free seeking of the truth and the best constitution, free competition of various political forces, freedom of meetings, associations and formation of political parties, free confrontation of political programs claimed by different political parties, constitutional state order, equality before the law and freedom of information, right to political self-determination of person, influence of society on the course of public affairs, right of society to control its political representatives in parliament, strict constitutional control over authorities, et cetera. Practically, however, modern western democracy is imperfect and deplorable; it is still neither the determinate way, in which the personality as such ? and society as a whole, ? is the master of his public property at this early stage of self-development and uses it totally nor the complete self-realization of the principle of subjective public property. As we shall see below, liberal states ruled by law are possible and will exist insofar as the person as such (respectively the society as such) takes possession of his (respectively its) public property ? the state and its political life as his (of the person) own life and his own deed ? and is the actual owner of himself.

It is the principle of the absolute infinite freedom ?Will yourself? that manifests itself as a principle of subjective public property. The human person completely owns, uses and has in his disposition the sphere of freedom, which he has mastered for himself as a member of free society ruling its public property. But the degree of possessing of that his property for every concrete person is strictly individual; it is where persons are and will always be unequal. Not only are individuals unequal as far as energy of Spirit and Will towards knowledge and prosperity, talents, abilities and diligence are concerned, but also unequal is the actually done by each individual hard work of Spirit and Will for achieving their purposes. Contradictory relations of one personal Will to other wills arise and as a result appears the division of society into classes; these are contradictions, originated by the rational will, which bears them in itself and overcomes them, achieving its organic unity. The great theoretical and ethical problems, faced by the Rational Will in each following epoch, are just an expression of its contradictions, which it creates in its eternally living process of seeking truth and justice, surmounts and overcomes them, coming back to itself, cognising and possessing ever deeper its rational freedom.

Now that the concept of public subjective property has been introduced, the Rational Will as such sublates its limitation, it contains no limit in itself, for there does not exist anything, which is not the very it. In everything it recognises and possesses only itself through itself, i.e. it has for its object just itself. Thus, the thinking Will is infinite; it reaches its infinite meaning and takes possession of its absolute infinite property. Private property of humanist type and subjective public property can exist only as interwoven; each of them, aspiring to develop as totality, with necessity contains its own other, causes it, keeps it and includes entirely in itself. The Absolute ? the infinite absolute ?I? as such, ? sublates the limit between private and subjective public property, infinitely mediates and unites them, and in so doing manifests itself as absolute property having itself for itself, as in-and-for-itself having itself absolute property of the Rational Will of ?the I?.

The infinite subjectivity, the free Rational Will of the absolute volition possesses the content caused by its creative activity ? this eternal world, which is a realization of the principle of freedom ?Will yourself? ? as its property. It is precisely individuality, in which the absolute volition realizes its infinite returning to itself and that is the determinate way in which it masters its own absolute wealth for itself and takes possession of the very itself as a property of itself. Thus, its greatest and absolute right is able to be a property of the Rational Will of every human person and, therefore, according to the concept of subjective freedom, the individual person with absolute necessity must have property, must have the total content of the absolute volition as a content of his own Will infinitely and unconditionally.

The absolute unity of private and public property is an immanent purpose of the individual; in all spheres of his activity, in everything, man knows and wants to know, has and wants to have only the very himself, to attain, to have and to use this concrete world as his personal world. Thus, he carries out into practice the great deed of the self-enriching absolute volition; his activity is only an independent and free self-possessing of the volition, and thus, the own self-possessing of the absolute volition: the infinitely possessing itself property of what has already taken possession of itself. This and this alone is absolute freedom ? the supreme purpose of the absolute volition. The latter is as much already realized, as eternally realizing itself in the process of creation and development of state organizations and their constitutions.

The possessing itself Rational Will is the principle of true constitution; the person as such is free, he rules his absolute property and everybody recognizes his right to rule it and he recognizes this right to any other person. The true constitution that will proclaim freedom as an absolute property of the human person is still to be written, but the beginning has already been put. The world of absolute freedom and free thinking Wills is the most superb and the greatest and there is nothing more superb and greater than it on Earth. In his whole objective actuality the person ? as a carried out into practice principle of the knowing itself and possessing itself absolute subjectivity ? finds and takes possession only of himself, unites with himself, while the above mentioned principle is as much a principle of freedom of property as it is a principle of property of freedom, of freedom as a property ? and this definition is the turning point, which has been made by today's politovolia.

The essential question of today's politovolia is: How much is the state a public property of the people, or ? we can say, ? a subjective public property of the person as such? The answer is: We are at a very early stage of political communism ? the golden mean between polity, res publica, the public (common) good, and personality (individuality). We live in a realm of civil freedom in which citizens act for their own personal good or private interests rather than for the common good of the polity. It all began with the ethical community of early capitalism that introduced the principle of representative democracy in the world; a principle, which was a tremendous step forward in comparison with feudalism. Hegel must have been fascinated by that principle, because in many places of his works he says: ?In the East only one individual is free; in Greece the few are free; in the Teutonic world the saying is true that all are free, that man is free as man.?¹ However, the fact remains that universal concrete freedom was not the actuality of the political communities of Hegel's time yet; they were and modern states still are a far cry from being democratic. A political system in which the so called citizen votes once every four years is a form of modern slavery, the reason being that once he has voted, his vote does not belong to him, but to his representative. The citizen alienates his Will and fully depends on his representative's Will and ideas. For more than two centuries, national elections have been part of a publicity spectacle designed to mask a political system that is not capable of being genuinely democratic.

Despite the entire demagogy about human rights, political freedom is still not a universal right of all citizens because the person as such still does not have a very considerable degree of possession of objective public property and actual political participation is a privilege of the elite. It is no secret that rich corporations control the political system of today through campaign funding and increasingly concentrated control of media, culture and the economy. No wonder that a system which works without democratic authority and which is controlled by a political and economic establishment unavoidably results in placing profits before the general public welfare and the environment. Public political life is reduced to imagery.

And yet we are at the very beginning of a turning point in the development of communities of people and polities; a turning point which is as important as the Reformation and the influenced by Marxism social democratic and communist movements. Political freedom is to become a universal right of all individuals; this is the immediate task of the World-Will, which will insuperably achieve what it wants. The fact of the matter is that it wills nothing less than political communism. It is the necessary development of politovolia in the nearest future.

The principle of representative democracy in modern political systems is exactly what the principle of private property is for the economic system. In his Philosophy of Right Hegel treats the principle of representation as a rational moment of the modern state but he failed to say that only at a certain stage of its development the absolute principle of politovolia: ?Will yourself? posits itself as a principle of representative democracy. But as a principle of eternal self-development the absolute principle of Rational Will has the internal urge to develop itself to ever-higher forms, each one of which necessarily refutes its previous stages. In modern states of representative democracy the free Rational Will still does not mediate itself in itself with itself. This and this alone is the reason that representative democracy is involved in the process of developing its truly higher form of direct democracy so that the political person as such can possess, use and participate in the ruling of his subjective public property within his political community or, generally speaking, polity. The latter is the determinate way in which the Absolute Will comes to total possession of itself so that each person has the state Will as his own and is politically free in politically organized and governed community i.e. in a polity based on the absolute priority of the common good over the private good. Such a state, or otherwise, political community, in which the sovereign power belongs to the people and they exercise it through referendums and direct democracy, is the nearest solution of the problems of modern humanistic politovolia.

Democracy based on the power of the people-sovereign means that polities, not corporations or corrupted representative governmental authorities, have direct control over decisions that affect themselves or their polity resources. The person as such is not any more a subject (as in feudalism) or a citizen (as he has been for two centuries in the times of modern capitalism), but a politician - a member of a polity, - a statesman, who can make informed and responsible decisions about issues and concerns that matter to him and his political community. For political freedom ? the highest point of property of the ?I? as such, ? is more important than civil freedom and citizens enjoy it only in so far as they participate in the political life of their communities, in which they are both rulers and ruled simultaneously.

These ideas are important; they are bound to redefine the standpoint of modern Politovolia. Rational Will is in the ever-lasting revolutionary process of self-organising its freedom; it is involved in the eternal and permanent process of entering into possession of its freedom.

Having a tremendous will for the universal, i.e. for the state, and carrying out into practice the latter as an actual res publica, the political Man of the new millennium wills to participate actually in the process of decision-making, to have actual political freedom and use it; the actual and acting will of every human being can be represented by itself only. Only when it has itself in the actuality of its objective law, is Man's rational will totally free for obeying its own laws, it obeys to itself only and, in so doing, it is at itself and is free in its res publica of political humanism.

NOTES:

1. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, volume 1, Greek philosophy to Plato, translated by E. S. Haldane, introduction by Frederick C. Beiser, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1995, page100

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