these sectors get subcontracted to private companies. Those blessed with sufficient money power can then buy up (or steal) almost anything and everything to the exclusion of the mass of the population that is lacking in sufficient money power, subversive guile or political/military influence to compete. But the fact that it is now possible to buy up proprietary rights to gene sequences, pollution credits and weather futures should surely, in the light of Polanyi’s warnings, give us pause. The trouble, however, it that all of this seems to be so embedded in the ‘natural’ and unshakeable bourgeois order of things that it seems not only understandable but inevitable that business as usual should be able to dominate social life in spheres of social and cultural activity where it has absolutely no business to be. Exchange value is everywhere the master and use value the slave. It is in this context that the revolt of the mass of the people in the name of inadequate access to fundamental use values becomes imperative.
That imperative then couples with a systematic critique and revolt against the ongoing politics of appropriation and accumulation by dispossession. That politics sits in a puzzling and plainly contradictory relation to universal legal doctrines of private property rights that supposedly regulate state–individual relations in such a way that coercive dispossessions, thievery, robbery and chicanery ought to have no place. Capitalist constitutionality and legality, it seems, are based on a lie or at best upon confusing fictions, if events in financial and housing markets these last few years are anything to go by. Yet we lack a common sense of exactly what the nature of that lie might be. As a result, we typically reduce the problem of accumulation by dispossession to one of the inability to apply, implement and regulate market behaviours sufficiently.
There are two other insights to be taken from this formulation. First, what guarantees that the individuals who so pillage and raid the common wealth will act collectively in such a way as to ensure the reproduction of that common wealth? Private individuals or corporations acting in their own short-term self-interest often undermine, if not destroy, the conditions for their own reproduction. Farmers exhaust the fertility of their land and employers have been known to work their labourers to death or to a point of such exhaustion that they function inefficiently. This difficulty is particularly severe on the terrain of environmental damage and degradation, as the example of British Petroleum’s part in the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010 suggests. Second, what incentive do individuals have to abide by the rules of good market behaviour when the profits attached to so doing are low and the rate of return on illegality, predation, thievery and cheating is very high, even after taking into account the enormous fines that might be levied for misbehaviour? The huge fines levied on financial institutions such as HSBC, Wells Fargo, CitiBank, JPMorgan and the like in recent years and the evidence of continued malfeasance in the realms of finance suggest that this too is an ongoing problem for the reproduction of the common wealth.
It is only when it is clearly understood how the ‘objective’ but totally fictional mediations of monetisation, commodification and privatisation of non-commodities such as land, labour and capital (all wrought and often sustained by extra-legal and coercive means) lie at the root of the hypocrisy of capitalist constitutionality that we see how that constitutionality (and its legal codes) can incorporate illegality at its very base. The fact that these fictions and fetishisms systematically advantage some individuals rather than others and so constitute the basis for the construction of capitalist class power is no longer purely incidental: it is the foundational raison d’être for the whole political and economic edifice that capital constructs.
That imperative then couples with a systematic critique and revolt against the ongoing politics of appropriation and accumulation by dispossession. That politics sits in a puzzling and plainly contradictory relation to universal legal doctrines of private property rights that supposedly regulate state–individual relations in such a way that coercive dispossessions, thievery, robbery and chicanery ought to have no place. Capitalist constitutionality and legality, it seems, are based on a lie or at best upon confusing fictions, if events in financial and housing markets these last few years are anything to go by. Yet we lack a common sense of exactly what the nature of that lie might be. As a result, we typically reduce the problem of accumulation by dispossession to one of the inability to apply, implement and regulate market behaviours sufficiently.
There are two other insights to be taken from this formulation. First, what guarantees that the individuals who so pillage and raid the common wealth will act collectively in such a way as to ensure the reproduction of that common wealth? Private individuals or corporations acting in their own short-term self-interest often undermine, if not destroy, the conditions for their own reproduction. Farmers exhaust the fertility of their land and employers have been known to work their labourers to death or to a point of such exhaustion that they function inefficiently. This difficulty is particularly severe on the terrain of environmental damage and degradation, as the example of British Petroleum’s part in the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010 suggests. Second, what incentive do individuals have to abide by the rules of good market behaviour when the profits attached to so doing are low and the rate of return on illegality, predation, thievery and cheating is very high, even after taking into account the enormous fines that might be levied for misbehaviour? The huge fines levied on financial institutions such as HSBC, Wells Fargo, CitiBank, JPMorgan and the like in recent years and the evidence of continued malfeasance in the realms of finance suggest that this too is an ongoing problem for the reproduction of the common wealth.
It is only when it is clearly understood how the ‘objective’ but totally fictional mediations of monetisation, commodification and privatisation of non-commodities such as land, labour and capital (all wrought and often sustained by extra-legal and coercive means) lie at the root of the hypocrisy of capitalist constitutionality that we see how that constitutionality (and its legal codes) can incorporate illegality at its very base. The fact that these fictions and fetishisms systematically advantage some individuals rather than others and so constitute the basis for the construction of capitalist class power is no longer purely incidental: it is the foundational raison d’être for the whole political and economic edifice that capital constructs.
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