sunday thought

Sunday thought. 🤔

One of the biggest contradictions inherent to capitalism is the institution of private property rights. Essentially, socially-created wealth is communal property, but it's treated as if it's not. All of our labour that goes into the production and distribution of the goods and services that are necessary to make our social life and reproduction possible — and which includes expenditure of our energy, use of our creative mental energies, use of natural resources that are all of our inheritance, etc. — creates the extra wealth that finds its way into the pockets of owners and that we measure through concepts such as GDP. That wealth is socially created, and logically should be socially accessible. But under capitalism, it's not—it's primarily accessible to those few who own and control it.

This leads to inequality since much of what we call profit is, in actuality, uncompensated labour kept by capital. And rather than equitably distributing this surplus wealth and/or giving the majority of working people a say in how it's used, invested, etc., it's allowed to accumulate in the hands of a few who own and control, though various legal fictions with the threat of state violence backing them, the fruits of our collective labour and the use of our communal infrastructure and natural resources. To counteract this and help resolve the worst of the inequality this engenders, wealth needs to be socialized, workplaces need to be democratized, and the institution of private property needs to be replaced by an institution of common property relying on democratic mechanisms for support rather than state violence.

In a perfect world, right? 🤷‍♀️