Read Online Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Harvey
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an individualised private property rights regime deep into the heart of biological processes and other aspects of both the social and the natural world in order to establish proprietary rights. There is a fierce ongoing struggle over the proprietary rights to knowledge of natural processes, for example. The field of intellectual property rights in particular is currently riddled with controversy and conflict. Should knowledge be universally available to all or privately owned?
An individualised private property rights regime lies at the basis of what capital is about. It is a necessary condition and construction in the sense that neither exchange value nor money could operate in theway it does without this legal infrastructure. But this rights regime is beset by contradictions. As in the case of money, the contradictions are multiple rather than singular. This is so in part because of the way in which the contradictions between use value and exchange value and between money and the social labour which it represents spill over into the individualised private property rights regime.
The first and most obvious line of contradiction is between the supposedly ‘free’ exercise of individual private property rights and the collective exercise of coercive regulatory state power to define, codify and give legal form to those rights and the social bond that knits them so closely together. Legal definitions of the individual and, hence, a culture of individualism arose with the proliferation of exchange relations, the rise of monetary forms and the evolution of the capitalist state. All but the most rabid of libertarians and the most extreme of anarchists will agree, however, that some semblance of state power has to exist in order to sustain the individualised property rights and structures of law that, according to theoreticians like Friedrich Hayek, guarantee the maximum of non-coercive individual liberty. But these rights have to be enforced and it is at this point that the state, with its monopoly over the legitimate use of force and violence, is called upon to repress and police any transgressions against the private property rights regime. The capitalist state must use its acquired monopoly over the means of violence to protect and preserve the individualised private property rights regime as articulated through freely functioning markets. The centralised power of the state is used to protect a decentralised private property system. However, the extension of the status of personhood and juridical individual to powerful corporations and institutions obviously corrupts the bourgeois utopian dream of a perfected world of individual personal liberty for all on the basis of democratically dispersed ownership.
There are many problems within the realm of market exchange that prompt the state to go far beyond a simple ‘nightwatchman’ role as guardian of private property and of individual rights. To begin with, there are problems of the provision of collective and public goods (such as highways, ports and harbours, water and waste disposal,education and public health). The field of physical and social infrastructures is vast and of necessity the state must be involved either in directly producing or in mandating and regulating the provision of these goods. In addition, the state apparatus itself must be built not only to administer but to secure the institutions it has to protect (hence the creation of military and police capacities and powers and the funding of these activities through taxation).
Above all, the state has to find a way to govern and administer diverse, often restive and fractious populations. That many capitalist states have ended up doing so through the institution of democratic procedures and mechanisms of governmentality to elicit consent rather than by resorting to coercion and force has led some to suggest, erroneously in my view, an inherent bond between democratisation and capital accumulation. That some
An individualised private property rights regime lies at the basis of what capital is about. It is a necessary condition and construction in the sense that neither exchange value nor money could operate in theway it does without this legal infrastructure. But this rights regime is beset by contradictions. As in the case of money, the contradictions are multiple rather than singular. This is so in part because of the way in which the contradictions between use value and exchange value and between money and the social labour which it represents spill over into the individualised private property rights regime.
The first and most obvious line of contradiction is between the supposedly ‘free’ exercise of individual private property rights and the collective exercise of coercive regulatory state power to define, codify and give legal form to those rights and the social bond that knits them so closely together. Legal definitions of the individual and, hence, a culture of individualism arose with the proliferation of exchange relations, the rise of monetary forms and the evolution of the capitalist state. All but the most rabid of libertarians and the most extreme of anarchists will agree, however, that some semblance of state power has to exist in order to sustain the individualised property rights and structures of law that, according to theoreticians like Friedrich Hayek, guarantee the maximum of non-coercive individual liberty. But these rights have to be enforced and it is at this point that the state, with its monopoly over the legitimate use of force and violence, is called upon to repress and police any transgressions against the private property rights regime. The capitalist state must use its acquired monopoly over the means of violence to protect and preserve the individualised private property rights regime as articulated through freely functioning markets. The centralised power of the state is used to protect a decentralised private property system. However, the extension of the status of personhood and juridical individual to powerful corporations and institutions obviously corrupts the bourgeois utopian dream of a perfected world of individual personal liberty for all on the basis of democratically dispersed ownership.
There are many problems within the realm of market exchange that prompt the state to go far beyond a simple ‘nightwatchman’ role as guardian of private property and of individual rights. To begin with, there are problems of the provision of collective and public goods (such as highways, ports and harbours, water and waste disposal,education and public health). The field of physical and social infrastructures is vast and of necessity the state must be involved either in directly producing or in mandating and regulating the provision of these goods. In addition, the state apparatus itself must be built not only to administer but to secure the institutions it has to protect (hence the creation of military and police capacities and powers and the funding of these activities through taxation).
Above all, the state has to find a way to govern and administer diverse, often restive and fractious populations. That many capitalist states have ended up doing so through the institution of democratic procedures and mechanisms of governmentality to elicit consent rather than by resorting to coercion and force has led some to suggest, erroneously in my view, an inherent bond between democratisation and capital accumulation. That some
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