Mathew Lawrence

Based on the premise that capitalism will not go quietly, Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence have written Owning The Future. It is the usual harangue over the intense evils of capitalism and its satanic spawn, neoliberalism. But it is also a prescription: learning from capitalism’s track record to be ready when the cracks widen enough. It’s not about biding your time; it’s about knowing the goals and laying the groundwork. Achieiving small milestones. That makes this book somewhat different from the usual leftist screed.

It seems to be mostly a recap of the evil in our midst. There’s environmental damage and the abuse of remedies. There’s outsourcing and privatizing everything in government. The financialization of everything, so that actual production is just a side issue. And the régime of private property - still oppressing most while a few hoard the bulk of it. And the perversion of markets, particularly the financial markets, where dividends, already high, are dwarfed by share buybacks to enrich the rich, while providing no useful function at all.

There are long explanations of how the fossil fuels people have co-opted and corrupted the environmentalists. They have bought off the well-intentioned zero carbon efforts by cynically buying up existing greenery and presenting it as proof they netted out to zero on whatever filthy abomination they are ready to foist on the planet. Or tearing down an established mixed wood forest in exchange for planting an area that is treeless (usually for a good reason) with far fewer trees, all of just one species, and totally unestablished to accommodate a mixed ecology. All these things do is short circuit attempts to save the planet. And make the developers bigger property owners.

Speaking of property, that seems to be the bulk of the complaint. Just two Wall Street firms are now the biggest property owners in the world. They collect property. They buy up farms and combine them, buy up housing tracts or invade neighborhoods, buying up everything that becomes available. Then the rents rise as maintenance and repairs plunge. All over the world.

This is merely the latest twist in an ancient history of the propertied, and the rents they extract from the unpropertied. Private property is still everything, which is a pathetic state of affairs when considering we have had three millennia to fix that. But as the population soars, and the amount of dry land shrinks, property values balloon, preventing billions from joining the club.

Adding insult to injury is the apparent role of central banks to protect private property. Zero-level interest rates for the past couple of decades, frosted with huge dollops of free cash from governments after the financial crisis and then the pandemic have further entrenched property owners, rather than the bogus, stated goal of wider homeownership.

Good old private property remains the top key to wealth, and the 1% are out to own all of it, now that they have the wealth to do that. It has been, in the authors’ phrase, “centuries of enclosure and extraction.”

They mean this literally, too, for example in mining. Mining occupies the poor, while their products enrich the already rich. All while massively polluting with no responsibility for it, as the recent Supreme Court decision on EPA regulations confirmed.

The same goes for the modern twist – high tech. Employees at Foxconn are prevented from committing suicide by huge nets surrounding the dormitories. They are paid next to nothing for six day weeks, while Apple rakes in hundreds of billions of dollars from their work. It’s a very old story.

After decades of near slavery, Apple store employees at least, are finally forming unions. But then the authors also point to Jeff Bezos, who, in his euphoria over flying in his own rocketship, thanked all his Amazon employees and customers: “You paid for this!” he exclaimed. So they had. And continue to.

It is also that modern corporations have total freedom of movement – unlike real people. That they can avoid taxation, unlike real people. That they can finance politicians as much as they desire, unlike real people. That British and American corporate laws are forcing out local laws all over the world. And those laws dramatically favor corporations, even over government.

The corporation is the seat of all evil. One example vexing the whole planet right now (and absent from this book) is the shortage of microchips. This is remarkable for an industry that must and does plan decades ahead. The reason for the shortage is simple – extortion. Chip makers are refusing to build the needed new plants (called fabs in Tech) until and unless governments grant them the money to build them. They are currently demanding $53 billion and they really don’t care which countries give it to them. Globalization means they can locate anywhere and bank anywhere. They are sitting back, waiting for the cash, while automobile manufacturers, for example, one of the largest employers in the world, have had to shut down production for lack of microchips. It has made new cars nearly impossible to build or purchase, and raised the prices of used cars to out of reach levels for millions. Chipmakers don’t care; they can wait it out. This is the flower of neoliberalism. But I digress.

The authors say Wall Street is superfluous, that corporations raise all the capital they ever need on their own. That shareholders are both too powerful and powerless at the same time. That buybacks enriching top management through their stock options distort the perceived value of the shares. That too much is paid out in dividends and not nearly enough in building the business or rewarding the employees. That “it is not that law only helps the rich; it is that the rich owe their wealth to the social resource we call law.”

None of this is news.

The whole edifice of neoliberalism is a hypocritical ploy by the rich for the rich to become richer, precisely at the expense of the working classes and the poor. It is the greatest wealth transfer in history, and it’s all in one direction – upward. More and more countries are fuming over it. And taking small steps to go their own way. So far, unfortunately, those leading the way are Brazil, Russia, China and India, no one’s idea of role models.

The authors quite justifiably attack the supremacy of markets. They say markets should be subordinated to the needs of society, and not the other way around. They say this about pretty much everything. Government should be for the people, not in spite of the people. Companies should be run by workers, who should be paid like owners. Those who just buy shares on the open market – not so much.

And they go after the privatization of, well, everything. Governments guarantee returns to corporations, by allowing them to keep profits while losses are socialized by the whole nation. Private firms have proven to be incompetent in pretty much every sector of the public economy, from delivery of water, to running the trains, to maintaining government social programs. In exchange for their incompetence, they are hugely profitable. Even where they have not originated a service and just taken over a government one, the service is a dismal failure, focused only on the most profitable customers and services. The authors give the example of internet access, where the rural are abandoned in favor the urban, the poor abandoned for the rich. Services like these are basic and essential now, and need to be equalized, not milked, they say. Their efforts always suffer from underinvestment and overcharging. This, the authors say, “all but guarantee(s) to further cement the economic injustices and dynamics driving the degradation of the climate and environment.” As noted above, they consider carbon credit markets and zero carbon plans to be a joke only corporate titans laugh at.

So. What to do.

First, people must recognize that “individual freedom (…) should be understood as only possible through collective liberation.” The libertarian “ethic” of mass anarchy and everyone for themelf will achieve nothing. (It is the specific interest of the rich to support the Right and its libertarians to keep anything from changing.) From this point flows pretty much everything, from grassroots organizing, to union organizing, to political organizing. Constant nibbling at the neoliberal carcass will see these movements prepared for when they can implement significant change. Waiting for it to happen has proven itself time and again to be worthless. It needs to be long term strategy, and incremental implementation.

Everything needs to be redesigned from the ground up. Things like markets and healthcare need rules that make them beneficial first to society, then to speculators. Everything was designed and approved by those who governed. They can similarly be dismantled and relaunched as being beneficial as their priority. We made them in the first place. We can therefore remake them to serve us better - is the driving ethos.

The objective is to develop “a politics committed to reimagining our systems of ownership and control.” This is a logical and consistent message, but it is unfortunate it must still be repeated so often centuries later. If any of the above is news to you, get this book. It is well written, but for me, it broke no new ground.

David Wineberg… (altro)