The first SacredCow Steak to deal with is ‘chance’. That age-old mantra ‘life is unfair’, the ultimate fall back for any anti-perfectionist or conservative.
I believe that all humans should be born equal. The idea that the son should be born unequal because of a father’s failures etc., must be fundamentally challenged. I argue that equality is not fought for on a purely emotive basis - were it so then the fight for it wouldn’t be nearly as enduring as it is - it is also grounded heavily in solid reason. Why should you be condemned to poverty just because you were born east of the river? The logical conclusion of this principle is that either (a) all children are separated from their parents at birth and brought up in equal and controlled environments in a somewhat-authoritarian utopia, or (b), regardless of location or class, children (and for that matter adults) should have equality of opportunity.
This is the simple idea that we may not all have the same abilities, in other words our natural talents are all different, but none of us should be restricted by environment. You shouldn’t be afforded a lesser education just because you (or more likely your family) are poor and so on.
There are huge potential benefits of having such an equality. Putting the vital principle of ‘what is fair’ behind for just a moment, imagine the subsequent explosion in ingenuity and prosperity if we all had the same chance that upper class ‘entrepreneurs’ have had for centuries now?
In my opinion we should all be aiming towards such a state of things. It seems to me that the ‘fairest’ society in this sense would be a collectivist one, or perhaps a Market variation, without the harmful, in-voluntary and prejudicing monopoly that is the State.
The State in the sense to which I refer is a ‘hierarchical institution with a monopoly on violence, usually highly-subject to the interests of an elite within a hegemonic culture’. In other words: we currently live in a world where State Capitalism dominates our lives from cradle to crib. More discussion of this concept is clearly called upon in a later post but for now I’ll take it as a given that every State on earth, that I can recall, is subject to the demands of powerful corporations. This situation, disproportionate power in the hands of a few, automatically means that every citizen is by no means equal.
What, then, is to be done? If we hold our hands up and admit that achieving anarchy (if that is where efforts towards freedom and equality take us) is going to be a fearsome struggle, then which steps should we take? First I would argue that no cemented guideline will take us to victory. Anyone who says that aiming our actions at one particular segment of the State Apparatus is the right course of action, or that there is only one route (e.g., that of the pacifist reformers, or that of the hard-line insurrectionists) is wrong. No such course of action has ever worked, and the historical evidence suggests that the largest social revolution in history (the feudal-capitalist transition) was the result of a number of interlinked factors. That is not to say that we should do nothing, or that we cannot in any way accelerate the cogs of history, but that we must recognise a diversity of action.
But I must return to my salient point. I would like to outline one objective that I believe all egalitarians should hold, and which may be a building block for anarchy. That is to recognise the friendship between Equality of Opportunity and our common right to the Earth.
Our common right to the Earth recognises that individuals and corporations have long utilised natural resources to gain profit and power over others, natural resources which they have no rightful claim to other than they beat the rest to it. Why should Water Incorporated be able to close off a natural water supply and exploit huge profit from it? Why should they be able to tell those who wish to share this water that they are trespassing on private property? When did the human race, who inherited this earth equally, give such permission?
Let us remedy this great injustice, and let us do it by achieving equality of opportunity. Let me boldly suggest the first step, a first step inspired by Thomas Paine (who in turn was inspired by the struggle of the oppressed and by the example of Native American society):
“There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth… he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue… when cultivation began the idea of landed property began with it, from the impossibility of separating the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement was made.
Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention… But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.” Thomas Paine in his ‘Agrarian Justice’.
I propose that it should be an inalienable right that every living person receive an equal share of this ‘natural inheritance’ (something we can presume in an egalitarian anarchist society) and that in order to establish this right we must sow the seeds into the State Capitalist framework.
A Human Income sourced from the profits of natural resource exploitation should be distributed.
More details of the proposal will follow in Chapter 2 of this essay.
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