The introduction of the concept of private property and currency fractured the old social contract, absolving individuals from collective responsibilities because it severed wealth from physical property. The need for wage workers and the erosion of local economies replaced the old collective contract with a new economic one.
While private property and a cash economy freed to some extent the rich from the poor, the restrictions of economic and geographic locality of the nation state kept their fate tied together and under the rule of a civil authority still giving those on the bottom some power to rein in the power of capital. The simultaneous evolution of representative government or the threat of revolt (economic or civil) in modern economies kept some accountability in the system to maintain some reasonable bottom and a middle class to support civil stability and wealth production.
Because the individual's fate had been severed from the collective fate, a compromise evolved that if a behavior is criminalized, than we have as a society an obligation to try and prevent that behavior, rather than just punish it. Consequently charity, social reforms, economic reforms, prevention and rehabilitation programs were accepted as the responsibility of the nation state as the balance to criminal sanctions. This allowed business to avoid their collective responsibility and give it to nation-states but compensate for at least part of the cost through the payment of taxes and the acceptance of reins on its power in the form of regulation.
That view, combined concrete and abstract thinking and reflected the pragmatic evolution of morality that advanced, no matter how haltingly at times, toward a more humane and just society and maintained some consensus across religious and cultural lines. In its simplicity it has established that there must be a balance between individual and collective rights and responsibilities in light of the new social contract.
Economic Influences, the Finger on the Scale
The economic forces have always bridled at their responsibility in this social contract, always seeking to further sever personal profit from collective responsibility and consequence. Collective responsibility and rights represent a challenge to corporations on an equal playing field, while individual rights do not. In a case of individual right vs. individual right, the outcome almost always favors the individual with the most resources. The elevation of corporations to individual entities having the same rights as humans, while denying humans the right to collective rights, is like shooting one fish in a barrel at a time.
As business is amoral, it has taken different directions at different times in history but always aligns itself with any moral value which it views as producing the most profit. The civil war when viewed from the viewpoint of conflicting economic systems was actually a contest to free capital from collective responsibility. The north had transformed into an industrialized capital production system free from both land and labor. The South represented a collective production of capital tied to both the land and the slave, a clash with the individualized system of industrialized wage slavery in the north that limited the entry of northern capital into the southern power structure.
While the ownership of other human beings as immoral is not disputed, northern industrialists claimed less collective responsibility for its workers than did slave owners in the south. In addition to profiting from war contracts northern capitalists were able to break the social contract inherent in the southern economy and spread the individualism that allowed them to gain control of southern resources, develop southern industrial power and rob poor whites and newly freed blacks alike.
While the north gained control of southern industry and resources, blacks stayed in non slave bondage, until society under pressure from the demand for collective rights, sought to correct the fault with the civil rights movement one hundred years later. Similar conditions in industry brought about the union movement and collective bargaining. The right has fought affirmative action and other programs meant to mitigate the severing of the social contract for collective responsibility through the advancement of an argument for individual and property rights. Business joined amoral greed with moral authority to accomplish its goals.
Another way that business avoids collective responsibility is to quantify the value of human life individually, avoiding that individual's value to the collective welfare. Value of life is relatively assigned by its ability to produce private wealth for business and is bereft of any moral value. For example, the family of a CEO who is wrongfully killed is due millions while if their child who has no education or income is killed, they have no reimbursable value.
We have even codified it in civil law concerning wrongful death. Poor people are valued less then rich, foreigners less then residents, white more then colored, working age rather than young or old, low-paid less then high-paid. Rural and poor boys are considered worth less then urban and wealthy when recruited for the military and women even less. While in the advance of corporate gain, death of a perceived enemy is actually considered a sign of heroism and honor regardless of whether they pose any threat to the collective good. In this system, Martin Luther King would have been valued by his minister's pay rather than his contribution to society and Jesus, by all accounts an itinerant beggar, nothing.
The ebb and flow of individual and collective rights and responsibilities has reflected the process of merging the social needs of the state for order and collective security, individual needs for freedom, religious beliefs and economic forces. Most often economic not moral forces have been the determining factor. Currently the economic forces have lined up with those religious/moral philosophies that support a view of excessive individual responsibility and repressive societal interventions. Business now seeks to discharge itself of the rest of the social contract. Both tax contributions and regulations that limit or demand mitigation are being discarded in the name of personal responsibility and individual corporate rights.
Unholy Alliance: Globalization and the Religious Right
Business supports private property rights not because it wants to protect you but because without collective rights the person with the most capital always wins in a battle of individual/property rights. Business hates the Environmental Protection Agency, the United Nations and other organizations that represent collective rights. Collective rights protect the individuals under their protection against large predatory economic interests.
The hate for collective bargaining, social security, health care insurance by business is based in the power of collective rights to prevent the exploitation of common resources and individual effort for private profit while making public the inevitable social, health, environmental or other financial costs.
The destruction of the Native American Nations were based on first demonizing them, appropriating their property and confining them to a reservation, then awarding plots of land to individuals who could be bought, bullied, or swindled. The process used currently by the religious right, business and government elements as their tool seek to do the same thing to those who oppose the final destruction of collective rights and responsibilities. In this country that means liberals, trade unionists and free thinkers. Hugo Chavez and various indigenous groups represent this threat in South America as does anyone that rejects trade agreements because of their destruction of collective rights and responsibilities. Islamofascism is just one extreme reaction to this pressure.
Globalization as pointed out by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Globalization: The Human Cost, seeks to elevate private rights to the supreme value. Corporations, while touted as collective efforts, are legally individual entities and treated as such under the law. Having achieved the same rights as humans they have now become superhuman. In addition to being immortal, they have limited (and rapidly disappearing) civil and no criminal liability (you can't put a corporation in jail), modern telecommunications has removed them from the confines of time and space (capital can be moved instantly anywhere in the world) and therefore they are not only superhuman but are supernational.
While private property and a cash economy freed to some extent the rich from the poor, the restrictions of economic and geographic locality of the nation state kept their fate tied together and under the rule of a civil authority still giving those on the bottom some power to rein in the power of capital. The simultaneous evolution of representative government or the threat of revolt (economic or civil) in modern economies kept some accountability in the system to maintain some reasonable bottom and a middle class to support civil stability and wealth production.
Because the individual's fate had been severed from the collective fate, a compromise evolved that if a behavior is criminalized, than we have as a society an obligation to try and prevent that behavior, rather than just punish it. Consequently charity, social reforms, economic reforms, prevention and rehabilitation programs were accepted as the responsibility of the nation state as the balance to criminal sanctions. This allowed business to avoid their collective responsibility and give it to nation-states but compensate for at least part of the cost through the payment of taxes and the acceptance of reins on its power in the form of regulation.
That view, combined concrete and abstract thinking and reflected the pragmatic evolution of morality that advanced, no matter how haltingly at times, toward a more humane and just society and maintained some consensus across religious and cultural lines. In its simplicity it has established that there must be a balance between individual and collective rights and responsibilities in light of the new social contract.
The economic forces have always bridled at their responsibility in this social contract, always seeking to further sever personal profit from collective responsibility and consequence. Collective responsibility and rights represent a challenge to corporations on an equal playing field, while individual rights do not. In a case of individual right vs. individual right, the outcome almost always favors the individual with the most resources. The elevation of corporations to individual entities having the same rights as humans, while denying humans the right to collective rights, is like shooting one fish in a barrel at a time.
As business is amoral, it has taken different directions at different times in history but always aligns itself with any moral value which it views as producing the most profit. The civil war when viewed from the viewpoint of conflicting economic systems was actually a contest to free capital from collective responsibility. The north had transformed into an industrialized capital production system free from both land and labor. The South represented a collective production of capital tied to both the land and the slave, a clash with the individualized system of industrialized wage slavery in the north that limited the entry of northern capital into the southern power structure.
While the ownership of other human beings as immoral is not disputed, northern industrialists claimed less collective responsibility for its workers than did slave owners in the south. In addition to profiting from war contracts northern capitalists were able to break the social contract inherent in the southern economy and spread the individualism that allowed them to gain control of southern resources, develop southern industrial power and rob poor whites and newly freed blacks alike.
While the north gained control of southern industry and resources, blacks stayed in non slave bondage, until society under pressure from the demand for collective rights, sought to correct the fault with the civil rights movement one hundred years later. Similar conditions in industry brought about the union movement and collective bargaining. The right has fought affirmative action and other programs meant to mitigate the severing of the social contract for collective responsibility through the advancement of an argument for individual and property rights. Business joined amoral greed with moral authority to accomplish its goals.
Another way that business avoids collective responsibility is to quantify the value of human life individually, avoiding that individual's value to the collective welfare. Value of life is relatively assigned by its ability to produce private wealth for business and is bereft of any moral value. For example, the family of a CEO who is wrongfully killed is due millions while if their child who has no education or income is killed, they have no reimbursable value.
We have even codified it in civil law concerning wrongful death. Poor people are valued less then rich, foreigners less then residents, white more then colored, working age rather than young or old, low-paid less then high-paid. Rural and poor boys are considered worth less then urban and wealthy when recruited for the military and women even less. While in the advance of corporate gain, death of a perceived enemy is actually considered a sign of heroism and honor regardless of whether they pose any threat to the collective good. In this system, Martin Luther King would have been valued by his minister's pay rather than his contribution to society and Jesus, by all accounts an itinerant beggar, nothing.
The ebb and flow of individual and collective rights and responsibilities has reflected the process of merging the social needs of the state for order and collective security, individual needs for freedom, religious beliefs and economic forces. Most often economic not moral forces have been the determining factor. Currently the economic forces have lined up with those religious/moral philosophies that support a view of excessive individual responsibility and repressive societal interventions. Business now seeks to discharge itself of the rest of the social contract. Both tax contributions and regulations that limit or demand mitigation are being discarded in the name of personal responsibility and individual corporate rights.
Unholy Alliance: Globalization and the Religious Right
Business supports private property rights not because it wants to protect you but because without collective rights the person with the most capital always wins in a battle of individual/property rights. Business hates the Environmental Protection Agency, the United Nations and other organizations that represent collective rights. Collective rights protect the individuals under their protection against large predatory economic interests.
The hate for collective bargaining, social security, health care insurance by business is based in the power of collective rights to prevent the exploitation of common resources and individual effort for private profit while making public the inevitable social, health, environmental or other financial costs.
The destruction of the Native American Nations were based on first demonizing them, appropriating their property and confining them to a reservation, then awarding plots of land to individuals who could be bought, bullied, or swindled. The process used currently by the religious right, business and government elements as their tool seek to do the same thing to those who oppose the final destruction of collective rights and responsibilities. In this country that means liberals, trade unionists and free thinkers. Hugo Chavez and various indigenous groups represent this threat in South America as does anyone that rejects trade agreements because of their destruction of collective rights and responsibilities. Islamofascism is just one extreme reaction to this pressure.
Globalization as pointed out by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Globalization: The Human Cost, seeks to elevate private rights to the supreme value. Corporations, while touted as collective efforts, are legally individual entities and treated as such under the law. Having achieved the same rights as humans they have now become superhuman. In addition to being immortal, they have limited (and rapidly disappearing) civil and no criminal liability (you can't put a corporation in jail), modern telecommunications has removed them from the confines of time and space (capital can be moved instantly anywhere in the world) and therefore they are not only superhuman but are supernational.
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