Bullying and Private Property:
Central Components of Capitalism
We hear a lot about bullying these days. The Education Act defines it because it is seen as a pressing problem in schools. It is defined as a circumstance where one pupil creates harm, fear and anxiety in another in a setting in which there is a power imbalance as a result of exploitable differences in size, strength, size, age , peer group power, economic power, social status, religious, ethnic origins sexual orientations, family circumstances, and the like. The availability of social media often serves as a launching pad for bullying.
Bullying also takes place in non-school settings. Take the Bank of England’s refusal to give Venezuela access to its gold reserves because the British government no longer recognizes the elected government of Venezuela as its legitimate government and, therefore, disentitled that elected government from asking for a withdrawal of Venezuelan funds. This is causing hardships to Venezuelans in need of social or medical assistance. Or, take the decades’ old sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Cuba, or its more recent ones on Iran, Russia, North Korea, and any others nations which displease it: these formal policies by nation states (the US has allies, such as Canada and Australia) are based on the belief that it is right to exploit power imbalances that favour them to harm to, cause fear and anxiety in, less powerful nations. If anything like this took place in school yards, it would be treated as reprehensible, unacceptable conduct. Yet, this economic bullying is not treated as wrongful behaviour.
What is made visible is that bullying in school settings needs special legislation because elsewhere things are not so clear. This is so because bullying is a central feature of capitalist relations of production.
When a feature is embedded in social relations, it is not seen. Functionally, it is treated as if it does not occur. Bullying is, to use a faddish word, systemic in capitalism. Given the imbalance in economic power that accompanies capitalism, it is the rulers, capitalists, who are the bullies. It is the ruled who are harmed, who live in fear and anxiety. Individuals and groups chafe under the yoke but law safeguards the bullies.
There is a right to bully. It stems from one of capitalism’ core principles. This is that the ownership of private property is sacrosanct. This principle is embedded in law and is taken to be a normal state of things. The belief is so deep-seated in capitalist political economies that it is not questioned. The consequence is systematic bullying by those who control private property of all others, including elected governments which accept the need to preserve the rights of private property owners.
The privileges of private property owners
Canada styles itself as a market capitalist economy. All are supposed to use their private resources, that is, their property (if they have any), and talents. In this way they are to add to their wealth and, in the process, increase the overall wealth of society. At the centre of that system is the right to own resources, that is, to have private property to deploy and invest. In a capitalist political economy, law gives pride of place to capitalism’s essential needs. The right to own private property is accompanied by a set of ideological tenets that allow the law to give privileged treatment to private property. Pivotal is the not-to-be-challenged belief that private property gives the owner the right to exclude anyone else from it and from its use. It is for the owners alone to determine what to do with their property. The starting point is that no one else, not even the government, should interfere with this ‘right’. Governments need to justify any such intervention by persuading the citizens that they are justified in doing so. This is a heavy burden for governments and they are reluctant to disturb the owners’ dominium over their private property. These starting points put individuals who own enough private property to invest (and they are very few) in a position to act as sovereign decision-makers.
For us: put in links to: ownership figures, concentration of wealth, massive inequality?
The legal right, one which has been made ideologically acceptable, to withhold one’s private property and to refuse to invest it in socially needed ways is the key to capitalists’ power:
*It is what gives such strength to the capital strike. All capital has to do (usually at dinners, golf courses, private meetings, via lobbyists and tame media), is to indicate to a government that if it does X or does not do Y, some capitalists will do what the law allows them to do with their wealth, namely nothing. The existential danger of such withholding of capital to provide welfare makes government think twice, three or four times before it will do anything that might displease any major capitalist, even if it makes sense to do so. Obviously, this never-absent exercise of power over elected governments undermines the working of electoral democracy based on the One person/One vote model.
For us: put in links to: funding of elections; lobbyist influencers; limits of electoral democracy versus extent of private powers, etc.? For example: I wrote a piece on some of this—others exist
*This is why those who own property (the very few) may refuse to share it with anyone, no matter how needy those without property are. This is why the rich demand to be—and so often are– praised when they act as philanthropists.
For us: put in links to: the anti-democratic, anti-social nature of philanthropy; relate to tax avoidance? Again, I have some pieces available to start up such conversations; eg., ”Criminals and Capitalists—Review of Jake Bernstein, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Crisis. New York: Henry Holt, 2017, Canadian Dimension, 2018.
*It is why taxation of wealth and income by a properly elected government is so difficult. The government is easily portrayed as unjustifiably taking the private property of citizens and to do things with it that the owners of that property would not.
For us: put in links to governments’ appetite to lower tax s for the wealthy; the choice by government to give incentives to capitalists to have them use their property to achieve what governments ought to be doing directly, etc.? The recent use of WE to deliver a government programme, Ford’s investing of monies to build LTC facilities apparently to be run privately, monies to produce PPE…
*It is why those who evade their tax obligations are rarely treated as criminals.
For us: put in links, eg., Review, Charles H. Ferguson, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America”, Canadian Dimension; “Lac-Megantic and the presumed innocence of capitalism”, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/07/24/lac-megantic-and-the-presumed-innocence-of-capitalism, 1—7; The Bullet, A Socialist Project e-Bulletin,, No. 858, August 3, 2013; apitalsim: a crime story; “SNC-Lavalin: How Canada tilts the law toward protecting capitalists”, Canadian Dimension, 25 Dec. 2019.
*It is why recipients of government welfare are treated so badly by governments and the public alike. The government will be giving them money that they have raised by taxing other citizens. The welfare recipients are seen as being given other people’s property that these property owners may not want them to have.
*It is why those who cheat on social welfare laws are convicted of crimes way more often than rich people who cheat our tax laws.
For us: put in links, eg., Ruth Harris and Dianne Martin We’re Being Cheated: Corporate and Welfare Fraud – The Hidden Story, Toronto: Canada Scholars’ Press, 1997.
*It is why, should a homeless person set up a tent in a rich man’s backyard, the rich man can count on the police to physically remove the homeless person. This is one way the police “serve and protect”.
*It is is why a nation’s assets being privately controlled, leaves nations without public and social housing and shelters for the needy. The ownmers of capital do not invest it just to be decent. They need to maximize profits.
For us: pit in links to housing and homeless writings; David, over to you; see also The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist
*It is why First Nations are impoverished and remain immiserated—their lands and their very source of living and surviving was stolen from them and has been recast as private property which is not to be taken away. The ‘morality’ underlying this stealing of land and ways of life was that the First Nation peoples did not own the lands as private property in OUR sense. They were, therefore, ‘free’ territories, there for the taking by the strong.
For us: links to any of the many reports on Aboriginal rights and land treaties; judicial decisions which give the right to limited uses of land for hunting and fishing but not for commercial purposes; for the right to be CONSULTED about pipelines, not given a right to reject them, etc.
*It is why any natural resource that is not owned by anyone—as in First Nations’ territories—can be grabbed and used and why the environment is pillaged and ravaged as capitalists take dominium over natural resources and use them to increase their wealth, to make their stash of private property bigger and bigger, no matter at what cost to the ecology of the planet or the health of its inhabitants.
For us: put in links to Rachel Carson, Ian Angus, Anthropocene, Green New Deal, over to you Nick
*It is why, by allowing ideas to be translated into things capable of being privately owned, new technologies owned by capitalists are used for the oppression of workers and the maintenance of a surveillance society.
For us: put in links to, Skylab , Soshana…over to you Nick
*It is why workers are not allowed to use an employer’s premises, that is, their workplace, to meet and ask fellow workers to join them to form a union unless the property-owning employer gives them permission to do so.They are on the employer’s private property and they need his blessing. While unionization is a perfectly legitimate activity in Canada, union organizers often find themselves meeting workers outside working hours, in secret, as if they were tawdry adulterers or low level would-be criminals.
For us: put in links about the difficulties of organizing unions
*It is why workers who, when they have a dispute with their employer and who try to communicate with potential supporters, must keep off that employer’s property. They must stay on public property when picketing. This marginalization is enforced by the police. The police will claim to be acting ‘neutrally’. These kinds of ‘neutral’ acts put the police squarely on the side of the employer because it stops unions from being as effective as they might be. This is how the police ‘serve and protect’.
*It is why picketers also may be controlled and shooed away by the police even when they are on public property. The police will do this as picketers may not interfere with the public’s normal use of that public property. Yet another way for the police ‘to serve and to protect’.
For us: put in links on picketing laws, limitations, eg. Eaton’s trespass case, Pepsi_Cola case in Supreme Court of Canada
*It is why people who want to exercise their right to speak, to protest, to associate, to assemble, on public property may face restraints. It is not only the public’s right to use the public space unimpededly that is to be protected from those seeking to express their political views, but also the right of property owners to conduct business with that public that is to be safeguarded. Shopkeepers and office operators may demand the police to ensure easy access to their places of business.
It is one of the reasons given as to why demonstrators must get a permit for their marches, their rallies.
It is one of the reasons given as to why peaceful, democratically encouraged demonstrations and rallies are patrolled by the police. This is yet another way ‘to serve and protect’ private property.
For us: put in links about G20, Days of Protest, about Occupy Now, Idle No More, pipeline protests, OKA,
*It is the right for property owners to choose what to do with their property that explains why every collective agreement has a provision that says that the employer has the right to do as it likes with its assets unless the union has explicitly limited that right in some way. It is known as the prerogative of management clause. The Oxford Dictionary defines prerogative as “the right of the sovereign, theoretically subject to no restriction; a peculiar right or privilege; natural or divinely-given advantage”. The disciplinary arbitration system enforces this crucial property right. It is backed-up by the courts and the police as they’serve and protect’ private property owners.
The list of the ways in which the owners of private property are entitled to ask the law to come to their aid to allow them to exercise sovereignty over their property, to determine whether, where, how, for how long, to invest their property, is as long as the myriads of situations that throw up a conflict between property owners and all other citizens.
The viability of private ownership is a chief concern of the law.
*This is why it is crucial to have a zealous, well-equipped police force dedicated to the task of enforcing such laws. In Canada, police budgets have increased from $7 billion to $12 billion over ten years.
*This is why theft, which is defined as the taking of another’s property with the intention of permanently depriving him/her of it, is the paradigm of crime in a capitalist political economy.
All this protection of property serves and protects those who have property.
Those who have the most property benefit most
The drive to accumulate ever more wealth by the already rich inevitably leads to ever-increasing inequality. The numbers are ‘in’. World-wide, 1% of the population owns as much wealth as the other 99% combined; 62 individuals have as much wealth as three and a half billion individuals. In Canada, 86 individuals own as much wealth as the bottom 11.4 million people at the bottom of our population. Obviously, ‘to serve and protect’ private property suits the few rather than the many.
How members of the working class who own some property may be impelled to support the protection of private property and thereby the class that oppresses them
In advanced capitalist political economies, many working class people ‘own’ private property, but do not have any discretionary wealth to spend or invest. They may well be very pleased to have a skilled, dedicated force to protect it. This is why the poorer segments of our populations are often fierce supporters of law and order-favouring politicians and the police. This tendency is given a fillip because it is the same less well-off who are the most likely to be the victims of street crime. This may lead some observers to conclude that the police serve and protect in an evenhanded way. Such thinking reinforces the legitimacy of the rights of all owners of private property, small or big, to do with their property as they wish. The cause of market capitalism benefits from that kind of endorsement.
In sum, mechanisms are in place that allow the owners of the means of production, the truly wealthy, to ride roughshod over the rest of us. Their power to do so is bolstered by the police which serves and protects private property.
But the unequal division of wealth which makes this scheme so nasty has no moral grounding. If one digs into its origins, sooner or later, it will become clear that the ownership of private property stems from thievery. Take Canada: it was literally stolen from indigenous people by colonizing Europeans.
Is this a basis to serve and protect existing wealth ownership? Is this a basis to keep the majority of the population subjugated to the tiny members of the wealth club or, as Warren Buffet calls them the ‘lucky sperm club’?
For us: put in links, Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist, Marx, Gerald Cohen, Erik Olin Wright
Joining the dots
It is clear that all engaged in struggles of resistance and transformation, those fighting on the privatization, environmental, indigenous rights, control over technologies, labour rights, tax and welfare, freedom of speech, association and belief, police abuse, etc., fronts, are all put behind the 8-ball by the ideology and legal endorsement of the morally, historically and politically indefensible capitalism starting point. The sacrosanct nature of private property is at the core of whatever problem they are tackling. The rights and privileges of private property must be challenged by all who are in struggle. If this is seen by the wide variety of actors, agitators, militants who want to relieve hardships and to create a better world, they will see that, despite all the rifts and segmentations, their causes are linked in the most profound way.