Possessing, Owning, Belonging
Kohák, Erazim V.
The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those...
...The first is based on participation, the second on expertise...
...458 press it...
...Not surprisingly, the collectivist owners have matched their corporate counterparts in the ability both to exploit labor and to despoil the environment: the "socialist" pollution exuded by the paper mills of esky Krumlov differs from its capitalist counterpart only in its greater immunity from protest by the disenfranchised labor force...
...As Marx recognized, corporate capitalism is teaching an analogous lesson, even if far more slowly and less painfully...
...The disruptive element again enters with the formalization of the claim of ownership...
...Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature society, but now have less power to inspire than they did in the past...
...The experience of belonging precedes any formal assignation of property rights, whether by reason, God, or the will of the ruling class...
...Bureaucratic collectivism can provide little inspiration for the technologically mature societies—including the Soviet Union...
...If socialism is to make a unique contribution to both the developing countries and the technologically mature societies, it must offer a vision of a liberated society that would not simply transfer formal ownership or compensate for its inequities but would break the bond between ownership and alienation...
...By contrast, the mass of their followers had little experience with private means...
...Nor may he use it to produce a private income even when such use requires no ownership of tools (accepting a fee for guiding a tourist or for making a repair, though common practice, enjoys no legal sanction...
...With a few exceptions, socialists, like capitalists, have conceived of ownership as a formal relation, independent of practice: regardless of who tills the soil or uses the tools, the "owner" is the person named in a deed or is the state agency specified by law...
...With this example we can formulate a provisional principle: the forms of ownership are liberating, sustaining the individual's freedom of identity and participation, if they express a lived relationship of belonging...
...ERAZIM V. KOHAK Marx may have written of and perhaps for the proletariat, but he was the son of an affluent upper-middle-class family...
...The intent was pure, the result not...
...As in politics so in economics, the dominant concern of Leninism has been not with the nature of power but with its possession...
...9, no...
...becomes distinctly secondary to the question, What shall it mean to own...
...The workers alone can be the owners: whether directly or through elected representatives, they alone can hire (and fire) directors and managers and decide how proceeds will be used and distributed...
...It is this vision that makes even the vic tims of Communism cling to the idea of socialism and makes idealists in Western socialist countries look—albeit utterly unrealistically—to •the Communist model...
...It is important to note, however, that it is not only a process of individuation but a process of socialization as well...
...He can be a partner, whether on a straight cooperative basis or in proportion to the labor he invests, but he cannot be what earlier rhetoric aptly termed a "wage slave...
...Intellectual work may be no less valuable and productive than that of a laborer, but by its very nature it is experientially distinct from the intellectual's income and the objects he can buy with it...
...In his "Critique of He gel's Philosophy of Right" Marx sees the impoverishment of the German proletariat—that is, its freedom from property—as the quality that will enable it to carry out an apocalyptic revolt against a system that exploits it and deprives it of property...
...One set of experiences quite naturally issues in a demand for appropriation of property, the other equally naturally in a demand for liberation from property...
...They failed because the rationale in terms of which they were designed, "public good, private bad," did not identify correctly these characteristics of ownership that make it alienating...
...I have stressed the analogy between the two sets of experiences, since on the level of the primary relation of the human and his world that analogy is real...
...Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is a noble and even necessary activity, but historically it is the merest beginning...
...Such labor would again become alienating: the employee, by his labor, also builds a stake in the business...
...Throughout, however, the principle is the same: ownership follows labor...
...A man of private means or a salaried professional may well "deserve" his reward, but he understandably experiences his sustenance as autonomous and as a distraction from his work...
...In the U.S.S.R...
...The basic socialist principle here is that those who work also own—both the tools and the product of their work—and that no one, whether individual, corporation, or state agency, whether in virtue of inheritance, stockholding or a nationalization decree, can or need 460 to possess tools he does not use or value he does not create...
...Successive Soviet civil codes distinguished three forms of property...
...The Code remained in force in Czechoslovakia until 1950...
...and Eastern Europe, socialist propperty rapidly becomes not ours but theirs...
...Although this system has no "private" owners, the factory worker is no less excluded from participation in the direction of an enterprise and from sharing in the proceeds of production...
...Property is not "free"—a factory is not a spontaneous growth like a wild tree, providing fruit to all who'll pick it...
...Against the collectivist principle, "public good, private bad," I would sum up the principle I am advancing as "self-labor good, hired labor bad," or in more general terms, applicable to large-scale production, "participating labor good, exploited labor bad...
...The lived bond between a human and his world is forged in labor: tilling the soil or wielding a tool is what makes an object genuinely "mine," not an accidental possession analogous to the object of theft...
...Despite the success of that strategy, continued social inequality and labor discontent since the first British Labor victory have 'shown that no matter how effective the social democratic strategy may be in coping with the ill effects of capitalism, it is not of itself a path to socialism...
...To be sure, such work still has its objective counterparts: the opportunity to write and publish is as real a part of it as tilling the soil and reaping its harvest...
...Tenant vandalism in public housing duplicates the effects of slumlord neglect, while Britain's "socialist" trade unions sometimes wield their power with as much regard for the public weal as did Commodore Vanderbilt...
...Collectivism did not liberate the workers—it could not do that—but it did demonstrate the utter absurdity of the claim that the investment of labor, capital, or effort does not only create a personal belonging and a right to compensation, but earns for a person's descendants a claim to perpetual possession...
...Nor has the social democratic attempt to civilize ownership by holding it to social responsibilities provided a model of a liberated society...
...Desirable though such change may be, it is more likely to follow POSSESSING, OWNING, BELONGING from rather than lead to institutional changes...
...Property is in the first place the objective counterpart of my presence in a social and material world...
...Although ownership has become anonymous, it is still real...
...Finally, the limitation of personal property—the only legally recognized form of identification between a human and his world—to objects of consumption has given rise to a consumerism that may well be the ultimate in fetishism of goods...
...A more ominous analogy suggests itself as well: slaves, after all, constituted a class free from all property, contributing according to ability and compensated according to minimal need...
...The failure, however, is no less real, and combined with the strong trade-union tradition of Western socialism, it left Western socialists with little appetite for experimentation with radical changes in ownership...
...It does not alienate—quite the contrary, it is the basis both of individual identity and social participation...
...there is no ownership given by reason, God, or in any other a priori way [that is, natural law ownership...
...Democracy might succeed in economics as well...
...Social democrats in the West have largely become reconciled with capitalist ownership...
...The soil he tills is a part of his very being, the tools he uses are extensions of his muscles...
...The achievements of collectivism are real, even though, given the grim realities of the Soviet police state, they are easy to overlook...
...But the relevance of socialism is contingent on its ability to offer a valid alternative strategy...
...The Marxist conception of the "leading role of the Party" thrives on that lingering inability of men and women to ERAZIM V. KOHAK conceive of a state that is the public servant of a community of free humans and so has no possessor...
...Individual ownership of one-man and cooperative enterprises, essential in the primary and tertiary sectors of the economy, is entirely compatible with that principle...
...The owned would be the owners, thereby effecting a dialectical transformation of total bondage into perfect freedom...
...The privileged, no matter how "progressive," inevitably lack this experience...
...By contrast, the breaking of the bond between individual humans and their most intimate embodiment, their tools and their labor, remained painfully tangible and, in contrast with capitalism, universal...
...In such enterprise ownership is fully coextensive with the belonging established by life and labor...
...The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits...
...Yet a century ago in central Europe it seemed no less self-evident that a village could not simply belong to the farmers who lived and worked in it—had to "belong" to this or that count or duke who had long since ceased to exercise any administrative function and who might simply have "bought" a group of villages he had never seen from another count—to whom they may have been "awarded" in turn by an emperor whose armies had conquered the land a hundred years ago...
...The only "owners" of a factory can be the women and men whose labor makes that factory a producing unit and transforms a soulless machine into a means of production...
...The workers notoriously experience no living bond between themselves and their work and tools...
...In the case of two or more humans work ing together, as in a three-man barbershop, a repair service, or a collective farm, the principle of socialist ownership—that ownership reflects labor—would take the 462 form of cooperative ownership, since the work is done cooperatively...
...The industrial worker may detest the factory where he has spent the major part of his life, but, as with a bad marriage, it is still an intrinsic part of him, his home and his extension in the world...
...The mere recognition of alienation as a basic trait of modern social existence is itself more Hegelian than Marxist, and it remains so in spite of the recent cult of "the young Marx...
...The liberation from property is complete...
...With the exception of wages, which to some extent remain tied to individual effort, the system fulfills the vision of liberation from property...
...It would be even consistent with the use of nonvoting shares as a source of investment capital (though the sale of such shares, because of the pernicious social effect of unearned income, remains problematic unless it is restricted to other socialist enterprises...
...The second category, personal property, is restricted to goods that a person consumes 456 rather than uses in his work, and that he receives from society (in effect from the state, as sole owner of the means of production) in recognition of his needs (health services, vacations) or of his contribution (wages, consumer goods...
...If the process of labor is individual, so is that of ownership...
...Something more is needed: a transformation of the rationale and forms of ownership that underlie alienation...
...No one who has lived in Eastern Europe can get over his first shock of incomprehension upon being told in the West that this or that factory complex "belongs" to the Smith family—who may live a thousand miles away, may have nothing to , POSSESSING, OWNING, BELONGING do with this factory, and yet is said to possess it and to claim a right to its proceeds...
...The Czechoslovaks moved in the same direction—until Soviet occupation restored central direction and state ownership...
...One of the treatises on ownership, which appeared in Czechoslovakia in the years of Stalinism, illustrates the problem clearly...
...The achievements of welfare-state socialism may be less ambiguous than those of collectivism, but they are hardly inspirational...
...Yet, collectivist ownership, vested nominally in "the people" at large but effectively exercised by a centralized state agency, both in the direction of production and in appropriation of the product, is just as incompatible with that principle as capitalist ownership...
...This is not a question of technical direction of an enterprise: certainly, any working collective, especially one as complex as a modern corporation, must include experts and technicians charged specifically with the direction of an enterprise...
...It is the labor a subject invests in the object that makes the object an extension of his being rather than a soulless commodity...
...As having-a-body, I am individual, this and no other, but as having-a-body, I am also social, since the body is not private but public, a member and a part both of a material and a social world...
...Yet institutions in the East did not fail because they were "too socialist...
...Certainly, a socialist factory, just as a capitalist one, must distinguish ownership and technical direction...
...It is a vision of a society without exploitation —conceived in a society in which a large proportion of the national product is appropriated by some 3 percent of the population in the form of unearned income, a society in which the wage earner, no matter how well compensated, still is exploited...
...The collectivist approach to property is reminiscent of those monastic orders that combined the freedom of poverty with the security of property by having their chapter houses, lands, and flocks owned nominally by the Church at Rome...
...The welfare state has probably given 1 Common Civil Code, Register of Judicial Laws, no...
...To be sure, in practice it may well be necessary for economic reasons to permit the hiring of employees, but the point is that it is a matter of privilege, granted for reasons of common welfare—and always subject to revision...
...Cromwell's commonwealth failed because humans could not conceive of a state without a possessor and because humans were willing to give up their freedom in exchange for a king who would make the social decisions and bear the responsibility...
...And so labor, which in experience belongs to a person perhaps more intimately than anything else, is treated as a means of production...
...The idea of a socialist society that fired the imagination of an earlier generation is not, after all, simply of a society in which no one starves...
...No one can be denied the ownership he creates by his work—and no one, whether the state or an individual, can claim abstract "possession...
...The socialist contribution has been a recognition that alienation is not simply a spiritual phenomenon but also an experiential one, acted out not only in the subjective relations of the ego but also in the tangible relations of human beings to each other and their material world...
...The "leading role of the Party" thrives on the unwillingness of humans to assume the responsibility of freedom: it is easier to grumble about "them" than to assume the responsibility that belongs to us and to me individually when we are free...
...The alienation of the human in postindustrial society cannot be overcome 454 by moral exhortation to love and stewardship, whether we call it moral rearmament, Consciousness III, or "a new socialist morality...
...The mechanics may differ, but the principle remains the same: socialist ownership is not a legal fiction but a living relationship forged by life and work...
...But on the level of socially conditioned forms of experience, it is the difference between the experience of the laborer and the experience of the intellectual that counts the most...
...I am not presenting this principle as a call for a subjective change in attitude to ward property...
...In both areas, it was democracy that succeeded, by transferring responsibility to those over whom power heretofore had been exercised...
...On the principle, "private bad, public good," they have created, in Eastern Europe, a system of ownership that is not private—and yet is no less alienating than capitalist ownership...
...It is a shock analogous to the shock the Americans of a hundred years ago experienced on being told, in central Europe or in Russia, that a particular village "belonged" to a certain count...
...On this level, the ability to own and belong is neither theft nor privilege, but the indispensable counterpart of being actual...
...This is the contradiction Karl Marx sought to resolve, valiantly and in vain, by interpreting the protest against deprivation and the demand for freedom from property as two stages of a continuous socialist development...
...The recognition of this bond is perhaps the distinctive socialist contribution to the making of modern political consciousness...
...It is perhaps the basic fact of being human, as basic as "having-a-body," "be longing-to-a-context...
...Intellectuals and proletarians can pledge allegiance to a common ideology and share a common abhorrence of exploitation...
...Socialists have criticized past institutions and devised new ones (or, in the name of humanity, refrained from designing new ones) on the assumption that ownership is alienating in virtue of being "private" and that, consequently, public ownership, simply in virtue of being public, would be nonalienating...
...its citizens a greater degree of personal freedom and social security than any society since the Industrial Revolution, but it, too, retains the idea that domination is the content of ownership...
...The acquiring of a body and of its extensions—tools, skills, familiar places, and the recognized place in a social world—is a process of self-realization...
...A worker's burden is precisely the lack of property: it is deprivation which seems to hinder his self-realization...
...What little nationalization they did carry out was predicated not on principle but on pragmatic consideration of public weal...
...It begins with the child's appropriation of his body as "mine...
...Democracy broke the old habit in politics: today the challenge is to break it in economics as well...
...They do, however, have to be based on a principle that correctly identifies the root of alienation —the divorce between work and ownership...
...The Yugoslays accomplished this with a system of Workers' Councils, elected by all the employees, which do not displace the expert directors but do displace the "owners...
...Nor did they fail because of an erroneous subjective attitude to property...
...When a child expresses the claim, "This is my house (I need not work on it, help keep it clean, but) I have a right to it (for instance, invite friends here) because it is mine," that claim is rightly resented by her siblings...
...In this sense, socialism is a direct continuation of the struggle for freedom that has motivated the social development of the West since the middle ages...
...The great, irreversible achievement of collectivism has been precisely that, as the Reformation in morals and democracy in politics, it has freed its subject—enslaved in every other way—of the pernicious habit of assuming that, of course, every industrial enterprise must have an "owner...
...In collectivist theory, only the means of consumption can be objects of individual ownership—the means of production belong to the collective...
...has been the transfer of power into the "right hands" rather than its transformation—and this held true in economics as well...
...Children habitually speak of "our house": here the ownership is collective, expressing a collective experience...
...The Reformation fought the first round in the struggle against the possessors—and against the need for possessors...
...It led socialists to ignore the pressing problem of alienation in large-scale productive complexes— after all, once nationalized, such enterprises were public and in principle good, even if the workers did not seem to realize it...
...Nor is there any magic divide between learning to use my toe and learning to use a tool...
...His appropriative demand for the ownership of his land or tools, for higher wages, or even for the product of his labor is no fetishism of property at all—it is a demand for recognition of his identity, strictly analogous to a writer's demand for the freedom to publish...
...What it does not need is an "owner," whether individual or private...
...Certainly the Leninist conception focuses on the question, Who shall own the world...
...Large-scale pilfering, abuse of property, and dismally low work morale on the job—in sharp contrast to the initiative and competence in the nonsanctioned afterhours enterprises and on private plots— testify to a high degree of alienation...
...Democracy is the political equivalent of the Reformation: the conception of society as community of free humans who accept the responsibility for governing themselves and dare do without masters upon whom the blame can be shifted...
...The scars left by the forcible expropriation of small holdings, collectivization of cattle and small shops heal slowly if at all, as the perennial crisis of agriculture and services in the Communist countries testifies...
...The roots of the contradiction may lie in the radically different and socially conditioned experience of property among socialism's founders...
...By replacing the individual enterpreneur with a mass of anonymous stockholders, it illustrates the fictitious absurdity of the idea of possession —and at the same time makes the "possessor" superfluous...
...The state, even a state claiming to "represent the people," does not contribute labor and so cannot own...
...Basically, ownership is presented not as a lived reality, but as an arbitrary privilege that must be assigned to a particular individual...
...Socialist institutions do not have to wait for a new subjective attitude to be effective —that would be a long wait indeed...
...On the level of social reality, from which both socialism and sociology derive their names, this conception simply does not correspond to experience...
...The first category, socialist property (owned by the state or the collective), includes all means of production —land, tools, factories—on the assumption that a tool is not something a human uses but rather something he hires another to use...
...In this struggle the enemies have been both the possessors —the individuals who claimed possession of the world—and the ingrained human fear of freedom...
...As with individual ownership, there is nothing prima facie alienating about collective ownership when it is an expression of lived experience...
...What he cannot do within the limits of socialist ownership is to "hire" another to work "for" him...
...Yet the modem intellectual's sense of freedom from immediate material concern— from property—is real...
...Forms of ownership may vary in different societies and historical periods, but the mutual relation of belonging between a human and his world is more basic than the forms that ex 2 V. Knapp, Ownership in the People's Democracy (Prague, 1952), p. 35...
...1 (January 1972), p. 61...
...More specifically, it is the recognition that the modes of ownership inherited from an earlier age are no longer adequate for mediating the relationship of human to human and to their social and material world...
...But the stereotypes of property that appear obvious to the one are, to the other, radically different...
...It is easy to oversimplify, but there is considerable justification for interpreting this contradiction within socialism as the difference between interpreting alienation as the effect of being deprived of property and of interpreting it as the effect of possessing property...
...In the case of humans working individually— and even in a highly sophisticated economy such labor remains essential, especially in the tertiary sector of service and distribution and in some sectors of agriculture— that principle will result in "private" ownership...
...In contrast to capitalism, however, on the level of small-scale enterprise, the principle, "public ownership good, private ownership bad" led to the systematic elimination of ownership based on self-labor which survived in the capitalist economy— individual enterprise in small production, distribution, and service...
...A wide range of social services, ranging from minimum guaranteed income to health care, have gone far toward providing some of the security and freedom of affluence for the nonaffluent, without demanding the bloody price exacted by Communism...
...Here now, I would submit, we have to start with a more careful analysis of the nature of ownership and the conditions that make it alienating than socialists hitherto have offered...
...As the collectivist bureaucracy came more and more to exercise the prerogatives of owners, collective ownership became formal and abstract...
...Ownership on this level is first of all the experience of a lived interaction between a subject and his world in the course of which meaning becomes actual and matter meaningful...
...In the Austrian imperial army, each regiment had its possessor—Inhaber— a civilian aristocrat with the honorary rank of a colonel whose sole function was to "own" the regiment—and that, too, seemed completely natural...
...946, paragraph 354...
...In the case of a factory, it would entail a collective ownership, exercised by the collective through a Workers' Council...
...The future relevance of socialism depends on its ability to extend democracy into economics: to substitute for the idea of ownership as a possessor's formal "right" to dominate and exploit the socialist domocratic idea of ownership as a social formalization of the lived reality of belonging...
...Fitfully, gropingly, with many false starts and lapses, it has given us the conception of moral community as the communio viatorum, a community of free human beings, under God, who dare assume what in the jargon of another era was called "the freedom through which Christ made us free...
...of humans willing to assume the freedom and the responsibility for decisions of faith and morals...
...The worker's wage has to be reduced to the status of bare cash nexus—experientially, it is the tangible bridge between his work and the objects that manifest his care for those who share his immediate world: the warm house, the clothes, the food on the table, even the garish plaster dwarf in his garden...
...Perhaps the first step is the recognition of the wiggling toes as a part of myself...
...Rather, I am presenting it as an alternative rationale for the critique of capitalist institutions and for designing the institutions of a socialist society...
...The institutions of a socialist society must respect and express that relationship rather than deny it...
...The demand that all humans become owners and the demand that all humans be freed of ownership issued in radically different alternatives to capitalist ownership, both legitimate yet fundamentally incompatible...
...In America, despite isolated experiments, the idea of a Workers' Council made up of elected representatives of employees and possibly elected representatives of the public might seem too discontinuous with native development, but a system of issuing voting shares solely on the basis of actual involvement in the work of the enterprise—that is, the lived belonging—is entirely feasible...
...the will of the owner moves within limits given by the will of the ruling class and concrete property relations are determined on a class basis...
...We live in this house together, together we work on it, keep it up, enjoy it: it is ours, and in each individual case, the house is no less my own for being ours...
...But, as a matter of historical fact, socialist movements have seldom risen above a Robin Hood model of socialism, concerned more with the distribution of property than with its definition...
...In collectivist and capitalist countries alike, the definition of ownership given by the Aus trian civil code of 1811, 1 as the right to use, abuse or ignore, destroy, transfer or abandon, remains uncomfortably accurate: ownership continues to be conceived of as the "right," formally defined and independent of practice, to dominate and exploit...
...Finally, in the case of public service, whether in transportation, medicine, or basic industry, it would entail social ownership, exercised by a council of elected representatives of the employees and elected representatives of the public they serve...
...From the start, socialist theory and practice were marked by a basic contradiction in the socialist analysis of ownership, its diagnosis of what precisely makes ownership alienating—and so also in its prescriptions for transforming ownership...
...While frequently supporting demands for expropriation of large productive units, the workers have usually done so in the name of appropriation of property...
...Both these "owners" conceive of the essence of that relation as the "right" to derive benefits from the object owned, whether in the form of rent or dividend, or of appropriation of profit by the state, with the corollary "right" to determine how the object shall be used, and in both cases without reference to the persons who actually till the soil or use the tool...
...Their strategy in power has focused largely on protecting workers from poverty by pressing the productivity of capitalism into service to relieve its victims...
...Quite understandably, however, the dePOSSESSING, OWNING, BELONGING mand for liberation from property makes as little sense to a worker as a demand for liberation from the freedom of the press would to the intellectual...
...Not the protests of expropriated capitalists but the staggering human, social, political, and economic cost of the dogmatic crusade against individual enterprise was the major factor inducing Western socialists to retreat to the humane but innocuous aims of a welfare state compatible with capitalism...
...On the level of socially conditioned forms of experience, it is quite understandable that many socialist intellectuals speak of liberation from property, or insist that the forms of property simply do not concern them...
...This is no less true of the industrial worker than of the individual craftsman or the small farmer...
...An individual may use it in personal consumption (building a weekend hut, playing a sport), but he may not withhold it (having no job constitutes the felony of parasitism...
...It is the vision of a society that would in its economic as well as in its political aspects genuinely belong to the men and women who constitute it rather than to a handful of "owners," alienated from their fellow humans by the privilege of unearned income and in turn alienating them from their world by the claim to "ownership...
...Ultimately, it is the difference between the strategy of welfarestate socialism, which seeks to liberate workers from poverty, and of bureaucratic collectivism, which seeks to liberate them from property...
...The workers may not be able, in their spare time, to direct a factory, but they—and only they —can own it: directors can be hired by those to whom the enterprise belongs, whose labor makes it genuinely theirs—the employees, from the manual worker to the managers...
...The attempt to do this by retaining the conception of ownership as a formal "right" to dominate and exploit, but transferring that "right" from corporate to institutional owners has failed disastrously—just as the attempt to solve problems of faith and morals by transferring the "ownership" of the Church from the pope to the presbyters failed in religion and the attempt to solve political problems by transferring power from hereditary kings to enlightened despots failed in politics, most recently in Russia...
...Similarly, Lenin was the son of a banker and a noblewoman—again, anything but a proletarian...
...Most of his life he derived his sustenance not from wage labor but from private means—in large part the largesse of a factory-owner friend, Friedrich Engels...
...In both cases, the "I" is becoming actual—and the objects in which the "I" becomes actual, whether hand or tool, come to "belong to me," as extensions and expressions of my being in the intersubjective world...
...Conversely, when parents appoint themselves the vanguard of the family and preempt the right of making decisions concerning "our" house, the collective ownership becomes alienating and evokes an individualistic, appropriative response: "(this is our house, but) this room is mine—(I live in it, clean it, and) I'll decide what color wallpaper will go on the walls...
...The socialist movement, after all, has always been an alliance of outsiders, the specially privileged and the specially deprived—"the progressive intelligentsia" and the proletariat...
...It is the vision of a free Church that belongs to the believers who constitute it—a community of believers without a human possessor...
...In the collectivist vision, however, the result was to be perfect freedom, because the ownERAZIM V. KOHAK ers would supposedly be the collective of the workers, peasants, and soldiers themselves...
...The bureaucratic collectivism to which Leninism gave rise effectively transferred ownership from an economic to an ideologico-political elite...
...The urgent task today is the humanization of ownership...
...The Leninist prescription, summed up in the slogan, All Power to the Soviets...
...cited by Rozenal, "Piemena vlastnictvi," Promeny, vol...
...There may be "propertyless classes," but there can be no "propertyless men" as there are no disembodied souls...
...Directors and managers have to be hired on the basis of competence, not participation...
...For the purposes of political theory, it is crucial to note that collective ownership can similarly be either the basis of individual ERAZIM V. KOHAK identity and social participation or a source of alienation...
...The state, in effect, becomes a holding corporation...
...They become alienating if they disrupt such belonging in the name of an abstract claim to possession...
...The abolition of private property—in the technical sense—in turn effectively destroyed the living bond that even capitalism had preserved, if only for economic rather than humanitarian reasons, between the small farmer or artisan and the most intimate counterparts of his being, the soil he tills and the tools he uses...
...It cannot become a matter of right...
...In spite of virtually unanimous opposition to the regime in a country like Czechoslovakia, few Czechs or Slovaks would POSSESSING, OWNING, BELONGING support the restoration of collective enterprise to private ownership...
...The formula resolved nothing, but it papered over the contradiction, and, as long as socialists were in opposition, this was all that was needed...
...The greatest obstacle to a politically free society has been the inability and unwillingness of men and women to imagine astate without a possessor, without a king or a prince or at least a class upon whom to shift the ultimate responsibility for social decisions...
...It is a process of appropriation of a material counterpart of my being: learning to use my body, making it an expression of my self...
...It becomes alienating under special circumstances, and our task is to isolate those circumstances...
...Here abstract possession is at best a consequence, but in no sense the ground of ownership...
...In semifeudal Russia, with its diminutive working class and long tradition of elitist autocracy, the revolutionaries set themselves the task of "abolishing property"—and since even Russians are not pure spirits but incarnate men with material needs, they settled for an attempt to make property anonymous, collective: property without individual owners...
...When revolution in Russia and electoral victories in the West confronted socialists with the responsibility of creating an alternative to capitalist ownership, the compromise broke down...
...It is controlled by the state...
...The struggle for democracy was a continuation of this battle...
...IF SOCIALISM is to inspire and guide social change and not simply apply ideological smokescreens or patchwork remedies to assorted social ills, it must carry out the liberation the Reformation carried out in morals and democracy in politics and in economics...
...The basis of socialist ownership is belonging, the special reciprocal relationship that life and work forge between a human and a definite part of the social and material world—an object, a place, a right...
...the only owner of a tool, whether that tool is 200 m 2 of a backyard plot or a steel mill, is the human who uses that tool, whether individually, cooperatively, or collectively...
...For once ownership is coupled with the awesome ability to bring large-scale, irreversible changes in our physical and social environment, the question, Who shall own the world...
...Nor is a stress on the importance of the social as against the individual dimension of human experience uniquely socialist...
...An individual clearly can, by his own work, "build a business"—and claim it as his own...
...For the one, ownership holds out a promise of freedom from care and a place in the world, to the other it suggests the bondage to objects...
...For the most part, they were workers for whom the wherewithal of daily existence was not a trivial distraction from work but its very content and goal...
...In retrospect the idea of a possessor in morals or in politics appears entirely fortuitous...
...The oldtimers, hanging around the shop after retirement, provide a painful reminder both of the need to belong and of the very basic sense of belonging that work forges between a human and the tools he uses, even when that tool is a steel mill...
...Speaking of property as "theft," like Proudhon, or as "soulless commodity," like Marx, reflects the condition of the privileged...
...This difference in turn is reflected in social strategies as contradictory as distributing large estates among the peasants and expropriating small holdings for state farms...
...2 The author states the dilemma: ownership, which he regards quite traditionally as a formal claim to possession, must be derived either from pure reason, a priori--or be defined arbitrarily by the "will of the ruling class...
...In a laborer's experience property is anything but a soulless commodity...
...The "I" enclosed within my consciousness becomes a part of a social world precisely in the process of embodying itself in objective counterparts...
...It is the idea of a liberated society...
...It is the daring vision of humans who give up both the constraints and the comforts of a Vicar of Christ—or, in Dostoevsky's image, of the Grand Inquisitor who would shoulder the ultimate responsibility...
...In that special relationship, a human defines his identity as well as his social participation...
...Socialist attempts to achieve this end, however, thus far have done more to discredit than to realize it...
...but it gave ownership little meaning beyond the traditional one of domination...
...The third category, private property, refers to possession of means of production, at times tolerated in practice (NEP, private plots) but always condemned in principle as incompatible with socialism...
...I like to believe that this indeed was the concern of the pioneers of socialism, and there is some evidence to that effect...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
