PROPERTY for people, not for profit

By Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J Hinkelammert

Published by ZED Books in association with CIIR(Catholic Institute for International Relations) 2004, 278 pages

Imagine a centrifuge that systematically draws particles from the center and flings them out into space. That image symbolizes the process by which, in the current world economic system, money is drawn automatically from the margins to the center, from the poor to the rich, and then out of the real world. It ends up being hoarded and/or traded in cyberspace, orbiting the world via the financial sector, and having little connection to the making and trading of goods and services.

Hardly surprising that purchasing power is being lost at all levels of all economies except at the very top; and that debt is now underpinning the loss of regular income.

The authors of this book demonstrate how this process has its genesis in the accumulation of property in private hands, and property's degeneration from something useful to human beings to a means of power abuse. Their analysis is frightening. We have become so accustomed to the philosophic and pragmatic paradigm of accumulation of private property, land and capital – the lefties among us seeking only to distribute it more fairly – that we have forgotten the dehumanizing effect of the concentration of wealth and therefore power.

The simple fact is that if I collect a lot of a finite resource there is less for you. If I then invent a system that automatically multiplies my access to more property, it will also systematically reduce your access and my capacity to control your life. You may not put up with that for long.

You can't in other words, alleviate poverty within a system where property is for accumulation, and not for use. And where there is no system for distributing property against the effect of the centrifuge.

Duchrow and Hinkelammert go deeper. The concentration of wealth and political power, together with the exclusion from both for the majority of humanity, is producing a terrifying symbiosis of murder and suicide. Both ends are dehumanised, the one by the need to defend ‘their' property, the other by the desperate lack of it.

Both the propertied and the naked are locked in a process where murder is also suicide. The killing by both sides has lost any claim to the promotion of peace and prosperity.

The authors – economist and theologian – did deep into history to demonstrate the process. In our time we have Timothy McVeigh, suicidal-murderer who actually sought judicial death; the suicide bombers operating internationally - from Ireland to Afghanistan ; and the ‘Coalition” attacks on cities – none of them positing a credible positive outcome for their violence.

Unusually, the book draws attention to a topic that most economists ignore. That is the corruption of the use of money by the fact that it is in effect created by commercial banks in the form of debt. That means savings are de-linked from investment, the amount of money in the economy is a function of commercial considerations, and governments have only the blunt instrument of interest rates to influence money supply. In 1808, President Jefferson had this to say:

The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks, and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money is more dangerous to liberty than standing armies

Half a century later, President Lincoln drew up a more detailed statement with the same purpose. A few weeks later he was assassinated.

The book concludes with a radical call to refusal, as far as possible, to collude with the system. The Churches and their members will be seriously challenged by the call for self-exclusion from the current financial sector. The same applies to bodies like trade unions. Governments with claims to progressive policies will require courage to resist and reverse the impoverishing effect of the global market mechanism.

But that, say the authors, is the sine qua non of the democratization of economic policy-making, in which electorates take charge of processes that meet their needs. They make a frighteningly convincing case that this is the only way to restore property to human use.

Margaret Legum
September 2004