Blockchain Papers

Usman W. Chohan

This chapter seeks to contextualize the nature of cryptocurrencies as an alternate form of capital that, while being inspired by cryptoanarchist thought, has come to embody extreme forms of inequality among its owners. The concentration of wealth produces a “whale effect” that, as the chapter argues, in fact reflects the forms of inequalities that are found in the ownership of traditional forms of capital. The chapter thus alludes to the mismatch between the professed cryptoanarchist philosophical bent of cryptocurrency owners and the reality of capital ownership in the cryptocurrency domain; while cryptoanarchism postulates autonomy, decentralization, and the spread of ownership, the whale effect suggests that cryptocurrencies are insufficiently different from traditional forms of capital in this regard. This challenges the degree to which the praxis of cryptocurrencies coheres with the philosophy of cryptoanarchism.

Sarah Manski, Ben Manski

The building of the blockchain is predicted to harken the end of the contemporary sovereign order. Some go further to claim that as a powerful decentering technology, blockchain contests the continued functioning of world capitalism. Are such claims merited? In this paper we consider sovereignty and blockchain technology theoretically, posing possible futures for sovereignty in a blockchain world. These possibilities include various forms of individual, popular, technological, corporate, and techno-totalitarian state sovereignty. We identify seven structural tendencies of blockchain technology and give examples as to how these have manifested in the construction of new forms of sovereignty. We conclude that the future of sovereignty in a blockchain world will be articulated in the conjuncture of social struggle and technological agency and we call for a stronger alliance between technologists and democrats.

Prateek Goorha

I propose a method for introducing ‘context’ within the contractual environment based on a simple and intuitive application of control theory. The approach permits looking at several interesting practical features of contracts, be they incomplete, complete or smart, within a single framework. I define a contextual environment with the help of an interaction between three distinct spaces: a market-based contractual space framed within a formal institutional space and an even larger cultural space. Each space is characterized by a governing law built on a selection of control mechanisms that differ in their approach as well as their reliance on information generated from feedback mechanisms. I suggest how these governing laws tie the contextual spaces together and present some ideas on how they evolve through their interactions with other spaces. JEL: D20, D86, P50, Z10

Paolo Tomassetti

This article analyses the rules on wage coordination and their effectiveness in the Italian two-tier bargaining system. It seeks to cast light on bargaining coordination by starting from the analysis of collective agreements, rather than focusing exclusively on normative and institutional aspects of wage bargaining. Accordingly, the study examines a dataset of 498 company-level collective agreements concluded between 2012–2015 in three sectors – metalworking, food, banking and finance – to analyse wage developments in company-level bargaining. The study considers the extent to which local wage negotiations are consistent with the rules on wage bargaining coordination laid down in economy-wide agreements and national collective labour agreements. Wage coordination rules are generally respected, though a significant number of company-level agreements still provide fixed-rate pay rises in breach of the rule that wage increases at company level should be linked to productivity and other factors relating to the workers’ and/or the firm’s economic performance. Although the violation of wage bargaining rules between national agreements and company-level collective agreements is in line with the favourability principle, it is argued that local negotiations on fixed-rate pay rises could be regarded as a form of uncoordinated decentralization, diminishing the effectiveness of horizontal coordination policies and the normative role of the social partners.

Ethan Miller

The exchange of ideas between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, taken together, presents a seemingly either/or choice between a communist politics of anticapitalist militancy subsumed under the unity of the party and a politics that eschews critique and antagonism in favor of emergent postcapitalist alternatives. Such a dichotomy eclipses myriad possibilities for autonomous, organized forms of opposition and creation. This commentary appreciatively challenges postcapitalist scholar-activists to engage more robustly with a critique of capital and with forms of decentralized militant organization in order to constitute a politics in which anticapitalism and postcapitalism can become mutually reinforcing dynamics in struggles to build new modes of collective life.

Richard Sandbrook

In the Global South, the restrictive realities with which the Left contends are typically more numerous and onerous than those encountered by European socialists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, in The Great Transformation , with its European and specifically British focus, Karl Polanyi could take for granted certain societal features and potential remedies that his counterparts in the Global South must treat as problematical. Polanyi could assume effective states able to maintain order and implement complex policies, class-divided but fairly cohesive societies, strong and autonomous organizations of the subaltern classes (especially labor), a lengthy democratic tradition, the rule of law, and national economies that not only would be shielded from volatile capital flows but also yielded sizable fiscal resources for redistribution. Some or all of these conditions do not obtain in the developing world, depending on the country. In addition, Polanyi might retain confidence until his death in 1964 that a form of democratic planning could replace market societies and maximize freedom. But we are much more aware today of the limitations and dangers of central planning. Even modern notions of “participatory” and decentralized planning are probably doomed to failure (except at the local level). But this recognition presents yet another dilemma. On the one hand, markets now appear indispensable in complex, globally integrated economies. On the other hand, markets are cultural as well as economic institutions. The market’s ever deeper penetration of societies breeds an individualistic, consumerist mentality that is inimical to the solidarity principles associated with the Left. Dealing with this contradictory reality involves difficult choices.

Chaia Heller

Weary as it is, the still-standing U.S. Left continues to refuse to take no for an answer. However, we face two prominent conundrums: How do we decipher the meaning of “revolution” during a post-socialist and particularly counterrevolutionary period in history? And how do we address an increasingly compromised natural world whose very ability to sustain organic life has been dramatically called into question?It’s been a few hundred years since anything resembling a revolutionary tornado has touched down on U.S. soil. Whereas peoples living throughout Latin America and the Middle East are quite fluent in the idiom of revolution, U.S. leftists have relegated the notion to a poetic dustbin dwelling somewhere just to the left of the deep past. Many entertain notions of particularistic “revolutions” in domains of the human spirit, art, technology, and even sexuality, yet they cannot expand the concept to encompass society as a whole. This loss of revolutionary memory and vision is tied, at least in part, to the collapse of revolutionary projects associated with the works of Marx.At the same time, we are facing a monstrous expression of capitalism: neoliberal tentacles are squeezing the life out of prior attempts by progressives and radicals alike to appease its appetite to devour all things human and nonhuman. In such times, questioning the “need” for a Left in the United States is more than slightly decadent.Moving any further to the right brings yet more crude liberalization and deregulation — and thus more dispossession and ecological destruction. Surfing the wave of leftist progressive liberalism or social democratic reformism will merely keep us treading water in the very muck we are trying to climb out of.Too often, well-meaning leftists opt for merely turning the capitalist clock backward. Many yearn for a revival of the 1930s-era New Deal, thinking back to a time when “we” enjoyed a kinder, gentler capitalism. In so doing, they romanticize a time when the state did its best to curb corporations’ ravenous demands, subsequently allowing many members of America’s white majority to enter a consumer-driven, car-crazed, working-middle class that enjoyed retirement benefits and Disneyland vacations. Sadly, the second coming of a dreamy New Deal blew up in our faces in 2006 when the bursting of the housing bubble ushered in another Great Depression, which we are still experiencing currently. Who has the time or dough to say, “see you in Disneyland” today?U.S. leftists who long for more than a revitalized New Deal gaze upward toward Canada or set their hopes on a more European style of social democracy. Our utopian horizons are studded with starry notions of state-subsidized health care and higher education, and lengthy paid-for summer vacations. When the best dreams that leftists can muster are of European welfare states (which are currently being eviscerated by neoliberalism), we have not only lost our revolutionary nerve, but our revolutionary vision as well.The question is not whether we need a Left, but what kind of a Left do we desire? What kind of Left is capable of moving us from a corrupt republican democracy to a direct democracy? What kind of Left can allow us to shift away from a capitalist system that empties out the meaning of what it means to be human? What kind of Left can create a moral economy in which citizens extend a logic of self-governance to realms of production and distribution, creating a democratized and ecologized economy? And finally, what kind of Left is capable of cultivating a way of thinking ecologically and democratically that can guide a revolutionary process to carry us in the direction we need to go in order to survive?Unless we are to prop up the ghost of the communist revolutionary tradition, we must think up another solution to the problem of what is to become of a Left bereft of a workable and coherent plan. Anyone donning a centuries-old garment should be willing to consider that its hemline or waistband might be due for a major alteration. And the U.S. Left might take a lesson or two by looking at what its more radical wings have been up to in the Leftist alteration department. There have been at least two riotous and instructive attempts to alter the U.S. Left that are worth taking note of in the past fifteen or so years — the anti–World Trade Organization protests of 1999 and the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in the fall of 2011.The anti-WTO protests of 1999 (a sort of “mini–May 1968”) did not come out of nowhere. It was a series of movements that I have decided to call the “Alter-Left” that bore this Seattle-based fruit.The Alter-Left had been growing since the 1980s, with deep roots in anti-neoliberal Latin American movements. During the 1980s, groups throughout Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico began to view the leftist project through an increasingly internationalist lens, coining the term neoliberalism to describe a resurgence of the vulgar liberal individualism associated with an Enlightenment gone awry. Neoliberalism is the structure under which corporations gained rights — as “individuals” — to operate unfettered by state-determined regulations, taxes, and standards that might hinder their individual corporate freedom.In the 1980s, countries throughout Latin America were roiling with hunger, poverty, and unemployment caused by rising debt to global loan-shark agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (renamed the World Trade Organization in 1994). These agencies in turn created structural adjustment programs, strong-arming countries to trade national debt for reduced state regulations in the domains of trade, labor, and the environment (including water treatment and access).As they organized in opposition to deregulation/neoliberalism, leftists began to alter the structure and culture of the Left, creating a novel Alter-Left. Before the 1980s, Latin American militant activity tended to emerge within labor unions or workers parties. In the 1980s, in contrast, movements were increasingly led by peasants, indigenous peoples, women’s groups, anti-poverty activists, ecologists, and human rights activists fighting forms of dehumanization ranging from racism to heterosexism. Rejecting a central party or leadership structure, groups worked autonomously, assisting communities facing chronic poverty, landlessness, and hunger. Going beyond the Marxist idiom, groups altered leftist discourse, calling not only for workers’ control, but also for democratization and citizens’ rights.What does all of this have to do with Seattle and the U.S. Left? The U.S. Left was in deep dialogue with global anti-neoliberal activists, taking note of others’ new ways of redefining leftist political structure and goals. Indeed, by the mid-to-late 1990s, a new set of international activists and organizations gained prominence, voicing global discontent not only with state-driven economic and political policies, but also with supranational bodies bolstering neoliberal capital.There is a clear line drawn between the 50 Years Is Enough campaign, for instance, and what has been called the Battle of Seattle. The 50 Years Is Enough project was a network of 300 grassroots groups from more than sixty-six countries that was founded in 1994 to decry the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of supranational agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. By saying “enough,” this network sent a message in a bottle on behalf of the downtrodden in the Global South. And U.S. activists in our very own far Left caught that bottle with both hands.The line strung between 50 Years Is Enough and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle also runs through another key Alter-Left moment: the Zapatista uprisings of 1994. The Zapatista mobilizations sent ripples around the world, inspiring leftist political cultures globally to become increasingly international, anti-capitalist, identity driven, directly democratic in character, and ecologically focused. And meanwhile, Left-altering organizations such as Peoples’ Global Action and the World Social Forum emerged, as well. The marginalized from the world over voiced solidarity against neoliberalism, its attachés (nation-states), and its ring of supranational disciplinarians.And so when U.S. activists learned in 1999 that the WTO would be meeting in Seattle, they too joined this effort to alter the Left, throwing a signature sensibility of American “movement democracy” into the mix. By movement democracy, I mean a form of leftist organizing where activists design movement meetings, plan direct actions, and design organizational structures along directly democratic lines. Under this model, there are no leaders endowed with autonomous decision-making power. Instead, a network of small groups called “affinity groups” are each empowered to express their collective will to the larger movement via rotating delegates chosen by the groups themselves. Activists first meet in affinity groups to clarify and define their groups’ position on particular issues facing the movement as a whole. After reaching a decision, the affinity group sends its spokes-person to the larger spokescouncil, which functions as a coordinating committee for the movement as a whole. In this way, decision-making swells from the bottom up. At the “non-top” of this non-hierarchy are recallable delegates who have no decision-making power at all. Through movement democracy, activists engage in face-to-face direct democracy, flexing and developing the democratic muscles required for the radically new society to come.Forms of movement democracy surfaced in the sixties but were further refined by anarchist wings of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement. The hub of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement was the Clamshell Alliance, a decentralized network of over eighty groups and organizations scattered throughout New England. The U.S. anti-nuclear movement was a particularly successful endeavor; it radically deterred the government’s grand plan to make the country 80 percent nuclear-reliant. Through organizing in opposition to nuclear arms and energy, activists created the country’s largest-ever network of decentralized and horizontal decision-making bodies aimed at ridding the world of nuclear technology. The anti-nuclear movement popularized the idea that a movement could be built up out of many affinity groups that trained and worked together. The affinity groups of the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for Alter-Leftists committed to nonhierarchical and socially cohesive forms of movement democracy.The anti-nuclear movement was also marked by an expressive political sensibility. Its drum circles, public art installations, and whimsical nonviolent direct actions captured the imagination of many throughout the world. In Seattle of 1999, a new set of leftist actors, agendas, non-structures, and post-hippy expressive sensibilities exploded like a confetti ball when the WTO came to town. Today, many associate Alter-Left demonstrations with the sky-high street puppets first pioneered in the 1970s by the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. By 1999, David Solnit from Art and Revolution had begun working with Bread and Puppet artists, teaching young activists to craft the puppet-driven demonstrations so many have come to expect and enjoy.For more than one rainy week, indigenous groups, peasants, workers unions, women’s groups, anarchists, ecologists, anti-racism activists, and queers from around the world poured into Seattle to say “enough” to neoliberal non-democracy. Neoliberalism’s grand meeting (real and metaphorical) was at least temporarily cancelled. As activists drummed on garbage cans and milk jugs, the Alter-Left chanted a collective “no” to the WTO.After Seattle, a question arose: did the over-the-top aesthetic of the anti-WTO protest help or hinder the growing alter-globalization movement? Many in the country were alienated by these counter-cultural images, but on the other hand, the drumming, chanting, dancing, and puppetry helped capture journalists’ attention. Undoubtedly, many journalists were determined to depict activists in violent terms, reinforcing notions of activists-as-criminals. Yet, the front pages of newspapers the world over were instead graced with images of activists in whimsical butterfly costumes (referencing studies on the toxic impacts of genetically modified foods on monarch butterflies). The expressive protest culture also helped assuage protesters’ fears of the state’s potentially violent response to activists’ nonviolent actions, and participation in a common aesthetic helped forge a deep, if transient, sense of political community. The celebratory protest culture of Seattle became a wellspring of inspiration for Alter-Leftists to come.A post-Seattle political culture propelled similar actions internationally, as people in Canada, Prague, Southern France, and Italy cultivated their own carnivalesque and nonviolent protest culture. Yet suddenly, out of nowhere, a plane zoomed into Manhattan. Then another. Death and more death ensued, now in the form of war with Iraq and Afghanistan.When those planes destroyed the Twin Towers, they also shot through the blossoming center of the U.S. alter-globalization movement. The U.S. Alter-Left was hijacked by a McCarthy-like U.S. political culture that equated U.S. activism with terrorism. Although a fragmented anti-war movement did surface throughout the country, it tended to regress back into a top-down and colorless protest culture unable to capture the imagination and moral outrage of the U.S. populace.And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the fall of 2011. The housing bubble burst as subprime mortgage loans went flying. Government bailed out Wall Street with our last cents. And there it was again: the U.S. Alter-Left, re-born in the form of Occupy Wall Street. That year, Occupy went national, then global. People from all corners of the Left enacted movement democracy, becoming the kind of democratic, self-governing, life-affirming revolutionaries the world needs now more than ever.Sometimes, leftists must look at what we do — rather than at what we don’t do — to understand the path we’re on. What the more radical, far-flung Left has been up to is altering the Left, creating a newfangled version of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something that blew in all the way from Latin America.For those who rightly note that the Alter-Left is bereft of what the New Left was missing as well — a coherent revolutionary theory — we are justified in noting so. We have altered the U.S. Left’s legacy of labor-centered theory. We have altered the old Left’s lingering shadow that led activists to privilege the idea of “workers” as the key site of revolutionary action. Now altered, we move from a theory that privileged workers to a perspective attending to the many for whom the system simply isn’t working (the 99 percent). While Occupy rightfully included union leaders and workers, it also welcomed the Alter-Left’s cadre of homeless and unemployed people, youth, queers, students, climate justice activists, and racial justice activists, to name but a few.We have indeed altered the methods of movement building and organizing, improvising decentralized, directly democratic networks of expressive activists who are willing to engage in civil disobedience and direct action. And we have tossed in all matters of ecology as we take stock of a dual disaster in the making — one humanitarian and one planetary. And we are indeed ready. All we need is a coherent revolutionary theory — a plan.Those who brought us Seattle and Occupy Wall Street are young and old, ready to draw from the best of the old Left, the New Left, and the social movements that brought us the women’s movement, black power, ecology, and the LGBTQ movements. We are ready to create an Alter-Left with revolutionary nerve.The motto of the World Social Forum is “Another World Is Possible.” The many who created the forum felt weighed down by a politics of refusal that could only say “no” to what it didn’t want, entertaining only a vague sense of other possible worlds to come. The French expressed a similar desire to go beyond an “anti” politics captured in the term “anti-globalization.” Creating instead a notion of alter-mondialization (alter-globalization), French activists captured the notion of alterity — or an “otherness” built out of imaginative and humane possibility. This idea of alternate worlds — the notion that we can redeem humanity and the rest of the natural world through compassionate and intelligent human ingenuity — is breathtaking.As we catch our breath together and conspire (which literally means to “breathe together”), we can draw and direction from the of social more than social from around the world have a collective to move the Alter-Left beyond our post-socialist toward a directly democratic, radically and ecological ecology key which to political direct democracy social and These are ready to be or by peoples around the world to create a just and Social ecology for in in this means to these means each is to its on the way each is into this idea of in into means this world of states into a horizontal of This could the form of and even international In this way, each or could a political life in which committed meet in to the political their world. By in face-to-face direct democracy, each on education, technology, or for instance, would be to a common in the What we call would be determined by the as of direct democracy, social and ecology to the way common are and In this way, this project would to the a capitalist economy that of and By ourselves to these social throughout the world to a socially democratic, and ecological of social ecology did to this vision of a — a vision for how to move away from our and society and toward a just and ecology a coherent revolutionary Yet in its for it a to a a to a Instead, it all of our communities to engage in how to its to our particular cultures and movement building us to a logic of direct democracy, social and ecology to a revolutionary process that will to a society that those very people are by state and ecological destruction. The U.S. Alter-Left is well to move our society away from this position and toward a vision that and the rest of the natural world to time to come together to create a movement that and also working to create a global of directly democratic communities together by a The way to that movement is by a in which we our thinking through how to these into a political movement capable of a society in need of radical problem with the American Left is that it its far left time to catch our our and think ecologically as we our way to a world that is for the

Gheorghe H. Popescu

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert C. Hockett, Daniel G. Dillon

No abstract is available for this record.

Peter Lindsay

I went to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1983 to pursue a Master's Degree in what was then called Political Economy. I chose Toronto largely because C.B. Macpherson taught there. Or so I thought. In those pre-internet days, news traveled slowly, and while the brochure I had received in the mail clearly listed him as a member of the faculty, I discovered when I arrived that he had in fact retired.As it happens, his physical absence hardly seemed to matter, as his ideas—along with those of Allan Bloom, who was also no longer there—permeated the air. It was easy to think about and find discussions of not just Possessive Individualism, but also of his many essays on democratic theory. When, after a four year absence in the mid-80s, I returned for doctoral work, I found no small amount of faculty support for a dissertation on Macpherson's democratic vision.I mention this history because it is of a time that now seems quite remote. Good old-fashion Marxist inspired leftism has almost a quaint air about it, as the names of those whose works we debated endlessly—Miliband, Poulantzas, Althusser, Marcuse (a friend of Macpherson's), Fromm—now create more nostalgia than they do internecine graduate student fighting. So too does the name Macpherson, and, I would argue, we need, in marking the 50th anniversary of Possessive Individualism, to acknowledge that fact. The book is fifty years old, but it was really only alive for about half of that time. Part of the explanation for its decline is no doubt found in the critiques—by Dunn, Skinner and others—of Macpherson's interpretations of Hobbes, Locke et al.1 Of at least equal significance, however, are the forces that have undermined enthusiasm for much of the socialist left. Put simply: Macpherson was too forceful a critic of capitalism for his work to remain unscathed by that system's perceived triumph over communism.Or so I shall argue. When I say “too forceful” I do not mean to imply that Macpherson's critique of capitalism was where he went wrong. Actually, I intend to make precisely the opposite point. To be more specific, my argument here is that while the central ethical commitment of the theory of possessive individualism was anti-capitalist in nature—and for that reason a difficult sell in today's political climate—a close inspection of the manner in which Macpherson employed that commitment reveals a critical perspective that renders his work every bit as vital now as it was thirty, forty or fifty years ago.2Macpherson explained in the opening pages of Possessive Individualism that the book's central concept is a form of individualism arising in the seventeenth-century in which the individual is “seen as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”3 This image was, Macpherson argued, brought to life in the writings of liberal thinkers who took their cues about the nature of individuals from the nascent capitalist relations around them.4 In imbuing their theories with this image, they managed, as have their successors—and in Macpherson's hands, there is no shortage of possessive individualists—to in turn justify those relations, for capitalism as an ideal made sense only as long as humans were conceived in the possessive individualist mode (which, as he later commented, was “a fairly realistic conclusion at the time”5).The logic of these justifications made them unassailable to anyone unwilling to question the basic “postulates of human nature,” as Macpherson was fond of calling them. And for those who did question them—J.S. Mill and T.H. Green through to twentieth century liberals such as A. D. Lindsay and Ernest Barker—the results were various forms of contradiction “involving the thinkers' concealing from themselves the fundamental nature of the problem.”6 As the possessive individualism postulates could not be jettisoned “while market relations prevail,”7 critics of the possessive model simply tacked on to them an “egalitarian complement.”8 This “concept of man as at least potentially a doer, an exerter and developer and enjoyer of his human capacities”9 resulted in “an uneasy compromise between the two views of man's essence, and, correspondingly, an unsure mixture of … two maximizing claims made for the liberal-democratic society.”10 Thus while the theory of possessive individualism was initially an attempt to bring to light the pervasiveness in liberal theory of market assumptions about humans, it became, as Macpherson continued in subsequent works to explore its normative implications,11 an attempt to expose much broader and further reaching contradictions within what had become liberal-democratic theory. As he put it, “Because Western democratic theory contains these inconsistent postulates, its condition is internally precarious.”12So far there is little to indicate why this theory might have come to be neglected in the last twenty years. Even if Macpherson's critics were correct that early liberal thinkers were not drawing from nascent market relations in their postulates about human nature, none, to my knowledge, has suggested that these postulates are absent in their theories. (Rousseau, after all, had argued something very similar when he pointed out that all state of nature theorists, “speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society.”13) Nor has there been criticism of the claim that such postulates do indeed work to justify market relations (irrespective of whether that justification was the intention of any particular thinker). In fact, it is difficult to see how one could reject that claim. So what is the problem here? Why is the theory of possessive individualism not still in currency?The answer, I think, has far less to do with Macpherson's analysis of liberal-democratic theories than it does with the normative position that motivated it. He was, after all, targeting those theories not simply because he, like Rousseau, saw them as anthropologically or ontologically incorrect. Rather, he targeted them because of what they did, namely justify particular inequalities endemic to market relations.14 Hobbes, Locke, and others whose theories were imbued with possessive individualist assumptions did not interest him as subjects of intellectual history; they interested him for the part they played—wittingly or not—in the justification of unjust property relations. His general thinking was that the maintenance [of any particular system of property] requires at least the acquiescence of the bulk of the people, and the positive support of any leading classes. Such support requires a belief that the institution serves some purpose or fills some need. That belief requires, in turn, that there be a theory which both explains and justifies the institution in terms of the purpose served or the need filled.15 This, then, was the role of possessive individualist theories.So what unjust set of property relations—what institution—did possessive individualism explain and justify? In discussing possessive individualism's emphasis on humans as having unlimited desires, Macpherson followed a causal chain to the source of the problem: … the acceptance, by the most active part of society, of the belief that unlimited desire is natural and rational leads to the establishment of the right of unlimited appropriation, which leads to the concentration of ownership of the material means of labour, which leads to the continual transfer of powers.16 This continual transfer occurs because men, as “proprietors of their own person or capacities,” are able to “sell the use of their energy and skill on the market, in exchange for the product or the use of others' energy and skill.”17 The source of the injustice was, then, the wage relationship, a relationship made possible by “the individual right to unlimited, or virtually unlimited, accumulations of property.”18Possessive Individualism (the book) did not dwell long on these concrete conditions, as Macpherson's focus was on the possessive picture of humanity that emerges from Hobbes, et al. He did, however, in his discussion of Hobbes, outline the features of “possessive market society,” emphasizing that “if a single criterion of [this] society is wanted it is that man's labour is a commodity.”19 Indeed, this criterion makes this possessive “model of society” the only one (of three he described) that “meet(s) Hobbes's requirements:” Only in a society in which each man's capacity to labour is his own property, is alienable, and is a market commodity, could all individuals be in this continual competitive power relationship.20To sum up: the “possessive” in “possessive individualism” refers not to our relationship with commodities (as is commonly supposed),21 but rather to our relationship with our own labor. Specifically, it refers to the fact that we can have a relationship with it; that it is thought of not as “us” but rather as “ours.” (Try having a relationship with your leg.) This self-image—the product of possessive individualist theories—in turn allows us to accept the sale of labor to others, and it is this actual, concrete economic fact (the existence of the wage relationship) that lies at the core of Macpherson's critical analysis. It is also what makes that analysis problematic in the era that accepts the market in an increasingly uncritical fashion, for in attacking the commodification of labor, the theory of possessive individualism attacks the market at its core.In most of Macpherson's analysis of possessive is not In fact name only on two pages of Possessive as he makes on one of those two his is The of possessive market society is a an It is clearly similar to the of or capitalist society by and others, who have made the existence of a market in labour a criterion of Indeed, while Macpherson did in subsequent writings say a bit more about the concrete economic relations he as he or to he simply it as his he and was however, a if in his later of whether he was at some a I have found if not clearly as he that “the of as a means of the is over Macpherson's of analysis in to a between the Macpherson's analysis was the as the in which it was was and, as I shall it is precisely this that explains why the of as a means of the has not over and why the of possessive individualism need not the To see this we need to the each in discussing was the problem by the wage turn to analysis of the wage relationship is found in the and of where he the problem of that relationship as one of In the he four particular of from the from the of labor, from our and from each The to in this is how at least half of it on some fairly we are from our of on what that an that can hardly be in the absence of some claim. As far as from our human it is difficult to see how its on the be as a in some political if it is it is so only in a sense that would be difficult to be like a it seems that we can to any right however, of from the and the product of our is the of the problem the is to … labor is to the it does not to his that in his work, he does not but does not his physical and energy but his and his He is at when he is not and when he is he is not at His labor is not but it is labor. It is not the of a it is a means to to it … the of labor for the in the fact that it is not his but that it does not to that in it he not to but to results in a condition as has put it, “a person who life as and or who to a sense of as is what the The his life the but now his life no longer to him but to the the this the is the of the product of his labor he is the this the less is he The of the in his product means … that the life which he has on the him as something and the condition seems it is difficult to how to what is problematic about it. it that we to remain to our And what is to the the how precisely is he in not able to see in not that there no only that capacity to them as did seems of In some this us to the of To the problem with wage labor one of where of the are is to that of and is as it is to the very relations of we to Indeed, that our of and in his the product of those relations, might have our to the wage as an injustice or a of this claim seems similar to Macpherson's argument about the of possessive The however, is that Macpherson's claims about liberal theory were from a theory of He was largely on the of how theory was to its material do not the general question of the of ideas or material he and Locke could be explained by the in which they but so too could Mill and the theories were and of this the were that was not in much more Macpherson, on the his to from the of possessive then, is that Macpherson from the relations of to which he so His was one of as he put it, not a he makes in the opening pages of Possessive we are by some others might our he was in some we can indeed see and critique the relations of from some the point. only is that Macpherson's critique is one that still has in an era to the of liberal no Macpherson only that we relations of from in their he whether those relations might the very to justify Possessive Individualism, Macpherson's critique of the market was that by the twentieth century it had both the and of that were the of political The problem was that theory to use the assumptions of possessive individualism because they are for our possessive market the market no contradiction to the indeed it the only of of which possessive individuals were such as Mill who possessive assumptions as were to in Macpherson continued to work on in liberal-democratic theory over the he his of its contradictions the of The problem liberal-democratic to the of capitalist society a of market postulates and which were not when a century or more what made the was not simply that was but that one set of postulates (the possessive individualist to justify an economic system that the (the The market simply a society of and the of the postulates had liberal-democratic theory then, that while claim is that the capitalist market about a nature of humanity and human relations, Macpherson saw no need to the basic liberal-democratic that were liberal theory in the century to make it To claim that the system would the of its of concentration of argued that the contradiction was between a market system and the of human life on its own Put simply: Macpherson within be about why this last I no claims here about the of or In I have been to the of analysis of the very ideas that I suggested were and on I have found about Macpherson, however, was his to those As a of political Macpherson taught his that there was within the liberal a of human one that much of the of that was in fact the as the but one that also the political that with theory of In Macpherson's critique of the wage relationship that need not accept the with which had it. through a one that its possessive could a to the wage relationship, and it could do so the own of Macpherson's perspective is to in over the wage relationship to or a for is to at with all the more so in the twenty years. Even if is correct as a right of man is not on the of man with man but rather on the of man from it would still be to question whether the capitalist market is really the most means to its own of and to its own of to a critique of property in the claim that “the of any man which are … are only those which all others to have equal is to out that property at a be on basic liberal Macpherson's that from possessive postulates could not to this him to at a position both and than Macpherson its liberal position need not be to on an of capitalist it has been so The fact that liberal in capitalist market is not in a reason why the central ethical of of the individual to his or human be to such Macpherson's hands, then, the of capitalism could on liberal terms that the of both and human As long as was from the “an of the right to all to human could the of the market then, does the wage contradictions for In what is a human by a in which no part in what is when it is how it is or why it is The is not the of the means of as it for in the of and The is with to the that has on the in the Macpherson was about the on two to the liberal those of and those of I shall close by how the wage each can with in its most something to claim that it in having a to capacity in and the of the to which one and in to need in the which the this of the between the wage relationship and democratic it also to a of in which the two might have little or no on one is the that the as he or to the have a in and the of that The also to for of however, for could In what sense does the to the there is the of whether a is inconsistent with an to the fact that the of democratic on how we might about the nature of the for the of the democratic has normative only if we accept the claim that the be for that relations do not with democratic is more of an than a normative In we need to the to which the is similar to or from the society that others, had in Macpherson's such are for between democratic and are if not In an twenty years Possessive Individualism, Macpherson argued we think of as not a set of … but as a set of or to which these are but it is to that any economic which can be to be also means to the democratic are to the and support of the The that was not a political concept but a broader one (a of as at the of Macpherson's thought his So too did the claim that was not just about a to capacity in and the of the to which one but also that it a of an equal society in which can be as he later it, in which there was an to use and and each person Indeed, it is this broader of that explains Macpherson's on political the is to be then democratic as as an of that the over which one would the of the of particular be those that to the of and namely those our In discussing for the democratic in in the Macpherson what was at in are as not as or are in it not to a wage or a of the but to make their work more to them. were in the for more to … it would do nothing … to from their image of themselves as and is not about of it is about the of or the to Macpherson's central claim that how we is of vital to the in which we of who we from a the here only on the that labor in fact, a part of us that it is only in light of an turn in century liberal thought that we have come to think that perspective it is the wage relationship that and an at a an one whose requires a democratic ideal in calling for a human the of what the capitalist market has there can be no doubt that democratic is with the that are for has every for the of its own to democratic unlimited property right with the wage to a democratic Macpherson saw as the not to the market, but only to in its was the to to “the has a to capacity in and the of the to which he that is received not on the existence of the wage but on its any the democratic ideal would themselves a democratic one that as much on in as it did on any As Macpherson put “the of a in Western liberal-democratic with their … of the possessive individualist model of wage relationship was not simply a democratic for the of to the means of labor that it one of the basic justifications of the … institution of individual property, that human be that In his writings on property, Macpherson with the concept in its one that from any particular mode of this property in “a and not a because it that the not be by of the of his market society had the wage was to this between labor and its As its very was, as Green put it, be by society in the power of and the means of a had been Macpherson to to of property that the market and its theories had of the for property as a human right … on whether we property in the or in the more and more natural sense of an individual right both to some property and to some right of to the natural and the of a we to it in the the property right democratic human we it in the broader it does not a democratic concept of human indeed it bring us to something like the concept of individual property in and he was more As as a property in is from an right which is at the time an the right to or property in labour, the is property as a right by all to them to their human is to In forms of property are with the ideal of the institution and forms are In the market not only of fundamental they also the very which they were I have no to Macpherson at the of As I have most of these are with Macpherson, to property, not to it there can be no and no society where some form of property does not is a he did so by at its most form of is not the of property but the of and he did so on the as Macpherson no man of the power to the of all that it does is to him of the power to the labour of others by means of such problem of has less to do with the of his than it does with its to be And of the market are as vital now as they were in for that matter, more of and, for those who do have a of labor all for those who to that the is a The question is who to more to the to they of the market, if we are to them at all, that market property not us where we to … as why that and then they why an set of property is to be most they after such a set of be able to close the argument as a liberal-democratic theory which the concept of property still be in any sense a liberal That of on what put that it mean all the market … then clearly a political theory around the concept of property could not be called if to be essentially an of the right to all to human … then a political theory around the of property is as liberal theory less of property would not but would the liberal-democratic

Michael Lewis, Patrick Conaty

This book is based upon research and reflection supported by BALTA during its initial research program from 2006-2012. It explored many of the themes that became central to BALTA’s work in its Scaling Innovation for Sustainability Project. With our communities confronted by major sustainability challenges, many linked to the impact of climate change, it argues for replacing the paradigm of limitless economic growth with a more decentralized, co-operative, steady-state economy. It examines case studies of success in energy sufficiency, local food systems, low-cost community based financing, affordable housing and land reform. Specific chapters and the book as a whole redefine the development paradigm within a sustainability and steady-state economic framework.

Tito Bianchi

Abstract The development field is currently dominated by two powerful and interconnected ideas: the idea of participation, and the idea of a bottom-up approach. The idea of participation emphasizes the process of development, and claims that development is more likely to be successful if as many as possible of its beneficiaries are actively involved in improving their own conditions. The bottom-up approach—which has a parallel in fiscal decentralization in public finance—maintains that the beneficiaries should choose democratically the means and objectives of the development strategies that concern them.

Fred E Foldvary

Abstract. This paper examines the process of mass democracy as the fundamental cause of transfer seeking and the centralization of governance, using Austrian-school theory and methodology such as decentralized knowledge, disaggregated phenomena, and the structure of capital goods. The alternative of decentralized, small-group gov-ernance reduces the demand for campaign financing and makes more effective use of decentralized knowledge. In addition, when public revenues originate in the local districts and are passed on to higher levels of governance, it provides incentives for revenue sources which do not have an excess burden on production. The governance struc-ture of cellular, bottom-up, multi-level voting, with public revenue flowing up from the lower to the upper levels, provides a contrast for a comparative systems analysis that can yield insight into the transfer seeking endemic in mass democracy.

Biagio Bossone

No abstract is available for this record.