From: Terrence Mc Donough <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Rousseau on property TM: [snipped bit on Roman slavery.] Private property rights have never guaranteed freedom of any sort. LR: Of course it does, it's just "freedom" of a particular sort for a particular class of people. "Freedom" should always be properly qualified. In common usage I think it rarely means "freedom" from literal slavery, rather "freedom" to economically enslave others, and so on. Also, I suspect that "private property rights" are part of the formalization of a deal between the rich and the government [the ruling class with itself] about the division of the spoils of exploitation. TM: I've long thought that the 'theft' of surplus by the capitalist class is not really the moral (or practical) problem with capitalism. The problem is the collective disempowerment on economic, political, and cultural levels which this appropriation leads to. LR: Puzzling. Such theft could not occur if the workers were not already "disempowered" by the current creation and enforcement of the capitalist version of private property "rights", through both legal and extra-legal means. So which way does the causality run? Capitalist theft also seems to be the immediate, direct cause of workers being much poorer than owners, with all the problems that poverty entails, including a much shorter life expectancy, even when violence is not included. That's one of the reasons that 'theft' seems like a "problem" to me.
