Look behind the veil of ‘private property’

A string of banks, airlines, car manufacturers and aluminium smelters — all big corporations that have profited for years while extorting billions of dollars in public subsidies — have spat in the face of our society.

They have begun huge sackings of workers, even though Australia supposedly escaped the worst of capitalism’s global economic crisis. The big banks have posted record profits, but they refuse to pass on interest rate cuts to families struggling to keep up with huge home mortgages.

In this context, Green Left Weekly has run several opinion pieces raising the idea of nationalising the mining, banking, car and aluminium industries. As a result, a few anonymous people have called us “extremists” and even “vermin” in comments online.

Some less hostile responses have asked if nationalisation is possible, considering that the plants and technology these corporations use is “private property”.

But these times of crisis provide lessons on how selectively the corporate rich apply their commitment to private property. In Europe, people are being condemned to the collective punishment of forced economic austerity just to implement capitalism’s only unbreakable rule: privatise the profits, socialise the losses.

In the case of the car and aluminium industries — as Geelong Trades and Labour Council secretary Tim Gooden explains in an interview in this issue — the public has paid for the profits of their private owners in times of boom and recession.

These companies have been on the gravy train for decades. They are world’s-best-practice corporate welfare extortionists.

So the public should not be terrorised into submission by the words “private property”. Indeed, we should look behind the veil of “private property” more often.

I am not referring to what most people count as their private property: personal possessions such as clothes, a bicycle, car or home.

Rather, I mean capital: the private property owned by just a few, which is used to oppress others and grossly distorts the social and environmental choices our society makes.

Private property of this nature can often be traced back through time to outright theft: the theft of land owned by indigenous and colonised peoples, slavery and piracy. But such ill-gotten gains have then been multiplied through systematic exploitation of people who have been left with no choice but to sell their labour power to the owners of capital.

The stupendous profits amassed under capitalism don’t appear out of thin air. Nor are they due to the hard work of the owners of private property. They come out of exploitation. No exploitation, no profit. This is an iron law of capital.

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” said the famous German socialist Karl Marx.

If we want to free society from the dead end that capitalism has brought us to, then we need to look behind the veil of private property and see the real relations of power that lie behind it. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity,” Marx’s best mate Frederick Engels noted.

OK, another red has come out from under the bed and I'm urging you readers to defy the “vampire-like” bloodsuckers of today by chipping into our fighting fund this week.

You can donate online to the Green Left fighting fund here. Direct deposits can be made to Greenleft, Commonwealth Bank, BSB 062-006, Account No. 00901992. Otherwise, you can send a cheque or money order to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007 or donate on the toll-free line at 1800 634 206 (within Australia).