Social ownership

“ The present society sanctifies ownership, and raises the owner to a position of moral superiority.
The same system which dignifies ownership can scarcely recognize work as of supreme social consequence. The worker is therefore placed in a position inferior to that of the owner. ”

“ By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. ”

“ Many socialist writers, it must be noted, however, point out that they wish social ownership of the means of production rather than of every item of personal property, such as books, clothing, and the like. ”

“ This vast and resourceful country should be free from the scourge of poverty and the blight of ignorance; but it never will be until the private ownership of the means of sustaining life is abolished and society is organized on the basis of social ownership of the social means of wealth production and the inalienable right of all to work and to produce freely to satisfy their physical needs and material wants. ”

“ Having shown how wide a social revolution is implied in the socialistic scheme of reconstruction, we may now state (1) that the economic basis of the prevalent socialism is a collectivism which excludes private possession of land and capital, and places them under social ownership in some form or other. ”

“ Over against all the ownership rights which do and should accrue to such manager, social responsibilities on the part of the management arise and develop with every stage in the progress of the business. These responsibilities are obligations to coöperators in the business, and to the society more remotely affected by the business. These obligations fix the ethical limits of ownership, and define the duties incumbent on proprietorship. ”

“ The objects of ownership are brought into the stream of social life. No private owner, for his own personal interests, can control them to the injury of the general public;—neither, again, can the general public control them bureaucratically to the injury of the private person;—but private persons, who are suitable, will have access to them, as a means of serving the public.
A sense for the general public interest will have a chance to grow up, when impulses of this sort are realised, which place production on a sound basis, and safeguards the body social from sudden crises. ”

“ For they assumed that private property in {18} land, and the private ownership of capital, were natural institutions, and gave them, indeed, a new lease of life, by proving to their own satisfaction that social well-being must result from their continued exercise. ”

“ Social relations are the reflex of the grouping of industrial possessions. The owners of all resources and means of wealth form a class of their own; the owners of labor power as their only possession in the market, another. Political, judicial, educational and other institutions are only the mirror of the prevailing system of ownership in the resources and means of production. ”

“ He finds law controlling economic power and imposing social responsibilities upon individual ownership. He finds the common will and the common well-being putting a bridle on the neck of the individual will and the individual interest. ”

“ Directly, because civilization shows us the continuous substitution of public ownership and social functions for private ownership and individual functions. Roads, postal systems, railways, museums, city lighting-plants, water-plants, schools, etc., which were only a few years since private properties and functions, have become social properties and functions. And it would be absurd to imagine that this direct process of socialization is destined to come to a halt to-day, instead of becoming progressively more and more marked, in accordance with every tendency of our modern life. ”

“ Now, this is not only the original source from which333 all ideas of exclusive ownership arise—as is evident from the natural tendency of the mind to revert to it when the idea of exclusive ownership is questioned, and the manner in which social relations develop—but it is necessarily the only source. There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself. ”

“ It does not fall within the scope of this work to describe how, in the course of mankind’s evolution, as individual human abilities came to play a part in the social order, private property also grew up out of other forms of ownership. Ownership has, under the influence of the division of labour, gone on developing in this form within the body social down to the present day. ”

“ No one may acquire the right of ownership of social resources which are conditions of labour in basic and other organizations of associated labour or are the economic foundations for the realization of the functions of self-managing communities of interest or of other self-managing organizations and communities and of socio-political communities. ”

“ The laws of nature make it impossible for individuals to own them. The extent to which the laws of the state shall become the accomplices of individuals, in turning proprietorship into monopoly, is a matter for social intelligence to determine.
To develop this suggestion somewhat more in detail, things which are a fair equivalent for the individual's labor, things which in their nature are useful only as consumed by individuals, may fairly be considered proper objects of absolute ownership in the sense already indicated. ”

“ Pursued historically, the student would find himself at the roots of property, separate ownership of land, inheritance, taxation, free trade and tariff, and discover the germs of international law and the state. The great questions of the day, as we call them, are little more than incidents to the working out of the great social institutions, and these are the expansions and modified forms of the family amid its unceasing support and activity. ”

“ Instead of the régime of private and capitalistic ownership of property, under which it is possible for one part of mankind to lord it over the other part, they wish to institute a system of universal social co-operation which shall make of every man a legal partner. ”

“ These classes of goods and opportunities cannot be claimed by right as any man's own. They are correctly viewed only when they are regarded as equipments of civilization, which are not primarily for consumption but for production. They cannot be made the absolute possession of individuals without dispossessing other individuals whose ethical claim to some of this social heritage is equally clear. These latter classes of goods are reasonable objects of proprietorship, but not of ownership. ”

“ He argues ably against private property, but no thought of any such radicalism as the admission of those poor peons of his with head half-shaved and glaring uniform against escape, to participation in ownership, appears in his proposals. ”

“ The ownership of socially essential things—resources and means of production is guaranteed by the state and the social relationship growing out of that ownership is a concomitant which the state is designed to preserve. ”

“ The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people. ”

“ What the individual calls his own, whether of real or personal property, is it, can it be solely the product of his own activity? Does he not owe by far the greater part of it to the co-operation of others, to the social labor, the labor in common, of the people who have lived before him and of his contemporaries? And as the individual attains possession of property only by means of the help of others, so he cannot enjoy its fruits without the help of others. Only in society has property value, only in society can man rejoice in it. ”

“ It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of a new State, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new State grows up. ”

“ If industry, frugality, and disinterested integrity were alike the virtues of all, there would, apparently, be more of the social spirit, in making all property a common stock, and giving to each individual a proportional title to the wealth of the whole. ”

“ But in our present world only a small minority can have that direct and honourable relation of public service in the work they do; most of the important business of the community is done upon the older and more tortuous private ownership system, and the great mass of men in socially useful employment find themselves working only indirectly for the community and directly for the profit of a private owner, or they themselves are private owners. ”

“ When certain strong men found themselves able to garner a larger share of property than their fellows, they rebelled against the communistic ownership of property, and the state, with the system of private ownership, was evolved, came into being to protect the private owners in their private ownership against the community, or the mass, which possessed no private property. ”

“ It is the public ownership of all the wealth, the mills, the mines, the factories, the railroads and land. Things that are used in common, must be owned in common, by the people and for the people under democratic management by the people, instead of the present system of private ownership for profits. ”

“ The concentration of capital in the form of trusts at the same time as it simplifies the task we propose that society shall undertake, viz. the dispossession of the capitalist class, and the administration of all land and instruments of industry as social property, of which all shah be co-heirs and owners. ”

“ Whether, under favourable circumstances and the rare public spirit of private owners, much can be done, or to any wide extent, so long as absolute individual ownership in land and ground values is allowed, seems to me very doubtful. ”

“ Their aim is not to abolish private property, but to purify it, by means of some systematic social regulation which shall give each man a share more conformable with his personal merit and contribution. ”

“ It is also very striking, on such rhetorical occasions, to oppose the private owner to the community or the state or the municipality, and to suppose all the vices of humanity concentrated in private ownership, and all the virtues of humanity concentrated in the community, but indeed that clear and striking contrast will not stand the rough-and-tumble of the workaday world. ”

“ All those things which belong to the class of private utilities should be left to private ownership, because I believe in individualism; but all those things which partake of the nature of public utilities should belong to the public. ”

“ Not only do the facts of wealth distribution contradict the assumption that it is the possession of private property which is the basis of our society, but the kind of enjoyment attached to commercial success which is being evolved by business changes is not so great as that which, so far as social respect and personal liberty are concerned, was the lot of the business man who managed his own capital and felt himself and his wealth integral parts of his town to be spent in the service of the town. ”

“ Wealth ownership and the exercise of authority, concentrated in one person or family, created a basic division in the community between those whose livelihood depended on their labor and those whose income was determined by their ownership of property and their exercise of authority. ”

“ Well, society cannot guarantee him the right to work or the right to life, it cannot promote him from the condition of a passive wage earner to that of a free co-operator, without itself entering into the domain of property. Social property has to be created to guarantee private property in its real sense, that is, the property that the human individual has and ought to have in his own person. ”

“ How is it possible for a group of parasites to retain private ownership over the means of labour, so indispensable to all? How has it come about that private ownership by the idle classes is maintained to the present day? ”

“ There was no limit to the extent to which an individual might acquire the exclusive ownership of all the factories, shops, mines, and means of industry, and commerce of every sort, so that no person could find an opportunity to earn a living except as the servant of the owner and on his terms. ”

“ Distinction between ownership and use The right to exclusive ownership of anything of human production is clear. No matter how many the hands through which it has passed, there was, at the beginning of the time, human labour - someone who, having procured or produced it by his exertions, had to it as against all the rest of mankind a clear title which could justly pass from one to another by sale or gift. ”

“ All persons may accumulate property which they create by personal labor, if they wish to burden themselves with the care of it. But as there is an abundance in the common stores to supply every want, there is no motive for the private ownership of anything but personal belongings which are ordinarily of no value to anyone else. Members of the community may have anything they need out of the common stock and intelligent people would not encumber themselves with the care of more than they have a use for. ”

“ We are apt indeed to think of the state of things in which the members of a family or clan hold land and stock in common, as the antithesis of one in which rights of property exist. In truth it is the earliest stage of their existence, because the most primitive form of society in which the fruit of his labour is secured to the individual by the society, under the influence of the conception of a common well-being. ”