Chapter 13
Property

In the second part of this book, we presented the organization of production, which constitutes the core of the social organization. In this third part, we will clarify other aspects of social organization in order to ultimately present a globally coherent system. Some very innovative political proposals, which could have been the subject of an entire thesis work, are presented here in just a few sentences, or even just one. Don't miss them!

The idea we often followed here is to present the key few changes that can unlock the situation, as for example in the chapters dealing with ecology, justice, or the media. Indeed, without a clear proposal outlining the main lines of the new framework from the outset, it is quite unlikely that the legacy of the past, the weight of habits and established interests, will allow for such a major change to occur simply through continuous improvement stemming from professional experience. Or, if so, such change would take a time likely counted in centuries.
However, we did not attempt to list exhaustively the practical consequences or to detail the implementation methods of these structural measures. Indeed, in part two, we just defined what an efficient and constructive decision-making loop is, which allows for addressing problems encountered in practice. The best implementation, therefore, is to always put this loop in place, through the creation of organizations, ensuring it works well, but without assuming what it will produce in terms of strategic decisions that define the practical operating modalities.
Yet, we needed these structural measures to quickly establish a coherent general environment. Indeed, although the effective and constructive decision loop is the key, we saw in chapter 10 that when overly archaic external structural constraints make the best solutions impossible, then, lacking results that produce social consensus, the game of alliances, and consequently the irrational reasoning described in chapter 4 may take over again.
Therefore, in the end, we should view these very innovative political proposals as catalysts for a coherent society project, which we just presented in the heart of the second part of this book, rather than as improvements to be made to the current system, which, due to failing to properly account at its foundations the implications of generalized nepotism and cognitive dissonance, will not escape from its archaic status, no matter what improvements are made at the upper levels.

This chapter addresses the concept of property from three angles: the ownership of the means of production, inherited property, and finally income derived from work.

Why limit the concentration of wealth?

We saw in chapter 5 that the Enlightenment ideal included the limitation of wealth concentration in the hands of a small number. This limit was endangered by the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, which the U.S. Antitrust Law aimed to partially counter by breaking up hegemonic industrial empires in order to prevent private power from becoming superior to that of the collective. However, as Alain Supiot has shown, the path taken in the 20th century was ultimately the acceptance of unbounded economic power concentration (1), and to deal with that, an increase in the size and power of federal states in the U.S. and Europe, i.e., a race to gigantism.
Yet, as we also saw in chapter 5, in a democracy, excessive concentration of economic power leads, at some point, to the people voting for a populist seen as an illusory bulwark against the owning minority unconcerned with the people's daily difficulties. We are in that situation quite everywhere in the world.
Tracing back the chain of consequences, what opposes a return to a more reasonable size is the current dogma of deregulated free trade at a global scale, which favors the most powerful organizations. Let's continue. We need deregulated free trade because we absolutely need growth, hence the need for new markets to conquer. And finally, we need permanent growth to compensate for the permanent increase in our non-productive staff, as seen in chapter 2 under the name of Parkinson's Law.
For pedagogical purposes, let's retrace the chain of consequences: proliferation of non-productive personnel → need for growth → need for new outlets → deregulated globalization → corporate gigantism → concentration of wealth in the hands of a few → populist voting → inevitable authoritarian drift.
At what level do we decide to break this infernal chain? Ecologists and alter-globalists want to get out of the growth logic. Alain Supiot wants to limit corporate gigantism in line with Enlightenment vision. Thomas Piketty wants to limit wealth concentration. Populists generally want to restore protectionism. We claim that all of this is illusory, and that the link on which we must necessarily act is the first one. This is the whole meaning of the creation of the organizations described in the second part of this book.
If we now approach the problem from the opposite angle; once we have decided to seriously fight the proliferation of non-productive personnel, do we need to do more? In particular, do we need to also limit the concentration of economic power by restricting access to property, and thus to freedom? In fact, once we have broken the chain of consequences we just described, then gigantism loses its reason for being. However, the risks it poses to democracy do not disappear, nor does the exacerbation of the internal struggle for power it generates, hence generalized nepotism, and the stress it causes on individuals. Therefore, there is no reason to tolerate it any longer.
This is also true for all the other links: once the infernal chain of consequences is broken, the end of the growth logic, the limits set on the size of enterprises, and protectionism, become obvious necessities to ensure that progress benefits everyone. We will come back to this in chapter 14 concerning ecology, and in chapter 19 concerning world trade.

Ownership of the means of production

The ownership of the means of production is the aspect of property at the heart of Marx's work. Indeed, he decried that the Industrial Revolution caused the concentration of this ownership in few hands, thus creating a new destitute class: the workers.

Regarding the ownership of the means of production, we aim here to move away from two extremes. On one hand, the capitalist extreme with large commercial enterprises; on the other hand, the collectivist extreme. We will first explain why these two positions are extreme, while in the West we tend to think that only the second is an extreme.

Concerning the notion of a commercial enterprise first, the limits set on capital reduce to, on one hand, the obligation to respect the letter of the regulation, and on the other hand, the constraint to make a profit. Yet, this represents an excess of power in at least three respects. First, an enterprise can make decisions contrary to the collective interest. Second, in a more subtle manner, it can make decisions that predictably lead to its downfall or poor health. An example is the excessive 'cost killer' behavior of some entrepreneurs. Finally, in our highly complex society, an enterprise can use this complexity to deliberately circumvent the spirit of the law while respecting its letter. The case of Lehman Brothers in the 2000s is a perfect illustration.

In a collectivized economy, the imposed limits are merely to partially respect the law and to have political support. Indeed, the power shifts from capital to the political realm, and enterprises tend to ensure their survival through political backing, thus favoring corruption, i.e., a law not applied equally to everyone.

Let us also note that the fact of privatizing or nationalizing, which we tend to see as the most revealing element of a political system, is actually not significant in itself. What ultimately determines the functioning of the social organization, but is often overlooked, is the governance of the production organizations set up. The fact of privatizing or nationalizing does not mechanically induce a mode of governance canonically associated with each. For example, when nationalizing, we can as well implement a political mode of governance, as in communist systems, as a rational mode of governance, as we recommend.

It follows that in a modern, hence complex, society, the ownership of the means of production must primarily be subject to good management, hence the operational control introduced in chapter 11.
Once this quality is ensured, it becomes obvious that structuring enterprises, i.e., those that are primarily order-givers to subcontractors, must be nationalized in order to become organizations as described in this book, as the social effect of their decisions is amplified.

We will see in chapter 17, dedicated to the financing of activities, how organizations can operate without capital.

Inherited property

The system for regulating inequalities that we will propose in chapter 16 is based on a wealth tax. Indeed, once we have established a system that no longer requires private capital to fund the economy, the concept of large fortunes becomes unnecessary and morally questionable. Thus, it becomes more logical to tax wealth than income.

Moreover, we will also see in chapter 16 that we intend to use an inheritance tax to ensure the balance of public accounts, i.e., to eliminate what is called 'debt' at the beginning of the 21st century, which in fact results only from an absurd way of accounting. Indeed, if one generation has incurred public debt because the state's budget was not balanced year by year, then it cannot pass on to its direct descendants the property acquired partly thanks to this credit, while passing on the corresponding debt to the whole community. It is appropriate, at the time of inheritance, to reconcile the two to transmit only the net result.

Income from work

It seems clear to us that if we combine robotics and degrowth, employment cannot be the only source of income for the working class. Indeed, in chapter 16 dedicated to taxation and redistribution, we include a universal basic income system.

Conversely, the tax system we propose does not include specific taxes on income from work, usually called social contributions and income tax. Indeed, as we have just seen, it is more logical to regulate over time using a wealth tax rather than to immediately levy the fruits of labor.
Moreover, we do not seek to limit income inequalities through taxes or laws, as we think the universal basic income is a mechanism that advantageously replaces the concept of a minimum wage, and on the other side, the fact of limiting the size of organizations, as indicated in chapter 8, will de facto limit the highest salaries.

Let us finally recall what we said in chapter 5 in the paragraph 'A very brief history of humanity': the end of mass work is not a catastrophe, but a potential fruit of the acquisition of technological knowledge, which simply requires the adoption of a new social organization adapted to the new circumstances.
More precisely, a mental obstacle to overcome is to see work as THE source of social integration, and therefore, by mirror effect, the end of universal work as a breakdown of society following the adage 'idleness is the mother of all vices.' This fear is an undesirable effect of Enlightenment philosophy, which saw work as the means of emancipation, as we mentioned in chapter 5.
What we are dealing with is simply putting an end to the alienation through work, i.e., gradually ending the acceptance of social oppression within the framework of work, just because one has to earn a living. Indeed, it must be noted that even after more than a century of democracy, the goal of emancipation through work of the Enlightenment ideal has never been achieved for the majority of the population, and never will be in a capitalist democracy, because the stress on individuals, resulting from generalized nepotism, opposes it.
The organizations we presented in the second part have two characteristics that promote fulfillment at work. First, even when their purpose is not rewarding, the modalities of power distribution limit the stress linked to generalized nepotism seen in chapter 2. Second, the organizations we propose unify the notion of a commercial company, administration and association, so they will allow the evolution towards more rewarding reasons as progress advances.

(1)
The threshold of reasonableness is exceeded with the introduction of the 'Too big to fail' concept, which changes the nature of enterprises: profits remain private, but any possible losses will be socialized.