This explains why slaveholder Thomas Jefferson was comfortable in declaring, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It is also why Ayn Rand could write that the European settlers could justifiably appropriate the homelands of indigenous peoples as being as virgin land.
It also explains the situation in which the world is now as a result of this thinking being coming a cultural traction that has been institutionalized as the liberal rules-based world order. This is at the core of a chief dynamic of the current moment in the historical dialectic – the conflict between liberalism and traditionalism.
Foreign Policy In FocusThe Lockean Roots of White Supremacy in the U.S.
Walden Bello
AlterNet
I am not 'non-white'
Heeten Kanti Kalan
This attachment to individual ownership of small property is deeply embedded in the collective cultural psyche of America — so much that Hartz asserted that the ideology of Americans could be described as “irrational Lockeanism.” Louis Hartz
ReplyDeleteActually, individual ownership of roughly equal plots of land is a Biblical concept exemplified by Old Testament Isreal/Judea. So it's not “irrational Lockeanism” but apparently God's ideal economic structure for humans.
In the United States, Lockeanism “swallowed up both the peasantry and proletariat into the ‘petty bourgeois’ scheme,” he wrote, derailing workers from the vision of socialism and channeling reformist energies to the illusion of democratic capitalism. ibid
I thought this issue of collectivism vs private ownership of small plots of land was settled by the Soviet Union where it was discovered that individually owned small gardens produced 25% of the food!
Not to defend Locke but just because he was wrong does not make socialists right.
Btw Tom, how much private property would you allow in your utopia? Any? Or is a private wife, husband or toothbrush too much for you?
Not to defend but rather to condemn Bill Gates' ownership of 230,000 acres or so of US farmland when we have so much homelessness and rent slavery among citizens.