The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-08-12

HoiIteu, anu they upHelu IHelf rights by an appeal to ancestral parchments. But they knew that their thrones rested upon bayonets, and without that support would speedily totter. So too any proper tied man knows that his ownership is not actively engaged in support ing itself with might expressed in terms of military violence, but through legal means, in the courts and the legislative halls. And truly also, everyone knows that were the propertilesS to flout the courts and the legislative halls, to ignore the proprietorship recognized by deeds and legal instruments, that fouting would speedily cause an expression of military might would soon bring the flouters to a more proper sense of the reality of force behind the legal formula.
 It may appear as an economic heresy to the average MarXian to declare that positively there can be no value where is not possession. It proprietor the right to exclude from the social benefit of any possession) that gives it it's value. Just as long as anything is free to all, as air or sea water, it possesses no value Ill the scheme of things, and in the readiness which it's possession can be acquired, it's value falls and de- preciates accordingly. Exchange values can only exist under capital ism, and while it is the application of manual or mental labor power to machinery and raw material that produces all wealth, only the pro prietorship gives any portion of that any value. Value is wrapped up ill prOprietorship, and it is valuable because that ownership is upheld by the social might which property luo tul ilCu iIlto llo ON II uoC' oNtN and barter in ownership of various articles is trade and barter in var ious articles of value. And it is the assertion of this ownership which involves the nations in wars, when the might required to assert itself as inherent in the principles ot ownership, conflicts with the might of other trading proprietors.
 But the present economic system is based upon might because it pre- dicates as it's sine qua non the right to exclude from the necessaries of life or means through which those necessaries can be secured, by force, if force is required to sup port authoritative enactments or legal sanction already created by private property itself.
 That is why the capitalist system is essentially an anarchist system. It has no other ethic than the ethic of the right of might. Its entire culture is fundamentally founded upon that principle. It claims, with force if necessary, the right to ex- clude numberlesS human beings from the means of livelihood, by denying them access to the means Of subsistence. It insists upon the right, by force if necessary, to allow those who have not property to acquire the necessaries of life only after they have rendered them, the Caesars of industry, tribute in the form of profits. They require ill older to maintain the social equili- brium, naturally because of it's be- ing essentially antagonistic and un- stable, armies and navies so that they will be secure in their owner ship.
 John Locke, the English philo- sopher, declared a great truth when he said that where is no private pro- perty, there is no injustice. The right to exclude a community from what the community needs to live, which private property conveys, is not to be upheld by any moral prin- ciple. If land and machinery and water supply are necessary to labor that labor may live, only an exercise of might can prevent labor assum- ing that right to live.
 But none of these things are dis cussed in moral terms. Nothing ever is accepted because of it's mo-