Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Capitalism [...] first expropriates the working people from the soil and their piece of land; then it appropriates their independent means of life and so creates the conditions in which it can also appropriate the products of their labour. The right of disposal over the fruits of labour, and hence over the producers themselves, falls into ever fewer hands. Furthermore, the truth that the sole achievements of the Russian Revolution were that the Russian Communist Party had been constituted as a totally centralised despotic instrument of power, equipped with all necessary means for exercising state oppression over the still dispossessed and propertyless producers was a fact we were forced to recognise.

But our thoughts went further: the most profound and intense contradiction in human society resides in the fact that, in the last analysis, the right of decision over the conditions of production, over what and how much is produced and in what quantity, is taken away from the producers themselves and placed in the hands of highly centralised organs of power. Today, over forty years after I first came to this awareness as I sat in prison, I see this development unfolding to an ever greater degree in all parts of the world. This basic division in human society can only be overcome when the producers finally assume their right of control over the conditions of their labour, over what they produce and how they produce it.

From the autobiography of Jan Appel, 1890-1985, writing in 1966.

I still think the focus on abolishing private property and wage labor mis-identifies the problem. (Later in the piece he wrote, "Our analysis therefore led to the inescapable conclusion that, once the workers have won power through their mass organisations, they will be able to hold on to that power only provided that they eliminate wage-labour from all economic life and instead adopt as the nodal point of all economic activity the duration of labour time expended in the production of all use values, as the equivalent measure replacing money values, and around which the whole of economic life would revolve.") The problem is unequal power, and more broadly the injustice behind that unequal power and the restrictions on liberty that enable the injustice to stand. From this perspective, while clearly control over ones own work and the opportunity to work are completely necessary, how to get there looks more like making access to resources equal (whoever holds the stuff and whether or not it's considered property) and supporting collective organizing in general (not just hierarchical, elite-controlled collective organizing in corporations, governments, and NGOs).

(To be fair, while I'm presenting this as if I'm taking the deeper view of looking at what underlies property and exploitive wages, Jan Appel represents a perspective that the deepest view is relations between people, particularly as regards work, and that this is what we must structure differently. I don't disagree with that, but I'm more comfortable changing what is obviously bad – wealth inequality, state and state-supported structures for concentrating power such as corporate law – and seeing how we reorganize under more fair and free conditions.)