Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“Most corporate profit consists of unearned economic rents of various kinds — returns on absentee-owned land and natural resources (the title to which, directly or indirectly, mostly derive from past expropriation), patents and copyrights, regulatory barriers to entry (mostly legislated at the behest of the regulated industries), etc. That is the very definition of a zero-sum relationship, in which one party’s profit comes at the expense of the others. By far the largest sufferer from such zero-sum exchange is the working class, whose bargaining power is gravely weakened by the concentration of property in the means of production in the hands of an absentee class of capitalist owners. The founding act of capitalism, in the late medieval and early modern periods, was the expropriation of commoning rights and other communal peasant claims to the land.” (04/25/24)