Quote from: K-Dog on Oct 22, 2023, 08:52 PMars.
Owners put people out of work and made them destitute. Owners were greedy fuckers who only cared about themselves.
Well, the whole point of this is how Property Ownership divides the Working Class from the Elite Class in society. Up to the early 1800s, Property Ownership meant Land Ownership, and the Elite Class was the Aristocracy of Europe, The Noble Class distiguished from the Common Class of people. These folks in Europe all had titles of one sort or another, Sirs & Lords, Barons and Baronesses, Counts & Countesses, Dukes & Duchesses, Princes & Princesses, and of course top of the Pyramid Kings & Queens. All hereditary titles, and all the land that went with the title being handed down to the eldest male heir.
Beginning in the era after the discovery of all that juicy new land available across the pond and currently occupied and possessed (but not "owned" under British Common Law) by uncivilized stone age H-Gs, Flags were planted by the Captains of Tall Ships in the name of His or Her Majesty the King or Queen of this or that Nation-State that had coalesced over a millenia of non-stop warfare after the fall of the Roman Empire. Only a couple of sources of power survived that collapse, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and the Banking Houses of Venice and their strongholds in the mountains called Alps north of Italy, bordering the French & Austrian Austrian Alps, and of course that tiny country that held no lowland property at all, Switzerland. They were the bankers for all the banks of the countries around them.
Come the discovery of the new world ripe for the pickin', the ships these monarchs dispatched had to be financed, initially directly from the treasury of a king, but eventually with Credit issued by banks, and money raised by selling Shares out of places like the City of London and the Dutch Port of Amsterdam, which became the homes respectively of the British and Dutch East India companies and banks and insurers like Lloyds of London and the House of Rothschild. At the same time, our good friendly neighborhood mathematicians Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz simultaneously devised a marvelous new bookkeeping system called the Calculus, and modern day Capitalism was born!
At this juncture in history, property ownership came to have a much broader meaning besides just land, which in fact dwindled in its importance as time went by. What it came to mean was ownership over the equipment necessary for these big undertakings like Tall Ships and their big crews of poor and impoverished refugees from wars who haunted the ports, and then the big mills necessary for processing wood and making cloth for sails, etc. It also came to mean ownership over intellectual property, like words written on a page of a book. To get a book published, an author had to sell his ownership of copyright to the publishers who owned the printing presses necessary if you wanted to get your book read. It also extended to patents for inventions, which if you held one then anybody who used it would have to pat you money, but in practice inventors usually have to sell their ideas to somebody with enough money or credit to finance building the toy, whatever it is. And afford the army of lawyers necessary to defend a patent.
Machines and the Luddite movement of weavers who were in the Guilds of Skilled Tradesmen that predated Unions were a part of this transition of traditional aristocratic land ownership to the capitalist owners of the means of production. In both cases, The Nobility were the Filthy Rich of their time while the Capitalists became the Filthy Rich of our time. Through both time periods, and going well back before that to the heyday of the Roman Empire when Jesus went flipping over the banca (Latin for desk) of the money-lenders, Banksters have been the Filthy Rich of all times, ever since the invention of money itself, probably around the time of the Assyrians or the Babylonians. The Tower of Babel itself was a Counting House and Warehouse, and the Collapse of the Tower and the legend of people no longer having one language in all likelihood was about currency failure and a credit crisis that occurred in that era.
What goes around, comes around and about the only differences between now and then is a whole lot more people and a whole lot less resources left to exploit and consume, or even own. So it goes.
RE