Earth and Society as Labour
Commercial rewards come from labour. This blog argues that commerce ought to recognize the value businesses get from earth & society as either rewardable labour or something more valuable.
In general terms, every commercial transaction goes from common to private ownership. Ownership, meaning the owner decides and controls what the reward (usually money) from common resources is used for.
A just transaction aims to balance private ownership with common ownership. This is a challenge in the commercial world where social narratives directly link success to how hard the individual uses his mind, effort, and will to transfer as much as he can from common into private ownership.
To be fair, it would be an injustice to deny the individual the fruits of her labour. A balance can be found right there — in the just need to honour the rights of one’s labour. The person has full rights to the rewards attributed to his/her labour (since he owns himself as John Locke argues). No one would enjoy living in a community where benefits from his hard work are grabbed by nothing-doers. However, it is also unjust for one to assume more reward than is actually attributed to one’s labour. Yet, our global economy runs on narratives that are corrupted by the ego-centric bias in which we (humans) attribute more responsibility and rewards for our efforts than is actually due to them.
Several studies highlight the effects of the ego-centric bias on human beliefs and behaviour. Because of the imperfect ways humans process information, the self tends to exaggerate his role and undervalue others’ [especially if it’s nature] role in value creation. This cognitive bias is at the core of the injustices of capitalist ownership — because the self chooses self-interested outcomes based on ethical judgments of his [exaggerated] role. Even worse, we’ve transcribed these exaggerated self-interested outcomes into morally sound social beliefs, laws, and state policies.
Economic injustices begin at exaggerating the human role in value creation and they spread when we celebrate role exaggeration through idolizing billionaires and honoring and louding Unicorns that make good use of tax havens and other creative accounting techniques to dodge taxes.
We likely exaggerate our roles because of a (seeming) abundance claimed by no one’s labour — because earth and society don’t have the privilege of personhood as do corporations so the value, they create isn’t rewardable and or the rewards are attributed to and taken by corporate persons. If commerce treated earth and society as mutual partners not zero-value externalities in value creation, the common value from them provides a base limit to how much created-value (labour) and rewards can be attributed to corporate persons and to the commons.
Take Locke’s acorns example — on which capitalist private property laws are based. When I pick acorns from a common oak tree, my labour starts and ends with picking them. I didn’t grow the oak tree; I don’t control the natural processes that nourish the acorns and give them aromatic flavors and sheaths that decay to feed not poison earth like our artificial packaging. For most economic production, nature does the hardest work. That I did so little as pick ready acorns (minerals, and other natural resources) than bring them into being, means that I own as little as I need for my self-preservation.
It means that nature didn’t go through billions of years of hard work — i.e. the hard-hitting evolution to create life-dependent climate, processes, and resources only for me to extract this base value and amass wealth, status, and fame from it, but for the common benefit. That one’s efforts go only so far in creating value compared to nature is imperative to balance private and common ownership.
The egocentric bias is especially rife in our knowledge economy. Developing modern production processes, medicines, energy, transportation, gadgets, and the algorithms running on them, takes far less effort compared to what wealth-accumulating inventors used as building blocks to invent them. That is, the freely abundant goldmine of knowledge (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and humanities), civilisation, and culture that would be impossible without the imagination, cooperation, and incremental refining done by the global society for over 5,000 years.
The abundance of resources is a rational and moral imperative for common, not self prosperity. Yet capitalism, specifically money is designed to turn abundance into artificial scarcity that channels common benefits into excess accumulation at the expense of common prosperity.
Economic imbalance begins with the entrepreneur exaggerating his role in value creation and exaggerating entitlement to rewards from commercialising common resources, and then social narratives and now laws coming up to protect the unjust role and reward exaggeration. This ego-centric exaggeration shrinks common entitlement to rewards from common resources.
Female inferiority was/is less productive and unsustainable because the value from women's activities went/goes unrewarded. Slavery was unsustainable because slave labour went unrewarded. Colonisation was unsustainable because the colonized received fewer rewards from their efforts and resources. Today, capitalism is unsustainable because it treats the value it gets from earth and society as zero-value externalities.
The lesson here is that, for sustainable productivity, where value comes from, proportionate rewards must go — irrespective of personhood.
Today, labour underpins value creation, which underpins capitalist ownership. Limiting this labour = value = ownership equation to human and corporate persons is unjustly limiting the rewards (funds) that go to social and environmental issues. It is limiting common entitlement from the common value created by earth and society to a handful of high achieving persons — as seen in the ever-widening private/public wealth gap.
The ego-centric bias also affects how we measure success in the commercial world. If one believes as from the prevailing social narratives, laws, and policies that one’s limited input entitles them to more commercial rewards than they actually are responsible for, then success as an aspect of social beliefs is effectively shifted from how much one shares common wealth to how much wealth one accumulates as a result of one’s ‘exaggerated role’ in creating value.
A seller voluntarily setting a commonshare and a buyer redeeming it at checkout exposes them to neglected social and environmental issues inspiring moral imaginations beyond ego-centric self-interest driven by recognizing the value businesses and customers get from earth and society and reciprocated by sharing not amassing abundant resources. For example, a seller (who compares the number of trees planted with a commonshare of 4% with the number of trees needed to fill a 300-hectares forest) can be inspired to increase to a higher commonshare of 8% to plant more trees quicker — success slowly shifts to sharing wealth.
Or as innovations like AI and machine learning advance to replace people as more efficient and cost-reducing workers, our narrative of labour = value = private ownership will put exponential wealth into the hands of even fewer people, leaving billions out of work — it won’t be sustainable. As and when this happens (and it is), we will need to have softened the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs and lawmakers to accept radical concepts of sharing commonwealth like Universal Basic Income. This means planting into markets early on the seed idea of treating the value businesses get from earth and society not as sources of private accumulation, but of commonwealth and prosperity — and this is what the commonshare is.
