The Silenced Majority

Metadata

• Author: [[Rana Dasgupta]]
• Full Title: The Silenced Majority
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/

Highlights

• Supremacy would come from its invention of a world principle of property. This principle was developed following contact with the Americas, where it became possible to conjure vast new English properties “out of nothing”—in a way that was impracticable, for instance, in the militarized, mercantile societies of India. Such properties were created by a legal definition of ownership designed so that it could be applied only to the invaders. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of,” John Locke wrote in 1689, “so much is his property.” When combined with other new legal categories such as “the savage” and “the state of nature,” this principle of property engendered societies such as Carolina, where Locke’s patron, the first earl of Shaftesbury, was a lord proprietor.
  • Tags: [[property]]
• They loved fashion and technology, they believed in rationality, progress, and transparency. They were the “founding fathers” of our modern world. And yet they presided over a political system as brutal as it was exclusive. Why? The answer is simple. They could not afford democracy, but also, crucially, they did not need
• They were also forced, from the outset, into political activism—for while agriculturalists, in difficult times, might wheedle some extra bounty from nature, factory workers relied solely on their wages, and every additional penny had to be wrested from owners’ profits.
• If there was ever a heyday of American democracy, it was recent and short-lived.
• But the most spectacular value creation over the past two decades has generated new varieties of space altogether. The internet, too, is a “new-found-land,” whose inchoate expanse has been coded into property using legal concepts directly descended from those with which America was founded.
• It is difficult to carry out a mass economic expulsion, after all, while everyone has a vote. And it will not be possible indefinitely to suppress those left-wing voices demanding that the state abandon its raison d’être and serve, not property and empire, but American citizens themselves.