LIBERAL IDEOLOGY

The Problematic Birth of Liberal Ethics II

John

Locke

- England: Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in England, the landed aristocracy acquired rights to takeover (“enclose”) lands deemed “unproductive”. Intellectuals like John Locke hobnobbed with them in scientific institutions (such as the Royal Society) to debate how the takeover of common property (or enclosure) was for 'the greater common good'. Poor farmers and foragers were pushed off land, and their dispossession made way for aristocratic “country houses, parks, and landscape gardens”

“t labour deed that puts the di erence of value on everyth g ”... Us g crude ‘calculations’ he declared that the un proved common lands roamed and put to various seasonal uses by American Indians were not worth “1/1000 of the Engl h acre”.

- America: “By the seventeenth century the word 'improver' was firmly fixed ... to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable” ... “In the beginning all was America”, wrote John Locke (“the father of liberalism”) However the Settlers found “America as fully settled as it well could be by Hunters”. When the American tribes refused to be dispossessed and put to work as labourers on their own ancestral land, their resistance was met with violence. The American middle and lower classes living in the new settlements – saw this elimination of the natives as a natural part of the destiny of improvement.

Karl Marx

- “It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined [simply] by the quantity of labour expended to produce it [as Ricardo claimed], it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article”/improvement!

Objectively, the work g class could not a ord laz ess: potential employers judged their labour-power as if it were a commodity.