What is the essence of the right of ownership over means of production? What is the difference between private and public ownership over means of production? — These questions belong to that multitude of questions to which traditional political economy (including its Marxist version in general and socialist version in particular) does not give articulate, systematic and practically viable answers. Let us therefore clarify them.
The right of ownership is one of many rights acknowledged by very different societies. It is realized by ownership subjects in relation to property, i.e. to objects of ownership. It is realized through proclamations as well as through implications. And proclamations can be suppressed by the actions of implications attending to these proclamations. An example to it is a violation of the Biblical commandment «Do not steal» by the prescription (also biblical) to the Hebrew of international usury executed on the racial corporation basis: «steal and the main thing — make everybody think that this stealing is allowed by God himself and to you alone» (see Supplement 1).
In well-meaning concepts of social organization people cannot be objects of ownership neither in proclamation (slave-owning, feudalism, serfdom) nor in dissembling (private-owning capitalism with the strangling not of usury or of personal «copyright» on the objects of «intellectual» property).
Of all the ownership rights an exclusive role belongs to the right of ownership on the means of production, because much depends on it directly or indirectly in the legislative regulation of economic life of society.
The essence of the notion of «the right of ownership on the means of production» is revealed exclusively as the right to co n trol production and distribution of product either directly or through a del e gate.
The essence of the notion of right on such objects of ownership as earth and its bowels, waters and other natural resources is revealed only as a right to organize human labor using these resources and also as a right to limit access to its non-productive use (e.g. for leisure, etc).
Right (in the meaning of personal right as a social institution) and value are categories residing in a social organization, not nature. Under the circumstances of purchase of such rights it is a result of human labor in the past, present or a possible result in future that is always paid. «Natural resources and comforts» do not objectively have any value. Their payment is a nominal solvency limitation of possibility to use them and a creation of funds to pay the labor contributing to the natural reproduction of these resources.
The notions of private and public ownership are connected with the social division of professionalism and its reproduction with the succession of generations in the social labor consolidation. Their essence is revealed through the process of formation of administrative personnel.
A property is private if the staff operating the means of production does not have an opportunity to immediately remove from administration those who did not justify their confidence and to employ or propose someone from their own circle as a new administrator.
A property is public if the administrators who have ceased to be trusted, did not cope with the duty of improving administration quality can be immediately removed from their posts through the initiative of the operating personnel. This is based on of the condition: a closed social group an entrance to which is restricted to the representatives of other social groups cannot be a social basis for an administrative body.
It is impossible to introduce public property in its administrative essence by a law because:
if a dominating opinion is that what is public de jure is ownerless de facto, then the latter would become private personal or corporate.
moreover, legal introduction of public property is possible only under a definite level of development of culture, morality and world understanding of a society, at least of its politically active part.
The right to remove an administrator — which is indispens a ble from public ownership — may be s o cially useful only if the personnel are conscious that the only reason for this is an admini s trator’s inability to exercise his duties on the necessary level of quality according to the socially supported conception of social life . In particular, a reason for the removal may be the use of admini s trative post for personal or family-clannish enrichment through blatant stealing, financial fraud, creation and support of possibil i ties to get e x clusively high payment and other things of this kind which directly or indirectly cause damage to the co n temporaries and descendants.
In other words the right of public ownership is based on the world understanding of individuals integrating a society and unconsciously (automatically) reproduced cultural traditions, but not on juridical declarations. That means:
First, in a society’s culture and psychology a moral worldview basis should appear in which the ownership on the collectively used means of production is understood as public irrespective of its legal form. And only after it the domination of public ownership de facto will express itself in the practice of controlling the society’s multiindustrial production and consumption system and will legally ratify itself.
If there are juridical forms but no moral worldview basis then a “public” de jure property is doomed to be a de facto private property of a corporation of swindlers-administrators as it was mostly the case in the USSR in the course of its entire history though it was caused by different reasons in different periods.
Private property may be personal (family-clannish) as well as “elite”-corporate. And a corporation may have a legal form of a privileged class (nobility) or caste (merchant class in Russia) or it may not have such a form but act in a mafia-like manner (as bureaucracy in the USSR). In the case of private corporate property it may seem public and have the juridical status of a public one. In the USSR the «national» state and cooperative-kolkhoz property was public in form but because of “elite” exclusiveness and absence of social control over «nomenclature» bureaucracy, which over generations started reproducing itself as dynasties, all «public» property under the connivance of the rest of population became “elite”-corporate. This was a manifestation of an actual morality that dominated among the non-party population and in the Communist Party. During the «perestroika» and «democratization» this actual fact of life began to be legally substantiated[168].
Now when we have explained the question of ownership on the means of production and the difference between the public and private (personal and corporate) ownership on the means of production let us turn to H. Ford’s views on the capital.