Newly emerged Germanic Land Democracy was based on a modified relationship between citizen and nation; between people and land. The essence of this change was expressed most clearly in the requirement that only property owners be allowed a vote in the new system. If you didn’t own any land in the new Germanic nation state you were not allowed to vote. You were not a citizen, your legal status was less than a slave. Effectively, the entirely new ‘class’ of landless urban dwellers created by capitalism were completely shut out. At the same time the ‘peasants’ who remained on the land were equally constrained by the same legal system as the newly created ‘workers’- they too were rendered powerless by the new property system.
An Empire Of The Mind
In each newly formed Germanic State territory, an emergent capitalist elite accrued virtual total political power. But it was clear that as a small minority of the overall population, they were unlikely to hang on to it for long unless they cold find a way to broaden support for the new regime. The central Germanic contradiction is a polity based on land ownership and an economic system based on the the denial of land ownership.
The solution that emerged was two fold:
First, to propagate the concept of ‘property ownership’ as a validation of democratic rights, primarily the right to vote. If a system is to have land ownership as a condition of participation and is to be as inclusive as possible, it follows that land ownership would have to be as widespread as possible. But the capitalist economic system requires precisely the opposite of that. So a dilute deformed symbolic form of land ownership has to be forged.
Secondly to increase the scope of the democratic franchise and correspondingly dilute its power. If a society is to have genuine people power and that power is based on total mass participation then there will be no one left to have control over!!
Underpinning this is the difficult truth that a democracy can only work if part of the population is not in it. A democracy only has a valid purpose if part of the population is not in it. It is a system of control. What would be it’s purpose if there was no-one to control?
So- called Germanic ‘Property rights’ are fundamentally different to genuine land ownership. As such they constitute one of the biggest frauds in the history of human society. A property owner is NOT a land owner by any means . A ‘property owner’ is one who pays state and private taxes for the privilege of being a citizen of a capitalist nation. The property owning citizen pays private taxes in the form of mortgage or rent and state taxes in the form of local or national taxes. No citizen of a capitalist state actually owns the land on which his property resides outright, even if they manage to pay off a mortgage.
The land your property is built on provides no safety and no refuge. You cannot say what happens there. You cannot defend the sky above your property from pollution and you cannot defend the land below from mining. In fact you cannot defend it from anyone, even the lowliest representative of the Germanic state!!. In the Germanic nation, the state is the landlord of last resort.
In truth the Germanic capitalist nation is a land dictatorship ; it’s citizens are land slaves. In order to hide this discomforting truth, grocers and factory owners hire gangs of preachers and poets to sing a new song; of an Empire Of The Mind of lions rampant and unicorns, (in England) and of disembodied eyes floating atop stone pyramids (in America). Instead of water and sunlight, you have a passport. Instead of clean food and air,you have a flag. Instead of culture, family and identity , you are assigned a ‘class’. Modern Germanic nationalism is born. In creating an empire of the mind class end of land ownership. Cultural and regional difference is to be abolished. Ties to the land are to be abolished for the ordinary people. Claims on the land are to be abolished. From now on economics would decide what you were allowed to want and when you were allowed to want it.
This new song of ‘economics’ led to the second great modification; to increase the franchise and so to the creation of modern political parties. The modern Germanic political party is formally based on geography, ( you elect specific representatives to ‘represent’ the people of a geographic area), but whose stated collective purpose is primarily economic. (The redistribution of the product of society generally understood as tax and spend)
This leads us directly to the concept of constituencies. A constituency is a group of people whose identity and interests are represented within an agreed forum.
A capitalist constituency such as ‘workers’ or the ‘middle class’ is a defined economic group whose economic interest is represented within national government by means of a Germanic party. A land democracy constituency is a geographic group of people represented within national government by means of a party..
I have briefly described the legal political development of a Germanic capitalist polity, but there is also the economic and technical development of capitalism to take into account. Capitalism requires a large and mobile group of people who have no option other than working for wages and SPENDING WAGES to function. It seems fairly obvious that capitalism needs ‘workers’ who have no way of obtaining resources other than by selling their labour. But capitalism also needs those same workers to depend upon the market for everything, even down to a glass of clean water. In the end, everything must become a commodity. Everything. Food water, air, sunlight, then dignity, justice, privacy. Everything. And if you look around you that is what is happening before your eyes…This ever increasing dependency is called growth.
Capitalism transforms the population into a large mobile and unstable workforce. In other words capitalism makes mass immigration and emigration inevitable.