AS regards the right to property there are countries which for some time now have been able to get along quite nicely without any individual right to ownership of the national means of production. Yet an older and more prevalent view declared that private ownership was the only legitimate form of ownership of the national means of production. The proposition needs only to be stated for the contradiction to appear. Nevertheless, that has been holy writ for ages. And so the utmost emphasis was given by the propertied class, through the state apparatus which they controlled, to preserving the integrity of the right to private property. Whole areas of the law developed to support this position, until even those without property came to accept as natural that they had no practical right to it.
One consequence of applying to a territory like Guyana property concepts which derive in that way is in a real sense to make a distressing nonsense of political independence. Capitalist concepts of property rights carry with them the right to prompt payment of adequate compensation at current market values. That principle offers no set-off to a newly independent state for the extent to which it’s natural and human resources might have been exploited during the colonial period by expatriate concerns. More often than not the sad result is that political independence is ushered in at a stage when practically the entire economy is under foreign control and ownership. Since the newly independent state lacks the means to make prompt payment of adequate compensation, it has no method available before it for repossessing itself of its own economy, for redeeming it of expatriate control, for restructuring it, and consequently for moving its society forward’s in the ordinary way, a country finds itself decked out in the trapping of political independence only to be saddle with the continuing burden of external economic exploitation.
This was indeed the situation confronting this country decades ago, we met it by modifying, as occasion required, the capitalist property rights clause which we received as part of our independence constitution. It was in this way that we were able to put into public ownership, where it property belonged, the major sector of the economy of this country. But while we have amended that clause to break the economic shackles of the past, it is necessary to go on to completion of the whole process by stating explicitly in the constitution itself that property is for social use and is not intended to ever again used as an instrument of exploitation of man by man.