Armani Gates

Professor Oifer
Political Philosophy
December 10 2014
The Westchester community and its stakeholders have been up in arms over the recent instituted
parking fee on Loyola Marymounts Campus. This fee has triggered a parking spillover and residents,
students, faculty, staff, and administration have yet to reach a comprehensive solution. The residents
argue that the parking spillover created by this fee has infringed upon their individual liberties and
rights of private ownership. The students, faculty, staff, and administration argue that the streets are
public property and parking should be available for all in the community. All the stakeholders must
reach a collective decision that will ensure the publics access to parking within the neighborhood.
Public access would further discourage private exploitation of the roads, challenge the capitalist
structure, allow stakeholders to pursue their species being.
A majority of the stakeholders in the community would argue that restricting access to parking to
only residents would continue to reinforce classism and intolerance within the community. Its the
response of the residents and action that continue to reinforce the capitalist system. The ownership of
private property meets their artificial needs; all the while it distorts perceptions that they began to
view everything as property. This toxic mindset is that reflected by the residents as they have
extended their property to the public streets and sidewalks. This view is very limiting and constricting
in the development of ones species being and for the betterment of the community. For to say that
man is a species being, is, therefore, to say that man raises himself above his own subjective
individuality, that he recognizes in himself the objective universal, and thereby transcends himself as
a finite being. Put another way, he is individually the representative of mankind" (414).It is important
that we free our minds from the capitalist structure so that we overcome this broken state. From birth
we are indoctrinate by the American education system on the joys of capitalism. Our ideas and beliefs
systems are formed as products of our class experience. For it is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their
consciousness (433). This phenomenon is what sparks the charge of a mans consciousness with
every condition of his material existence. Intellectual production changes its character in proportion as
material production is changed (433). It is important that we challenge the idea of material
possessions as what defines us but more about our species being. We must challenge this social
stratification and aspire for a classless society. Increasing access to public parking for all stakeholders
in the community is just one of many small steps to a classless society. For in place of the old
bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of all (434).
The residents of the Westchester community have voiced their opinions and displeasure over the
parking spillover in the neighborhood. It is their belief that the burden (this has caused) has been
placed on their families and themselves. For "an opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or
that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press,
but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house
of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard (463). They
would argue that private property gives an individual ownership and control the means of production
for which he may then choose how and for what purpose he will give his life. In addition, the residents
would that ownership of private property is individual liberty that is worth protecting. It gives them a
territory under their jurisdiction for a degree of self-rule. In this home and on his property, in the
free society he can design his one-person country to fit his values, ideas, and desires. It is that
freedom of choice that provides the conditions for true liberty and justice.Individual liberty is limited if
the freedoms which it entails pose an inherent threat to the capitalist system. For the end of man
is the development of his powers to complete and consistent whole, and that two requisites are
freedom and variety of situations (464).