Private Property is Historical Baggage

And the authority on which we believe it necessary is bankrupt

Private property is at the center of our lives and determines every aspect of it. Your ability to get food depends on your access to private property to grow it (and own it) — otherwise you need to purchase access to sustenance. Your ability to live under a roof depends on your ability to purchase a house, or material to build one and a corresponding plot to build it on — otherwise you rent either land or lodging. Without ways to provide ourselves with shelter and sustenance, we find ourselves in the precarious situation of having to rent the only thing we do have sole ownership over — our bodies (Labour) to afford those other things.

With such a core role in our lives, you would imagine that the role of private property would be a topic of much debate in the public sphere. Paradoxically, the existence of private property is taken as gospel. It exists, as if ordained by natural law or heavenly providence. This lack of inquisition into the nature of private property is also a result of normalization. First, our entire institutions of governance, the state and law, is preoccupied with defending it (even the countries in which we live in are treated as if they were one big plot of privately held land); and, in our more personal lives, inheritance, allows us to benefit of the private property accrued by our family creating a seeming link between our effort and personal standing — social mobility.

But how did we get to a place were private property is taken as such a de facto state? and how does property become private in the first place?

Philosophical Reasoning

Two philosophers are of utmost importance here, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Both agree that the world started in a state of wilderness — a ‘state of nature’. In this state, private property did not exist.

The philosopher John Locke leans on the bible to dispel the notion that any one person, namely monarchs, have sovereignty over property by reminding us that God intended nature to be used by the good of all and was not delivered to Adam to rule over, but to live from, populate, and prosper.

“ Whatever God gave by the words of this grant Gen. i. 28, it was not to Adam in particular, exclusive of all other men: whatever dominion he had thereby, it was not a private dominion, but a dominion in common with the rest of mankind.”

This goes against the justification given by those who supported monarchy and leaned on Adam’s divine sovereignty — which is what the sovereignty of kings was derived from — to justify feudalism.

If private property is not a divine right, then how does property become private? Locke makes it clear by saying that the only way one can claim lay to land is by mixing it with ones Labour — which is the only thing an individual has sole right to.

“Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a “property” in his own “person.” This nobody has any right to but himself. The “labour” of his body and the “work” of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this “labour” being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”

Rousseau, follows a similar vein, laying out four conditions for land to become private:

“ First, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence; and, in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of proprietorship that should be respected by others, in default of a legal title.”

Both these defenitions have a paradoxical quality. On the surface, they seem quite egalitarian. Rousseau demands that “a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence” as does Locke claim that property can be made private only as long as “there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”

But the nature of property is finite — it is limited. What then happens when there is no longer enough left for others? Does private property become obsolete and all property return to commons?

Libertarian philospher Robert Nozick takes this argument even further by noting that any sort of private property contravenes the idea that there will be “as good left in common for others”. He says:

“It will be implausible to view improving an object as giving full ownership to it, if the stock of unowned objects that might be improved is limited. For an object’s coming under one person’s ownership changes the situation of all others. Whereas previous they were at liberty to use the object, they now no longer are.”

That means that any imposition of limits for others to use a property goes against Locke’s own law.

Historical legacy

Rousseau has another theory to go alongside that of Labour, the social compact. Rousseau argues that Individuals can come together and, through compact, agree to manage their property in common. Rousseau says that:

“It may also happen that men begin to unite one with another before they possess anything, and that, subsequently occupying a tract of country which is enough for all, they enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves, either equally or according to a scale fixed by the Sovereign.

Rousseau though, correctly notes something dangerous about such an arrangement. He says that “ Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory: it serves only to-keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much.” And indeed this is the historical path that property has taken.

As our societies grew and became more complex, so did the governing power over land and resources. Governments and religious institutions, often intertwined, became massive administrative centers and what is theorized to have been a government by consent transformed into moral obligations towards temples and rulers. We owed them resources and money for keeping us safe, or for making sure we held favour with the gods.

The relationship between individuals and state became what Rousseau best described as “You have need of me, because I am rich and you are poor. We will therefore come to an agreement. I will permit you to have the honour of serving me, on condition that you bestow on me the little you have left, in return for the pains I shall take to command you.”

Governance, thus, became a function of coercion.

Utilitarian Rational aka Efficiency

Contemporary justifications of private property though are significantly distant from philosophical beginnings. Today, private property is justified by the “science” of economics.

Private property and the markets that stem from them are the most efficient way to distribute goods and services and manage our scarce resources, the competition created by private property is also the main driver of innovation — or at least so we are told.

However, this does little to address the amounts of waste produced by our current system, this artificial scarcity leaves many without access to things that under other circumstances would be easy to gain access to such as food and housing. In the US,about 50% of produce is thrown away, and there are more than 18.5 million vacant homes.

Technology also falls under the remit of private property through laws that manage intellectual property. This means that instead of technology being continuously improved by all that understand it and applied to the maximum number of people, technology can be hoarded and manipulated by the owners.

This is not to mention the false demand created by marketing pushed by private enterprise. This diverts resources that could be used as determined by social needs instead of in a drive to maximize profit.

The State and Property

If the rationale, both philosophical and ‘scientific’, on which we base our belief in private property is completely false, then the only thing that remains to justify the existence of private property is the authority lent to it by the state. Yet, where does the state’s mandate of keeping private property around come from if not the same historical context which has previously mandated private property to kings and lords?

And if this indeed is the only mandate that the state has in upholding private property, and there was legitimacy in stripping kings, lords, and aristocrats from their property during the liberal revolutions that established republics; then there must also be legitimacy in further removing the existence of private property and returning it to be governed democratically under commons — anything else will be a continuation of that same tyranny.

This is not a radical idea, even Adam Smith pointed out the complicity of civil government in protecting the propertied class. Smith makes this clear in the Wealth of Nations “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none.” A different perspective to this is saying that government itself is held hostage by private property and has no choice but to give in to the demands of industry built on private property to remain competitive in the global market. Whichever way one looks at it, the existence of private property continues to create the extreme inequality we have been warned about since the enlightenment. The same kind of suffering that lead Rousseau to proclaim that: