Anarchists should rethink common vs private property
Anarchists should rethink common vs private property
Anarchists should rethink common vs private property
https://www.ellerman.org/rethinking-common-vs-private-property/
@anarchism
Erm, this is something that has been discussed in Anarchist literature already more than 100 years ago. This article seems totally ignorant of the well established conceptual difference between "private property" and "personal property".
I am aware of the distinction between private vs personal property. Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist's legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees' labor. The article shows that it is not. It is the employment contract that is to blame for this violation. We should focus our critique on that contract instead when supporting universal workers' self-management. We should consider other anticapitalist arguments
Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist’s legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees’ labor. The article shows that it is not. It is the employment contract that is to blame for this violation.
Those are the same thing, though. The author is really putting a lot of stake into the separation of owning capital vs. renting it, and trying to make both of those things distinct from decision making. But ownership is fundamentally about decisions and control. Rent changes that very little. You rent a home, and perhaps get a tiny measure of control over the decisions regarding it, but the landlord retains ultimate decision-making power (buying, selling, renovations, kicking you out, etc.), and capitalism is 100% geared toward ensuring that stays true even in the most wild scenarios we can conceive of regarding tenants' rights under capitalism. And the same remains true of owning a "company"—and, of course, the means of production that are a part of it and keep you from just walking next door and creating a new one if you don't like how the capitalist runs things (yes: this is the part—the enforced scarcity—that makes "owning a company" actually worth something, so it is fundamental to the system).
if you don't think that ownership and control are intrinsically linked, think long and hard about what it would mean to "own" something but not be able to make any decisions regarding it (including where anything produced by it goes). WTF does that "ownership" mean? It's like donating to an infrastructure project to get your name put on a sign by some stretch of highway: it means absolutely fucking nothing.
Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist’s legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees’ labor.
This is the Marxist analysis (as also pointed out in the article), not one commonly shared by Anarchists.
I don't think the argument in the article is particularly new or enlightening, and in fact the proposed democratic company is apparently modelled after Mondragon, which was founded on Anarchist ideas nearly 70 years ago.
Just because some people have known about something for more than a hundred years, doesn't mean all people have known something for more than a hundred years. I am a fan of Henry George's work, but I wouldn't be all "ho hum" if someone who was ignorant of George's work (and derivatives) nevertheless managed to figure it out independently and present it to new people. I would be thrilled to see the idea spreading.
The article you posted is interesting.
To a certain extent I understand the want of people to have a space that they can call their own. A stable home is that very place. But this pathological need to own land is ridiculous. Native Americans lived for centuries under the premise that nature owns the property and humans are allowed to live in harmony with her and are expected to be good stewards of her. Property ownership is a capitalist notion. It's a notion that resources must be horded so as to create artificial supply shortages depriving others of their right to a stable home and creating almost a caste system. That's my 0.02. In fact, I would go as far as to consider authoritarian capitalism, which is essentially what the US more or less is, is in of itself a pathology.
One thing I think we need to make a distinction between is the idea that people should be able to own their own homes and businesses on the one hand, and the idea that people should be able to own other peoples homes and businesses on the other. We don't need to threaten the middle class single family residence to get justice for the population as a whole. Enough of them just naturally follow their "betters" out of instinct; we don't need to drive more of them into their arms by threatening a harmless lifestyle choice.
Native Americans lived for centuries under the premise that nature owns the property and humans are allowed to live in harmony with her
This worked because they had low populations and an abundance of high resource land. We have high populations and scarcity of high resource land. Their situation was unique to their era and populace.
North America, South America, central America, the Pacific islands... The list goes on.
This isn't some kind of metaphysical crap, they respected the land so it would provide for them. Respect in this context means you're mindful of what you take, and you plant the seeds to help more grow down the line. You hunt the herd, but you also chase off predators and make sure it stays healthy.
Some of them didn't have to take food with them when they traveled, because over generations they stocked the forest with edible plants. They knew how to, but they often didn't have to plow the soil because their ancestors artificially selected for the environment into being great for humans
They surrounded themselves with food forests. The uneaten food draws in animals too, making for easy hunting. No worries of depleting the soil, you don't have to work the land, you just walk around and gather what you need
It's very efficient and probably what humans did in most places that had good conditions. You get to spend most of the day on your hobbies and hanging out. They had trade networks from Argentina to the Pacific Northwest. They had advanced math and their technology was moving at a reasonable speed. They had hundreds of thousands of people, and plenty of room to grow
Farming has one advantage - a small group working their asses off can feed a much larger group. That let's you field big armies with bupply lines, and then you can turn the "savage" land into farmland, and extract profit from it while denying their food source
Their situation wasn't unique, every indigenous people either had forest gardens or managed herds of wild animals. They even had empires like the incas and the Maya, who were able to build roads, pyramids, and floating cities with huge populations
That's why they started wars when people started killing buffalo for profit and leaving the meat to rot - they were willing to share because they had more than enough due to generations of work, and profiteers slaughtered their food source for no good reason. It wasn't moral outrage, it was an extensional threat
They rejected the idea of ownership of the land because it wasn't theirs to exploit, it belonged to future generations. And that's why our generation is fucked, because capitalism isn't about efficiency, it's about maximization
One thing I disagree with:
The basic myth goes back to the old idea, prominent in the Middle Ages, that the governance or Lordship over people residing on and using the land was considered part and parcel of the Ownership of the land. As Maitland put it: “ownership blends with lordship, rulership, sovereignty in the vague medieval dominium,….” [Maitland 1960, 174] The landlord was the Lord of the Land. But then socialists and capitalists alike—each for their own reasons—carried over the idea that “Rulership and Ownership were blent” [Gierke 1958, 88] to the “ownership of the means of production.”
I observe the opposite: that modern peoples simply do not recognize that control of the Land is the same thing as control of the people who live on it, at least in the United States. We went through such a long historical period with plenty of cheap open land (so long as you were white), allowing people to become property owners at best, or negotiate an advantageous tenancy at worst, that the idea that capitalist land ownership is in any way a violation of the freedom of anyone else is almost totally counterintuitive to most people. Taken together, the landowning class literally has the power of life and death over the rest of the population. But because this ownership isn't individual, because we can choose our landlord and competition keeps rents below the literal death level for the majority, we are considered "free", even as market forces perpetually push rents* up to a point where they absorb our entire productive surplus.
--
*Note that "rents" is not only the money paid to live in a particular place (and even that is not entirely Rent), but also things like the money our employer does not pay us because competition for scarce jobs, the market power of the employer, ensures he does not have to pay us our entire marginal productivity.
And here is something with which I enthusiastically agree:
The civic republican scholar, Quentin Skinner, has emphasized the same contrast between alienation and delegation [1978]. Democratic theory is in fact based not on the courageous liberal stand against coercion and in favor of the consent of the governed nor on the critique of a pactum subjectionis as not being “really” voluntary. Democratic theory is based on a critique of the contracts of alienation as alienating that which is inalienable [Ellerman 2005, 2010b].[10]
As some may have seen elsewhere, my personal hobby horse is land theory. Our current theory of economy allows people to fully alienate themselves from the land. But the right to land is the right to be. To exist is to occupy space. To be landless is to be dependent on others for the very privilege of existing. I do not believe it is proper that anyone can be alienated from this right.
To the degree that some have the privilege of deciding who is and is not allowed to exist, they should be required to compensate the excluded to the greatest value the market will bear. Currently the revenue from that operation accumulates in the hands of a privileged subset of humankind, with a few collecting massive sums from great numbers of others for no service other than allowing them the privilege of existing. But because this "service" is bundled together with other actual services, it is rendered invisible to most people.