Tomorrow, Saturday 3rd January

Embankment

12.30

London

Demonstration For Gaza

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/416636.html

What is the Origin of Property, Part 2 of 4

In the abstract, the position I want to defend and develop is this:

-That ownership of property is a form of political dominion, and has developed historically out of political dominion more generally.

This is in direct contradiction to the view sometimes offered by anti-communists, namely:

-That the right to own property is central to and essential to individual freedom, and to live without such “property” is necessarily to be unfree.

The previous post talks a little about what is meant by ‘property’, so I should not be taken as saying that anyone having any control over any items as an individual is ‘property’. I mean specifically the institution of property that is widespread and powerful in our society – something that combines rights of use, exclusion, trade, and destruction, and which encompasses almost all goods, whether they are land, capital, food, clothes, ideas, printing presses, ships, bicycles, coffee beans, coffee machines, or coffee shops, and brings them under a single integrated system of exchange.

Now, one way to support such an account would be to simply point at the control and power exercised by people who own a lot of property over those who own little. Some people might find that convincing, others might not. I’m going to assume that the reader does not. To such a reader, their immediate impression of property seems entirely different from their immediate impression of power and control. Owning things, investing things, trading things, employing people, buying things for people, look much more like actions of self-empowerment, autonomy, not like actions of dominating and controlling others.

What is the Origin of Property, Part 1 of 4

This is the beginning of a series of (probably) 4 posts about property – what it is, why it exists, what bit of the human condition it relates to. Posts 1 and 4 will probably be most philosophical, post 2 most historical, and post 3 most anthropological/zoological.

The first post in this series will be a critique of John Locke. Locke famously argued that property was a natural right (i.e. a right existing independently of laws and society) based in individual labour as an extension of self-ownership. I’m going to refer to this as the ‘Fruits of Labour’ principle, or ‘the FOLP’. Something like this is the standard line taken by right-wing libertarians and by many defenders of capitalism. My conclusion will be that while there is a meaningful idea here, it doesn’t account for the reality of what property is and has been.

Stages of Patriarchy – Analogies of Feminism and Marxism

In this post I want to develop a radical feminist analogy to Marx’s stage-theory of class history. Marx’s account of successive stages (ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism) has a lot of holes, but it gives one crucial contribution, namely the ability to understand how there can be simultaneously a change (capitalist society is not the same as medieval feudal society) while the crucial facts remain the same (it’s still a society run by an exploitative class in its own interests).

The dominant narrative regarding sexual oppression often seems to be “it went on for thousands of years, then it stopped in the 20th century”. When feminists protest that it hasn’t stopped, it is all too easy for this to come across as a simple adjustment of that story: “it went on for thousands of years, then it lessened in the 20th century.” I want to suggest “it went on in a variety of forms for thousands of years, then it shifted form decisively in the 20th century.”