What is the Origin of Property, Part 4 of 4

In my last few posts I’ve tried to make out a convincing case that the idea and institution of property did not arise out of any just of legitimate desire for the products of one’s labour, but rather arose out of the system of power-struggle, with input from that legitimate desire.

The philosophy that I am principally arguing against would perhaps not disagree with any of the specifics of what I’ve said so far. That philosophy, which I would put under the umbrella term ‘right-libertarianism’, and which would include ‘libertarians’, anarcho-capitalists, minarchists, classical liberals, and all that sort of stuff, would simply say

“Certainly, Alderson,  for most of history in most places what has existed has been a horrible unjust fusion of political power with property ownership. But property ownership can take a liberating, non-coercive form, when it is shorn of its connection with coercive power.”

I can’t quite remember the name…

What is the name of that place where a racist government, which has for years been opposed by an internationally isolated ‘terrorist’ movement who have pioneered the use of suicide bombings in ‘defending’  their ethnically and religiously distinct oppressed population, has suddenly unleashed a huge round of organised violence in the hope of crushing said ‘terrorist’ movement, deploying its hugely superior military force to kill hundreds and leave thousands homeless, with the violence ongoing and its culmination approaching?

Oh yes, I remember now.

What is the Origin of Property, Part 3 of 4 (in which my new word FOLP appears repeatedly)

As I said in part 2, we can’t directly observe the emergence of property, so I’ve been trying to approach it from both directions. In part 2 I approached it by looking back from the present at history. In this post I want to approach it by looking at what we can imagine to have preceded it, i.e. pre-human societies, considered by analogy with non-human societies.

Of course, as I have argued before, the homogenous concept of ‘animals’ is an ideological fiction. There are many sorts of animal society, and many non-social animals. The animal societies that we can suppose most similar to very early humans/pre-humans are those which include groups larger than individual families but smaller than herds, i.e. smaller enough for members to recognise each other, which live at least partly on the ground, which feed by a mixture of gathering and hunting (not grazing), and which have a long period of infancy and childcare. The animal societies that most fit this pattern are social carnivores and social primates. Social carnivores include otters, hyaenas, lions, many types of wild dog, and similar things; social primates include chimps, bonobos, gorillas, baboons, and many types of monkeys. Everything I say here will be true only in general, with lots of exceptions.