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.
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.
Believing the statement I made there is not limited to Marxists. I have found many anarchists believe the statement when challenged on private property (in products of labor) from an individualist anarchist perspective.
In a sense, Proudhon made a similar argument to Ellerman, but he did not fully draw the connection to principles of responsibility to ethically justify inalienability of that right. That connection is valuable because it makes it much harder to deny the conclusion
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.
Sounds just like NFTs!
NFTs basically give nothing to the purchaser. Here, the workers get control rights over the firm and the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The workers get to decide collectively what contracts the firm makes with input suppliers, who to sell the output to, what to produce, and how to produce it. If it really was worthless, tell the capitalists that it doesn’t matter who hires what or whom in the marketplace
LMAO. Yeah.
Not the same thing. If workers need a factory to produce trains, they can either (1) rent the factory or (2) the factory owner can hire them. In case 1, the workers retain ownership over the produced trains (fruits of their labor). In case 2, the employer owns the produced trains.
Private property in land is different, and should involve common ownership.
A distinction exists between positive and negative control rights. Property only confers the latter, which can be weakened
If the owner decides he doesn’t wind up with enough of the value of producing the trains, he can kick out the train builders.
Same thing.
The train builders can go somewhere else collectively under this system.
Property norms can be set up so that the buyer can compel a sale. This would work by having a community digital ledger that keeps track of property claims. The owner would state the price at which they would be willing to part with the property, and they would pay a percentage fee on that price into a common fund. Anyone that paid that price would get the property even if the owner objected @anarchism
Sure, workers can always allegedly “go somewhere else”. You realize that private property and capital accumulation and market distribution have, in actual practice, kept us from doing so very, very effectively, right? Like, there’s one or two large enterprises that are worker-owned and allegedly democratically managed. And even on the local level, co-ops are incredibly difficult to establish. You sound like a fucking propertarian, telling people to “just go somewhere else/start one yourself if you don’t like it.” I’m not sure why you expect anyone to fall for that shit here.
Are you sure you’re an anarchist and not a liberal? Because you’re working awfully hard to propose market-based solutions in order to seemingly protect private property relations against anyone who might want radical, use-based community ownership.
The difference is that workers can take the entire company with them when they go somewhere else.
You are confusing the difficulty of establishing a co-op today with the difficulty of establishing a co-op under a system where co-ops are the only firm. The employment contract’s pervasiveness has caused the former. Ellerman advocates abolishing the employment contract and private property in natural resources.
There have been anarchists that do not oppose markets such as Proudhon
@jlou @StrayCatFrump @anarchism
So you’ve got a factory that doesn’t require land to sit on?
Something doesn’t add up here.
The land itself will be owned by the land trust, but the value derived from improvements on top of the land will belong to the worker coop that made the factory. The idea is that, while the products of nature are not the fruits of anyone’s labor, using them up in production is part of the negative fruits of labor of the workers that use them up.
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.
Sure, but (contrary to the article linked) the headline here is “Anarchists should…” when Anarchists are actually the ones that have probably thought about this the most already and the article (without mentioning Anarchy even once) basically just re-invents 100 year old anarchist ideas.
Don’t forget that the anarcho-capitalists have been muddying branding. Some folks may not realize that anarchism is not the same thing as absolute landlordism.
Anarcho-capitalists do not even correctly apply their own principles. They accept the principle that people have the right to appropriate the fruits of their labor. However, they do not recognize the routine violation of that principle embodied in the capitalist firm. They, in fact, defend the right of the employer to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of the workers’ joint labor in the firm on the basis of consent missing the point about inalienability
I’m not sure Anarcho-capitalism is intended to be applied consistently. I’d be willing to bet it was originally crafted with the deliberate intent of fooling some would-be anarchists into allying themselves with authoritarians.
EDIT: Ha! It appears I am not alone in this. From the article:
Classical liberal thought has done its job well to get much of the Left to use the consent/coercion framing and to quibble about what is “really” voluntary (or whether the payment is big enough to compensate for all the “alienated labor-time”)—as if the whole institution for renting people would be acceptable if only people had other choices (like a guaranteed basic income) or were paid higher human rentals.[11]
Yeah. A couple of “timeless” quotes by the propertarian Murray Rothbard:
One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy…“Libertarians”…had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety.
We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines…we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists…We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.
They knew damned well what they were doing. At least Rothbard didn’t fully accept the appropriation of the latter term, even if others from his shitty movement have since then.
“This is my proposition: the laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced.”
-- Pierre-Joseph ProudhonEllerman’s modern version of this analysis was first stated in 1984. Rothbard in 1950 saw the employment contract as vital to private property and swallowed the fundamental myth of capitalism that Ellerman mentions. He would include Ellerman’s position on this matter as collectivist and anti-private-property.
Don’t forget that the anarcho-capitalists have been muddying branding.
I hope there aren’t any in this particular forum where that the title was editorialized for, though. “Anarcho-capitalists” (propertarians) aren’t anarchists, and this whole forum (plus its moderators) should be very clear about that, and become very clear about it if they aren’t. I mean, the very first thing in the “sidebar” info is a link to an essay by David Graeber which should inform any propertarians that we most definitely are not talking about them (especially the last two sections on listening to your mother from your early childhood and believing in people’s better natures).
Most anarchists are opposed to private property in the products of labor, so my re-contextualizing the article for this community was valid. Personal property does not cover all products of labor because it excludes the means of production, which can be a product of labor. The anarchist closest to Ellerman on this matter was Proudhon. Ellerman acknowledges him in his other work as a predecessor. Ellerman’s critique applies even if wage labor is voluntary unlike many anarchic critiques @anarchism
Personal property does not cover all products of labor because it explicitly excludes the means of production, which can be a product of labor.
This isn’t quite true. A means of production can become personal property if it is actively used by the person that produced it. It is just that no property right is thought to be absolute and actual usage usually trumps other means to derive personal property status.
Personally, I think Locke’s provisio on occupancy and use applies: The use of land confers ownership if there is enough just as good left for others to do the same. If there is not, then those who acquire such a privilege should be required to compensate those excluded by this privilege.
Oh, you mean the occupancy and use sense of personal property. That does not allow one workers’ collective to rent out means of production to another workers’ collective and retain ownership. It is different from what Ellerman is arguing for. I also edited the comment to add another point
Not quite. Personal property can also be thought of as a group ownership. In fact often it has to be because it is difficult to manage in larger organizations otherwise.
Renting out the means of productions seems like a non-issue as when you are not using them why not give them to someone else to use? This is well established in Anarchist library economics texts.
The article also seems to be more concerned about investments into future returns from the means of production, but again this is basically just repeating the staking concept used in Mondragon for this, which is not uncontroversial, but benefits might out weight the risk that it creates a two class system within the company.
Renting out means of production is another way for workers’ collectives to exchange products of their labor, and receive something else that they value more. Giving away the means of production would mean forgoing compensation. It isn’t clear whether the person you’re giving away the means of production to will use it in a socially efficient manner. Prices provide a rough approximation of social cost especially in an economy with common ownership of natural resources @anarchism
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.
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
I get what you’re saying, but it’s a bit romanticized. By the time cultures get to the size of the Aztec, they’re farming. The Aztec had huge floating farms that fed the people, and many other forms of trade and industry similar to ours. I’m pretty sure that Aztecs believed in land ownership. They certainly believed in owning people.
By “unique to their situation”, I didn’t mean unique only to native Americans, I meant unique to cultures before the 1800’s that remained relatively small, and lived in resource abundant areas. There’s were many cultures like that across the world, but they all had commonalities of having abundant resources and small enough populations to not require more robust solutions like agriculture and farming. And while native Americans didn’t follow a system of land ownership, they did believe in personal space and property. You couldn’t just go set up your dwelling right next to someone else’s unless that person liked you and agreed to it. But there was room to spare, so the solution was easy.
The lifestyle we’re talking about doesn’t really support laying around and enjoying hobbies like you said. Yes, it was probably a great deal less stressful than modern life, as long as nothing went wrong. But it definitely required work. Have you ever gone backpacking? There’s always that needs to be done. You’re not really rushing to do things, and it’s pretty satisfying and enjoyable, but there’s a lot to be done. You have to walk down to the stream and collect water several times per day. You need to filter water. Food needs preparation, things need to be cleaned. The fire needs to be maintained. But it is all fairly gratifying. For primitive cultures they would have even more things that required their attention, like tool maintenance and crafting, weapon crafting, practicing skills, teaching young ones, hunting, skinning, making clothes, etc. Even still, I think those were probably edifying activities.
Anyways, I’m not really disagreeing with you other than the few clarifications I made. I’m just saying that I don’t see how such a life is compatible with modern society. It can work in small communities in places like Wyoming, or Nebraska, or even parts of California, Washington, and Nebraska, but what about NYC, London, and Paris? Those people are never going to abandon their lifestyle. They’re not going to leave their cities and start wandering the forest throwing seeds on the ground. There aren’t enough wild animals left on the planet to support 8 billion people’s needs for food and clothing. You don’t get cotton clothing without cotton plantations. You don’t get polyester without oil. You don’t get oil without massive industries and farms to support them. So I think we need to focus on figuring out a way to make our current systems work sustainably, not try to return to primative methods.
Our current systems are owned, and the owners have very little incentive to change.
Urban gardening and other minimalism endeavors reduce personal reliance on those systems, and reduced participation in those systems will force them to change.
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.
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.
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*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.
