Essay:Property is Theft

There is a reason why we say "property is theft." The invention of modern private property theory literally took place as the result of an act of theft: the enclosure of the commons in early modern England. The enclosure of the commons and the invention of private property forced millions of previously independent peasants into wage slavery, into a hierarchical and authoritarian relation that required force to maintain. Land that was previously held in common for the usage of all was now held by a minority of landowners, of landlords. The people who had lived and worked on these lands for millennia were forcefully evicted, robbed at gunpoint, of everything they had, including their own homes. Property originated as the result of this early modern act of theft, and hence property is theft.

The upholding of private property, of the initial theft that occurred due to the enclosure of the commons, required and requires force, authority, to maintain. In a way, property itself is authoritarian. This wiki says it opposes authoritarianism, but it doesn't oppose private property. Liberalism itself, Lockean metanarratives on property origins, were an ad hoc excuse concocted up to justify this theft, this enclosure of the commons. And since this wiki is itself a liberal project, it is no wonder that this wiki upholds this pseudohistorical apologia of private property and the authoritarianism it requires to enforce the rule of private property.

A wise man once told me that "all property today is theft, either by the parceling out of the commons via fiat, or by the seizure of land from the indigenous." We haven't even gotten started on the indigenous, who also held this land in common for all to use. Borders were fluid, and rarely permanent, and all land was held communally. To introduce the rule of private property into North America, it involved the robbery of land from the commons yet again, and forceful displacement of the occupants yet again, this time accompanied by massive amounts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The same goes for Australia, for New Zealand, for South America etc etc etc.

Myths

One specific myth about the origins of property is that it originates in the "improvement" of land by "rugged individualists," this particular canard was invented by Locke. It ignores the historical reality that property originated as a result of theft, when previous land was held in common for all to use. Improvements were made to the land for the benefit of all. It also goes on to denigrate indigenous peoples as being akin to wild animals, having not improved the land in any way, shape, or form. However, this ignores the fact that indigenous peoples often did alter and improve their landscapes, the entire Amazon Rainforest is the result of millennia of horticultural practices by indigenous horticulturalists, for instance.

To quote Kevin Carson:

although the myth treats individual private appropriation as a natural and spontaneous norm, the fact of the matter is that the great bulk of land appropriation throughout history was collective. Individual, fee-simple title to land has, for the most part, been imposed from above by state violence and involved the violation or nullification of preexisting collective title — the majority of cases falling only within the past five hundred years.

Defendants of property claim that private property has been the norm for most non-nomadic groups, but we find this to be both irrelevant to the point and ahistorical:

Martin Bailey examined anthropological observations of more than fifty hunter-gatherer bands and autonomous villages, finding that they all had at least partially collective claims to territory. Many foragers, including famous cases like the Ju/’hoansi, have systems of collective land “ownership” in which rights to land access are guaranteed by complex systems of memberships in groups, clans, moieties, sodalities, and through networks of individual reciprocity. Richard Lee and Richard Day observe that one characteristic “common to almost all band societies (and hundreds of village-based societies as well) is a land-tenure system based on a common property regime …. These regimes were, until recently, far more common world-wide than regimes based on private property.”

One example that has been cited to defend property is the notion of property occurring inside the Code of Hammurabi, to which we find irrelevant and besides the point, again, as well as to respond with this:

Of these three categories of land, “private” property (alienable, subject to market sale without being subject to repurchase rights by the sellers, their relatives or neighbours) emerged within the palace sector. From here it gradually proliferated through the public bureaucracy, among royal collectors and the Babylonian damgar “merchants”. However, it took many centuries for communal sanctions to be dissolved so as to make land alienable, forfeitable for debt, and marketable, with the new appropriator able to use it as he wished, free of royal or local communal oversight….

To further demonstrate our point regarding the ahistoricity of the Lockean metanarrative of private property origins:

It is wrong to say that people living in autonomous villages have no property rights at all. The group often holds land rights against outsiders. Each family keeps the crops they produce subject to the responsibility to help people in need. Often different individuals hold different use-rights over the same land. Land rights in small-scale farming communities have been described as “ambiguous and flexible” and “overlapping and complex.”

In Honoré’s terms, the incidents of ownership are dispersed: some incidents held by various members of the community, some incidents held by the community as a whole, and some or all incidents subject to revision by the group. Throughout this book, we describe “traditional” or “customary land-tenure systems” (both in stateless societies and in many villages within state societies) variously as complex, overlapping, flexible, nonspatial, and at least partially collective with a significant commons.

Most land in most swidden and fallowing stateless farming communities is a commons in at least three senses. First, individual members of the village have access rights to cultivate a portion of the village’s farmland though not to any particular spot each year. Second, individual members usually had shared access to farmland for other uses (such as grazing) outside of the growing season. Third, individual members had access rights to forage on or make other uses of uncultivated lands or wastes….

…These societies are neither primitive communists nor Lockean individualists. Autonomous villages, bands, and many small chiefdoms around the world are simultaneously collectivist and individualist in the extremely important sense that the community recognizes all individuals are entitled to direct access to the resources they need for subsistence without having to work for someone else. Independent access to common land is far more important to them than the right to exclude others from private land.

It's been claimed that the concept of land ownership dates back to Roman times in England, but even then the same patterns emerge: a top down imposition of private property on land previously held in commons enforced by state violence:

As for the Romans, the same thing applies here, of enclosing land from the commons to the detriment of the lower classes in favor of a small, landowning elite:

In the years of the Roman Empire’s greatest success, the extent of the ager publicus (public lands) was ‘immense’. Some of this land, seized from conquered peoples, was distributed to military veterans…. The status of the ‘unallocated’ land was less clear. But, across time, there was evidence that effective ownership came to be concentrated among a few large landowners (and landlords). According to Nelson…, ‘patricians acquired hegemony over the uncultivated ager publicus [and] by the time of the Gracchan laws (the agrarian reforms of 133 and 122 bce ) these tracts of land had been in private hands for generations and had acquired the aura of private property’.

Notice how none of my critics actually address any of the substance of my points, and ignore basic historical patterns, pretending that they don't exist. If they applied even a slight modicum of critical scrutiny, they could see what I say is true.

Thus we can clearly see that property still, after all, is theft, no matter what bunkum property apologists come up.

Squatting

People say "squatting is theft." Well to that effect, I can equally respond that "property (as in land ownership) is theft." It is the institution of land ownership in the first place that breeds homelessness. The notion that I have a right to land to the exclusion of everyone else. Where are they supposed to go? Land is not an inexhaustible resource. By excluding people from land you are by default forcing them into a state of economic servitude. Where are they gonna live?