What Is Property?

[Terxpahseyton]

We've already established, though, that Proudhon locates rightful possession in labour, and labour is to a certain extent homogeneous, and therefore interchangeable. All that Proudhon would require is that like is exchanged for like in regards to labour-time.

Aha! That's more sensible.

Does a society need a market to be efficient or modern? That, as I said, is a whole can of worms in itself, and not one that needs opened here.

It don't find it particular wormy in this instance
If market = private trade (which is my assumption here), not with absolute necessity, there is one alternative: Central management. But that was out of the question with an Anarchist. Now though that point is obsolete anyway, as I just wasn't aware that "possessions must be self-produced" actually means "must reflect own labor-time".

I'm not saying it wouldn't need something more formal than just divvying things up as you go, just that you don't need third-party arbiters for that to work. Illiterate peasants across the globe managed it by themselves for around ten thousand years, and I would think that we've made enough in the way of technological advances since to give it a decent go.

The thing is, without a third-party, you have no monopole of legitimate force. And there just is no reason to believe that people can be trusted to constrain themselves enough that this theoretic society wouldn't end up creating a new third-party-system but every reason to believe they can't. Simply because third-party systems have superior abilities in projecting power for power being centrally organized. Maybe not in every instance, but on the long run - I dare to say for sure.

Moreover, there is even less reason to believe that people could be trusted to uphold Proudhon's idea of possession reflecting labor-time without a third party checking (not to mention the more obvious problem of it - that being inefficient in the sense of needing a lot o labor-time would be rewarded by the market).

So alternatively, if we assume that this third-party aspect would concern economic matters alone, removing the third party practically is bound to mean following the ideal of a totally free market economy. Which can hardly be what Proudhon wants.

In conclusion, everything you have told me so far about this suggests to me that his idea of how possessions should be dealt with instead of making use of property is a result of what we in German call "Ich male mir die Welt wie sie mir gefällt"* - thinking, rather than a realty-based try to seriously suggest alternative models for society.

*"I paint the world like it pleases me" (it rhymes in German)

In which parallel universe does 99% of the population own no property?

Early medieval Europe perhaps?

 

[Murky]

Keeps the 99% from accidentally shorting the wires at a transformer farm on the city power grid, for one.

How? If property boundaries are just imaginary lines drawn on map and most people don't own it, then why should anyone bother enforcing the law? It has actually become fairly commonplace for squatters to move into a physically vacant property because the owners (usually some bank) are so far removed as to not even notice.

In which parallel universe does 99% of the population own no property?

It is increasingly becoming this way in America. Foreclosures are still at an all time high. The top 1% own most of the wealth.

 

[luiz]

It is increasingly becoming this way in America. Foreclosures are still at an all time high. The top 1% own most of the wealth.

That's an entirely different thing from sayin that "99% own no property". The overwhelming majority of Americans do indeed own property.

 

[warpus]

I would say that 100% own property. If you own pants, that's property. There are no fully naked homeless bums in America.

 

[Murky]

That's an entirely different thing from sayin that "99% own no property". The overwhelming majority of Americans do indeed own property.

What if instead we said that 99% of Americans own a relatively small amount of property? If you consider that most people own a mortgage rather than a house you could say that most people don't actually own the property until it's paid off.

You should factor in how much inequality in property ownership goes into how much people value and respect property rights.

 

[Traitorfish]

Aha! That's more sensible.

It don't find it particular wormy in this instance
If market = private trade (which is my assumption here), not with absolute necessity, there is one alternative: Central management.

That's one of the puzzles yes- how you define "market". In some definitions, has particular implications about as to the legal status of property and market exchange, in others, it would include the USSR (in that the USSR possessed an economy based around commodity exchange), and in some it would even encompass some forms of (what amounts to) communism that made use of "goodwill credit"- a sort of gift economy-with-account-books. So the term "market" remains ambiguous.
Although, even taking that into account, I'd dispute the assumption that our choice is between markets and central planning. Perhaps you could argue that these are our only viable options in contemporary society, but to suggest that they are the only possible forms of human society is demonstrable false.

But that was out of the question with an Anarchist. Now though that point is obsolete anyway, as I just wasn't aware that "possessions must be self-produced" actually means "must reflect own labor-time".

A flaw in communication on my part, sorry.

The thing is, without a third-party, you have no monopole of legitimate force. And there just is no reason to believe that people can be trusted to constrain themselves enough that this theoretic society wouldn't end up creating a new third-party-system but every reason to believe they can't. Simply because third-party systems have superior abilities in projecting power for power being centrally organized. Maybe not in every instance, but on the long run - I dare to say for sure.

Moreover, there is even less reason to believe that people could be trusted to uphold Proudhon's idea of possession reflecting labor-time without a third party checking (not to mention the more obvious problem of it - that being inefficient in the sense of needing a lot o labor-time would be rewarded by the market).

So alternatively, if we assume that this third-party aspect would concern economic matters alone, removing the third party practically is bound to mean following the ideal of a totally free market economy. Which can hardly be what Proudhon wants.

In conclusion, everything you have told me so far about this suggests to me that his idea of how possessions should be dealt with instead of making use of property is a result of what we in German call "Ich male mir die Welt wie sie mir gefällt"* - thinking, rather than a realty-based try to seriously suggest alternative models for society.

*"I paint the world like it pleases me" (it rhymes in German)

This mostly comes down to the fact that he was an anarchist, and you are not. So the disagreements are bit more profound than a disagreement about property alone. The rest is a critique of Proudhonian economics, and, as I'm not a Proudhonist, I'm not really in a position to respond.

In which parallel universe does 99% of the population own no property?

True enough, which is why distinguishing between the legal category of property and Proudhon's discussion of the social function of property as the separation of people and possessions is crucial. Most adults in our society owns something, but very few people can claim to own everything they possess. That would still be significant if everyone in the country owned their residence, let alone as things are now. [Edit: The distinction we might make is between the legal form of property, which is general, and the social content of property, which is specific. Understood in social rather than legal terms, an owner-occupied house and a privately (or publicly, for that matter) owned steel mill are not the same thing at all.]

Although Warpus' comment on bums raises an interesting point. Given that their few meagre possession have effectively no legal protection, can they be said to "own" anything? Or do they merely possess what nobody owns, in the same way that someone squatting in an abandoned building can be said to? Again, we are forced to consider more deeply how we understand "property". Hence, y'know, this thread.

 

[Aleenik]

Your terminology is confusing. It sounds like you mean capital when you say "private" property ...

Well, I'd say private property is any form of capital that can be used to generate wealth. I use the terms 'private property' and 'personal property', but I suppose an alternative would be to use the terms 'property' and 'personal possessions' respectively.

In which parallel universe does 99% of the population own no property?

As a note, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei was written in 1848.

Now, we must realize the distinction between personal and private property. That quote from the Communist Manifesto is talking about private property, not personal property. A house that you live in is considered personal property. Was housing for living purposes included as a form of personal property rather than private property when making that quote? I'd say yes. Housing for living purposes is personal property because it is not the means of production, natural resources, land used to cultivate products, or productive resources, which are what is generally meant when talking about private property, to quote a poster.

Even today very few people own any private property and it will continue to stay that way because that is an inherit part of Capitalism. Rule of the few over the many. Exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.

 

[Tahuti]

Well, I'd say private property is any form of capital that can be used to generate wealth. I use the terms 'private property' and 'personal property', but I suppose an alternative would be to use the terms 'property' and 'personal possessions' respectively.
As a note, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei was written in 1848.

Now, we must realize the distinction between personal and private property. That quote from the Communist Manifesto is talking about private property, not personal property. A house that you live in is considered personal property. Was housing for living purposes included as a form of personal property rather than private property when making that quote? I'd say yes. Housing for living purposes is personal property because it is not the means of production, natural resources, land used to cultivate products, or productive resources, which are what is generally meant when talking about private property, to quote a poster.

Even today very few people own any private property and it will continue to stay that way because that is an inherit part of Capitalism. Rule of the few over the many. Exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.

Problem is that this distinction is worthless as well. I own some shares of publicly traded corporations myself as an alternative to savings and anyone with even a below average income could buy such shares if they would want to. In fact, you'll probably end up owning some shares as well as part of your retirement plan.

Strictly speaking, anyone who owns such shares has the means of production, even if they are not the top 1% earners.

 

[Traitorfish]

Problem is that this distinction is worthless as well. I own some shares of publicly traded corporations myself as an alternative to savings and anyone with even a below average income could buy such shares if they would want to. In fact, you'll probably end up owning some shares as well as part of your retirement plan.

Strictly speaking, anyone who owns such shares has the means of production, even if they are not the top 1% earners.

That's why the distinction between ownership, the "legal form" of property, and control, its "social content", is so important. By the same token, nobody actually owned the means of production in the Soviet Union, but no thinking person is under the impression that control and therefore de facto ownership lay with a managerial elite. And given that the average pleb is never going to amass enough in the way of shares to exercise any meaningful control of those companies- major investors have a hard enough time controlling management!- the issue of control remains here as surely as it did in the USSR despite its phoney parliaments and lapdog trade unions.

 

[BasketCase]

How? If property boundaries are just imaginary lines drawn on map and most people don't own it, then why should anyone bother enforcing the law?

For my example with the transformer farm, two reasons:

Number one, anybody who steps across the line is likely to get killed. Not by human malice, but because of a voltage differential applied across a human body that is touching two wires it should not have been touching. So you keep people out for their own safety.

Number two, people who step across the line may, rather than killing themselves, unintentionally damage sensitive electrical equipment and cause an outage that blacks out an entire district. So you keep people out for the safety of the community.

Most private properties are private for good reasons.

 

[Traitorfish]

Are factory workers, for example, at significant risk of bodily harm or death if they attempt to run a factory without the suits? Which is what implies.

(And, yes, I know that they're at risk insofar as the merry band of fratyboy fascists who go around keeping property private would have a few words to say about it, but that's a bit circular, so we can set that aside for the purposes of this discussion.)