💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › ran-prieur-property.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:43:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Property
Author: Ran Prieur
Date: 2009
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, property
Source: Retrieved on 15 February 2011 from http://ranprieur.com/archives/024.html#property
Notes: April 24, 2009

Ran Prieur

Property

I’ve written before that we could define the “owner” of a place as

whoever lives there, and factor out the whole concept of “property”.

Last month I discovered that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had the same idea in

1840, in his book What Is Property? Specifically, Proudhon noticed that

our word “property” blurs together two opposite concepts: the rights of

someone who actually works with a piece of land, a house, a sum of

money, a tool; and the rights of someone who does not work with it, who

might never see it, but who is said to “own” it because, well, the rules

say so, and we don’t question them.

Looking just at land, where do pieces of “bought” land originally come

from? Usually they are violently stolen from indigenous people, or in

the case of unoccupied wilderness, some central authority simply

declares “ownership” out of thin air. Tribal people have the concept of

territory, but they would think it’s insane for one tribe to “own” the

land that another tribe occupies. Even neolithic farmers, who have

already carved fields out of the forest, would not understand how one

family could work a field “owned” by another — unless they were slaves.

The concept of non-occupying ownership is like a magic spell that makes

violent conquest and near-slavery seem natural. It enables ecological

destruction, because people actually living on land, seeing the effects

of their actions, are less willing to cut down forests and deplete

topsoil than remote commanders seeing only numbers. And it enables

positive feedback in wealth distribution: the two big ways the rich get

richer are rent and interest, one where you pay a fee to the “owner” of

land you’re occupying, and the other where you pay a fee to the “owner”

of money you’re using.

So, should we make possession the whole of the law? I see two problems

with this. The first is that no set of laws can make a tolerable society

if people are still hyperselfish. For example, you might leave your

house for a day and come back to find out that someone else has claimed

it. The other problem is that even occupiers of land can abuse it, like

the mining companies that are cutting tops off mountains in West

Virginia, or renters who trash a house because they know they’re not

staying long. In this case, it’s the absentee landlord who has a healthy

relationship with the property (though not with the renters).

So I suggest a more useful distinction, not between possessing and

non-possessing ownership, but between sustaining and extractive

ownership. More generally, we can distinguish between sustaining and

extractive relationships. An extractive relationship is what you have

with an apple: you get it, you eat it, it’s gone. It’s not good to have

an extractive relationship with a person, or a piece of land.

Civilization as we know it has an extractive relationship with the whole

planet. But as the extractable resources get used up, more and more

human systems will have to develop sustaining relationships with their

land. The challenge is to have good relationships and high social

complexity at the same time.

I’m also thinking about this in the context of money. In the Empire

money system, rich people and banks have sustaining relationships with

their piles of money — they want their money to stay the same size or

grow year after year. And they do this by having extractive

relationships with people and land. In a system with depreciating

currency, people are forced to have an extractive relationship with

their money: If they hold onto it, it will decay, like an apple, so they

have to use it up by spending it. And if they’re smart, they will spend

it to build sustaining relationships with people and land.