đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș sub-media-what-is-property.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:06:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: What is Property? Author: sub.media Date: 2019 Language: en Topics: property, primer, video transcription Source: https://sub.media/video/what-is-property/
Anarchists have a well-earned reputation when it comes to property. Acts
of targeted vandalism and sabotage are often used by liberals,
politicians and corporate media outfits to paint a picture of anarchism
as nothing more than mindless hooliganism. But these small-scale acts of
property destruction represent more than just surface-level outbursts of
misdirected rage, or a ritualistic rivalry with Starbucks windows. They
gesture towards a broader assault on the philosophical and legal
underpinnings of the state and capitalism itself.
Early anarchist forebearer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon summed up this tension
more than 175 years ago, when he penned the phrase âproperty is theftâ.
All power structures are rooted in ideology. A shared belief in this
ideology is what keeps the structures of power in place. Under
capitalism, the edifice of social control is built on the collective
illusion of private property, and the sanctity of the so-called âfree
marketâ. Any moves taken to challenge this logic will therefore provoke
pushback from the systemâs indoctrinated cheerleaders, and will
certainly catch the attention of the repressive and recuperative
functions of the state. But as the saying goes... you canât make an
omelette without breaking a few eggs. And you definitely canât overthrow
capitalism without messing with peopleâs stuff.
So.... what is property, anyway? And what do anarchists have against it?
Property is a legal concept, used as a means of delineating ownership
and control. Itâs rules are so ingrained into the fabric of our daily
lives that itâs easy to forget that they are fluid, changeable, and that
they have assumed many different forms throughout human history. From
the stateless Anishinaabe peoples of the Three Fires Confederacy, to the
vast state-managed enterprises of the Soviet Union, differences in
baseline conceptions of property have fundamentally shaped the specific
character of social relationships, the development of culture and the
operation of power and authority in their respective societies. In most
parts of the world today, national and cultural distinctions exist
mainly as localized variations of a single, global capitalist economy.
The dominant ideology of this empire is a consumer-fuelled individualism
â a worldview that sees a corporate-dominated system of private property
as synonymous with freedom of choice... or even liberty itself.
Of course, things havenât always been this way. Capitalism first emerged
in Europe, where the growing wealth and power of rich landowners,
merchants and financiers gradually began to unravel and displace the
existing system of feudal social relations. Before this, much of the
lands and natural resources needed for human survival were considered a
commons, meaning that they werenât actually owned by anyone. Even in the
Christian agrarian societies where capitalism first took root, it was
widely understood that the earth and the entire bounty of nature
belonged to God, and were merely administered by his representatives on
earth, the Church and the monarchy.
The shift to capitalism was made possible through large scale
commodification. This process, also known by Marxists as primitive
accumulation, essentially amounts to state-sanctioned theft. In a cruel
parlour trick, things without monetary value are legally transformed
into commodities that can be owned and traded. Yellowknives Dene
anti-colonial theorist, Glen Coulthard describes it as âthe violent
transformation of non-capitalist forms of life into capitalist ones.â
The great enclosure began in earnest at the end of the 15th century, as
acre upon acre of the British Commons was broken up and commodified into
individual parcels of land. This was, incidentally, around the same time
that Spanish and Portuguese merchants began their invasion and pillage
of the new world. As part of their genocidal colonization of the
so-called Americas, European settlers imposed this new system of private
land ownership onto Indigenous nations with a very different conception
of property â one in which people belonged to the land, not the other
way around. The same colonial process of commodification was then
applied to fellow human beings. Over the following centuries, European
slave traders kidnapped millions of Africans, reduced them to the legal
status of chattel property and sold them to the owners of massive
agricultural plantations. The massive volume of wealth extracted from
this stolen land and labour cemented the power of the emergent
capitalist class, and was used as a springboard for subsequent wars of
conquest. And with these new waves of Euro-American expansion came the
enclosure of new lands, the creation of new markets, and the spread of
capitalist social relations all across the globe.
Conceptions of property and ownership have evolved over the years. In
its hardwired pursuit of constant growth, capitalism has been forced to
constantly adapt, contort and reinvent itself. Technological advances
have revolutionized the manufacture and transportation of commodities,
while property relations have become muddied through the rise of
publicly owned corporations, investment vehicles and financial debt
instruments. And the logic of the commodity form has continued to
colonize new frontiers, from intellectual property, to genetic
blueprints, to information itself. This has resulted in a world where
nearly everything imaginable has been transformed into property, and its
ownership increasingly concentrated in the hands of a shrinking pool of
unimaginably wealthy individuals. This hoarding of resources by a small
minority finds its natural reflection in the explosive growth of abject
poverty among the worldâs majority. In the Global South, oil and mining
companies hire paramilitary death squads to displace entire villages,
swelling the populations of favelas, shantytowns and mega-slums well
beyond their natural limits. Meanwhile, in the so-called âdeveloped
worldâ, millions of people are homeless, while ten times that number of
homes sit vacant, silently accruing value for real estate speculators
and investment trusts owned by the managers of public sector pension
funds.
These levels of entrenched inequality are backed up by the massive
application of state violence, and the internalized sense of collective
helplessness that this violence has produced. But this fatalism has
limits, and many see the regime of property for what it is â a social
war â and act accordingly. Around the world, anarchists have been at the
forefront of urban squatting movements, breaking into empty buildings
and transforming them into social centres and collective housing
projects. In more rural areas, communities of displaced peasants have
occupied private or state-owned lands and defended one another against
the threat of eviction, while Indigenous groups have taken up arms,
halted development projects, and forced colonizers off their territory.
Anarchists have honed their forgery skills, creating counterfeit
government IDs, state currency and travellers cheques for armed
resistance movements around the world. While other anarchists, like the
Greek comrades of Revolutionary Struggle, have carried out armed
expropriations, robbing banks to fund their attacks on the state. Crews
of anarchists have blocâed up and swarmed grocery stores, liberating
enough food to feed their entire block, while others have broken into
fenced off lots to build community gardens and autonomous parks. The
struggle for anarchism is above all a struggle to replace the alienated
and exploitative social relations of capitalism with new relationships
based in solidarity and mutual aid. This means de-commodifying our
lives, and all of the things that we need to live well. It means seizing
back the commons... and everything that theyâve stolen from us.