livebloggingmydescentintomadness:

naturallyselectedbyaccident:

fatpinocchio:

fatpinocchio:

squareallworthy:

fatpinocchio:

From a narrowly political libertarian property-rights perspective, people should be free to waive or transfer their property rights and have that respected and enforced. But from a broader cultural liberal/spirit-of-libertarianism view, it’s bad if people transfer so many of their rights that they no longer have the general ability to do what they want with themselves and their own stuff.

Okay, but how bad? Bad enough that you would want to ban people from transferring certain rights? Does this come up enough in real life to matter?

If we only talked about things that come up in real life enough to matter, the world would be a much less interesting place.

More seriously, if some people want to surrender their property rights and live in a socialist, white-nationalist, or NIMBY commune, they can, but those should be relatively unusual arrangements against a background of generally being able to do whatever you want with your own property. Much like how you should be able to sell yourself into slavery, but it definitely shouldn’t be common.

This gets the history of property in the real world nearly exactly backwards.

Looking at historical records and independent non-Western people groups in the world, what actually happens is that groups enter history with the vast majority of their goods being held in collective property rights, and over time, nearly always at the behest of states, those collective rights get assigned to individuals. The classic Western European case is enclosures that spread across England primarily in the 17th and 18th centuries, often with the need to violently keep our people from their former common lands. Another example is Russia just prior to WW1. For time immemorial, farming was done with collective village ownership of the land. In the late 19th century under the influence of liberal economic advisors, the Czar said that peasants could choose to divide their collective land into private individual plots. By WW1 only 20% of peasant land was divided this way with 80% preferring collective ownership. In China this took the form of extended families holding land collectively and even with the rule that land with the ancestors’ tombs could never be alienated even with the agreement of the whole family. Then of course there are the collective living arrangements and territories of hunter gatherers. And in all of this, necessities for life such as food and clothing, are held AT MOST loosely individually with the rule that if someone else needs what you have, you must give it to them.

Does this seem strange? Why would the human default prior to the modern market economy/state be collective not private property? Why do humans so consistently give up property rights in the premodern world?

The answer is they don’t, collective property is just the natural answer to how to assign rights to an object that multiple individuals are responsible for. This is where the early theoreticians of property messed up. Production is almost never a case of an individual mixing their labor with nature. People don’t form out of clay fully capable and even if they did most things worth doing take multiple humans collaborating. Every human goes through childhood where they could not survive without help from others. They learn from others. Then when it comes time to make things, they use items prepared by others or with their direct help. If a bow is being made, who has personal ownership of it? The person who taught you how to craft it? The family that watched your back and kept you fed while you concentrated? The person who used their bow to kill the animals you obtained parts from? Or just the person who brought those parts into a whole bow? The answer humans have traditionally come to is “all of them”.

So where does private property come from? Ultimately the answer is theft. One person denying the claims of other people who contributed and then enforcing that with violence. That’s where anti-capitalists and capitalists differ. The capitalist argues his actions were decisive giving him sole control of the property, and the anti-capitalist points out that these individual assigning of rights comes from some people finding ways to steal from and physically overcome other people. That’s why markets arise with states and not prehistory. That why actually existing stateless regions of the world never develop along the lines of ancap thought but tend to revert to collective ownership.

So, yes once people have private property, the people with the most property rarely do give it up willingly. But it’s also NOT true that most people groups in history started with private property.

Also side note but historically when it’s been around selling oneself into slavery was actually very common because typically the options were “sell oneself to the rich man” or “starve to death because the rich guy is hoarding the food in an attempt to get more people to sell themselves”. Happened a lot in Sumer/Mesopotamia (accompanied by semi regular debt forgiveness to keep the total discontented slave population low), happened in Rome (land reform in the late Republic was meant to reduce the need of such extremities), and happened in Africa (the African slave trade was part war prisoners part debt slaves sold off to Europeans).

This is a great example of Marxist theory in history, applied straightforwardly in a way that gives some interesting insight–and also a skillful rebuttal of the vaguely libertarian and completely ahistorical musings above it. Prehistory being what it is, it’s difficult for us to know exactly what events happened and how people felt about them, and so we have to rely on archaeology, which does reflect a lot of collectively held property in various prehistorical cultures globally. Broad sweeping assumptions are always wrong, and so while I say this with the caveat that there is probably at least one case in which this is not the case–the notion that prehistorical peoples had no concept of individual property is utter nonsense. Maybe your individual property could just be small items like “this necklace my mom gave me” and “the literal clothes on my back”, but the idea that every possible thing was held in common by the community and not in any way belonging to a single individual or family ignores reality in favor of theory.

I don’t want to say that Marxist theory as applied to prehistory is somehow bad or anything like that, but this argument reads beat for beat as Marx himself, and beyond not really having anything new to say needs to be scaled back significantly.