Property: A Theft?

“The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, “This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.” Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people who have been neither able nor willing to sell, and who have received none of the proceeds of the sale will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, ‘So perish idlers and vagrants!’”

– Pierre Joseph Proudhon, ‘What is Property?

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the Earth no-one’s.”

– Jean Jacques Rousseau, ‘On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind’

The origin of wealth lies in ‘property’. I would like to argue that property (any property) on the other hand contains both the fractional rights of every individual in the society and unpaid, underpaid, or simply stolen labor of others.

Timur’s son, the Turkic ruler of Kabul and Samarkand, Babur, established the Mughal empire in India, by defeating Ibrahim Lodhi at the Battle of Panipat in 1526.

Bharatpur and its surrounding areas including Mathura (the birthplace of Lord Krishna) and Agra ( later, home to the Taj Mahal) were ruled by local feudal lords who collected tax from the peasants. By 1774, Bharatpur came under the control of the Mughals and in 1805 it had accepted the sovereignty of the British Raj.

States came into being not through the will or conscious efforts of ordinary people but through the personal ambitions, greed and conquests of warriors — who sought success, power, and glory.

In many ways, that quest for power remains an unalterable human instinct. It finds expression in the ambiguous undertakings of entrepreneurs, who leave no occasion to remind us that their efforts push the needle of progress only forward; even as people become parallel victims of their action.

The common man, the eternal peasant is condemned to be ruled. To accept the laws of the state, designed to retain the status quo. Live and die an unremarkable life.

The origin of the term ‘property’ lies in the Latin word ‘propertietat’ and its French equivalent ‘proprious’ which essentially means ‘a thing owned’. If property is a ‘thing owned,’ this ‘thing’ has to be external. And external things can be divided into 2 categories:

a) A person’s labor

b) A person’s property which is extracted from natural resources, purchased or manufactured

The French philosopher and economist, Pierre Proudhon, famously termed property ‘a theft’ because he believed profiting from other people’s labor is immoral. All religions and faith condemn it. The ‘process of ownership’ or ‘anything that transfers ownership from one person to another, which is the basis on which the entire foundation of economics is built, is nothing more than ‘theft’.

The concept of property was known to everyone, from ancient Greeks to Hindus, Romans, Jews etc. It occupies an important place in human life because it is virtually impossible to live without the use and exchange of material objects which constitute the subject matter of property.

The idea of property and ownership are also very closely related to each other. The two are mutually interdependent and correlative. One implies the existence of the other. There can be no property without ownership and no ownership without property.

In modern times, apart from its common use, ‘property is used in a wider sense also. It includes all the rights which a person has. Thus, a person’s life, liberty, reputation, and all other claims which he might have against other persons is his property. The term property is used also to denote the proprietary rights of a man as opposed to his personal rights. In this sense, it means a person’s land, house, his shares in a business concern etc. It is used in a third sense also, that is, to mean proprietary rights. The law of property is the law of proprietary rights. According to this usage, a freehold or leasehold estate in land, or a patent or copyright is property: but a debt or the benefit of the contract is not. There is also a fourth and the narrowest sense in which the term ‘property’ is used. In this sense, property includes nothing more than the corporeal property or the right of ownership in material things.

Enlightenment philosopher John Locke was the first major proponent of private property. He deals with the idea of property ownership in his “Second Treatise on Government” by asking a question, “By what right an individual can claim to own one part of the world, when, according to the Bible, God gave the world to all humanity in common.” He then answers, “that although persons belong to God, they own the fruits of their labor. When a person works, that labor enters into the object. Thus, the object becomes the property of that person.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his “Discourse on Inequality” effectively counters that reasoning by stressing “that the natural right argument does not extend to resources that one did not create” that would include land and air and trees and sea routes, for instance, which individuals later monopolized.

Locke’s labor theory of property has been singled out for critique by modern academics who doubt the idea that mixing something owned with something unowned could imbue the object with ownership.

Consider the views of Canadian Marxist political theorist and historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, in her work “The Origin of Capitalism”,“Why isn’t mixing what I own with what I don’t own a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don’t?”

If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?

Both, Locke and Rousseau, presented an idea. Why is it that Locke’s idea of ‘private property’ became more acceptable than Rousseau's?

It is not my case that the efforts or inventions or skills of free citizens should be appropriated for the benefit of the society, but that they do not belong to them entirely in the best place. That their efforts alone cannot produce wealth for them without the support of society, the community, and the sacrifices it entails.

It is estimated that 90% of the wealth generated today is due to knowledge inheritance. It belongs not to those in whose accounts it sits today but billions of people who contributed to the generation of that knowledge in their own way.

There are four important lessons that one can draw from the this:

1. Labour is the only moral and ethical measure of value and by extension money.
2. Resources that belong to nature should continue to belong to nature. Land is a natural resource and should be held in common ownership and only leased out to individuals and corporates for productive purposes if required.
3. Money is created from thin air. Yet, through a complex set of economic arrangements — commercial banks, industrial establishments, rigged markets and government programs — it ends up in the pockets of a few individuals.
4. Money comes to acquire a value of its own, even though its intrinsic value is zero.

It is a common misconception that economics began with Adam Smith’s claim that the market’s “invisible hand” will lead to a good society. It’s rarely mentioned that Smith had grave doubts about how those markets could function.

1. “Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains.”
2. “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
3. “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.”
4. “Wherever there is great property there is great inequality.”

Adam Smith denounced both poverty and inequality which he attributed to a disparity of property rights. He proposed progressive taxation as a solution. Smith’s distrust of profit and excitement for redistribution are deeply embedded in economic theory but rarely surface in contemporary discourse. The rate of profit in a fair market that is genuinely competitive cannot be higher than the cost of capital. Large profits are inherently indicative of dysfunctional market economies, he stressed.

Endnotes:

1. Institutions and Economic Theory: The Contribution of the New Institutional Economics By Eirik Grundtvig Furubotn, Rudolf Richter
2. Right to Property in India: everything important you …. https://blog. ipleaders.in/right-to-property-in-india/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Treatises_of_Government
4. Labor theory of property — Infogalactic: the planetary …. https:// infogalactic.com/info/Labor_theory_of_property
5. Labor theory of property — WikiMili, The Best Wikipedia Reader. https:// wikimili.com/en/Labor_theory_of_property