Links:
- “Take me to the river…” (2010)
- “Practicing the Encounter: Appropriation (and Ecology)” (2013)
- “Notes on What is Property?” (2019)
- “New Things and Old Words in Proudhon’s Late Works” (2022)
This is the second in a series of documents addressing the various questions surrounding the notion of property.
Archic property is theft. — Let’s start with a very minor revision of Proudhon’s infamous judgment, clarifying that, having started to address property in its full range of meanings, we can specify a particular variety of property that is the natural object of anarchistic critique. We can then — after a few other preliminaries — review Proudhon’s arguments in What is Property? and incorporate the observations made in the post on “Archy, Property and the Possibility of An-archic Property” into critiques originally made on slightly different terms.
There are no particular problems created by this adjustment in terms. Proudhon wrestled with a number of different approaches to the rhetoric of property, wanting at first to “call different things by different names,” so as to avoid confusion. This led to the distinction between property and possession in What is Property? — although, even there, Proudhon struggled to be consistent, before finally abandoning the notion of possession in later works. Even in the “Preface” to the later editions of the work, where Proudhon defined property as “the sum of the abuses” [of property], he had begun to move toward the strategy of his later years, made explicit in 1853:
I will retain, with the common folk, these three words: religion, government, property, for reasons of which I am not the master, which partake of the general theory of Progress, and for that reason seem to me decisive: first, it is not my place to create new words for new things and I am forced to speak the common language; second, there is no progress without tradition, and the new order having for its immediate antecedents religion, government and property, it is convenient, in order to guarantee that very evolution, to preserve for the new institutions their patronymic names, in the phases of civilization, because there are never well-defined lines, and to attempt to accomplish the revolution at a leap would be beyond our means.
(See “New Things and Old Words in Proudhon’s Late Works” for a more extended discussion of the shift.)
In the same period, he was coming to think of most concepts as in some important sense indefinable. Their specification would require some organization of the varying senses into series or their incorporation into some explanatory narrative.
To incorporate the broad, inclusive sense of property proposed in the first installment of this particular series, nothing is necessary except to anticipate a shift in approach that was probably already underway in Proudhon’s thought. But we can arguably also make the adjustment by examining what is strongest in “classical” accounts of property rights — the archic property that is the most obvious object of anarchistic critique.
The most robust account of exclusive individual property and the most unobjectionable rationale for rights protecting individual appropriation is perhaps found in John Locke’s Second Treatise, where he provides the familiar account of “labor-mixing” as the method of just appropriation. It’s one of those texts that can be surprising to read, particularly if you are only familiar with nth-hand accounts from “Lockeans” more concerned with the defense of the ideology of propertarianism than with the philosophical nuances. The accounts starts with “God, who hath given the World to Men in common,” and then tries to work out a political system of individual property consistent with those beginnings. A key move comes in paragraph 27:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
Here is self-ownership in one of its simplest forms, presented as the fundamental premise that makes the ownership of external property not just possible, but a fairly obvious extension of the premise. There are, however, only a couple of ways to make things work. Either “property in one’s person” is the product of divine intention, a right granted by God, or else it is a logical axiom, with some sort of self-evident character. I’m not sure that Locke really chooses between those options or that his account of labor-mixing always incorporates the best available choices. We know that, in the end, he moved beyond this account to one friendlier to capitalistic relations. But there are elements of this first account that seem to me quite elegant — particularly when given a free and generous reading.
Let us say — no doubt both freely and generously — that the “property in one’s person” that forms the first and most important premise here is not ultimately a feature of some god’s intention, a bit of divine legislation, but is simply property in the most general sense of the term. When we begin to speak of persons, we are led to distinguish between the self and the non-self, then, because the self seems dependent on a continuing interaction with the non-self, to distinguish what is proper (in a variety of senses) to a given person, to respond to the possibility of conflict over resources with theories of just appropriation, etc. — a sequence that gradually takes us from a quality assumed “by definition” through various descriptive stages to questions of ethics, if not, for anarchists, to the potential questions regarding rights or law.
It is proper to the self to mix with the non-self — and the person is, at any given moment, the result of that ongoing process. When we find ourselves in circumstances that call for us to note, respect, challenge, etc. the limits of a given self, then we are in the realm of some kind of property, which need not become a matter of rights or law, but does probably commit us to some kind of broadly ethical concerns. That’s the framework for thinking about an-archic property.
(I have written about this topic on a number of occasions in the past. “Practicing the Encounter: Appropriation (and Ecology)” addresses some of this is just a bit more depth.)
Anarchists will, of course, be particularly interested in how to pursue this sort of analysis without recourse to archic, legal, governmental applications. In this respect, Locke’s account is useful to the degree that it establishes the general nature of an ethic of respect for property based in mutual respect for persons. Respect for other persons presumably entails respect for their ongoing mixing with the world around them. We can anticipate conflicts over the potential appropriation of particular scarce resources, resources situated in particular locations and combinations, etc. It is hard to imagine an ethic that would always steer us around difficult, perhaps impossible sorts of conflict, negotiation, compromise, etc. We can easily imagine solving some of these problems through the recognition of joint property, limited property, etc. But if we are going to try to work through all of these questions without recourse to legal and governmental means, it would be useful to have some guidelines for unilateral appropriation which, if not necessarily self-evident, would at least be hard to object to.
Locke gives us at least a interesting start in that direction. Here are the passages in which he introduces what we now call the main “proviso” in his theory:
32. But the chief matter of Property being now not the Fruits of the Earth, and the Beasts that subsist on it, but the Earth it self; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest: I think it is plain, that Property in that too is acquired as the former. As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common. Nor will it invalidate his right to say, Every body else has an equal Title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the Consent of all his Fellow-Commoners, all Mankind. God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour, and the penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which another had no Title to, nor could without injury take from him.
33. Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his inclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No Body could think himself injur’d by the drinking of another Man, though he took a good Draught, who had a whole River of the same Water left him to quench his thirst. And the Case of Land and Water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.
This is both delightfully clever and a bit underwhelming when we unpack it. Appropriation is unobjectionable when there is enough to go around. That’s the proviso that conditions the more famous proviso: “where there is enough for both,” meaning where there is enough for all. So perhaps we have a path by which we can move from the “by definition” to a practical ethic — and on to “rights,” if that was our sort of thing, since they too would be as unobjectionable as such things can be — or maybe there is no path at all, because there isn’t enough to go around.
Framed in those terms, it’s hard not to be struck by the fact that the defenders of property are likely to be the ones who deny that there is enough for all, while the critics of property would tend to take the opposite position. Modern propertarians often insist on the necessity of exclusive individual property precisely because of general conditions of scarcity that make leaving “enough, and as good” an impossible condition of appropriation. Even self-proclaimed “Lockeans” seldom embrace the conditions established by that proviso, which would seem to be the element that holds the theory of labor-mixing appropriation together.
Part of the problem is undoubtedly that this particular account is a product of its time. The question of “enough to go around” was probably easier to discuss in the 16th century, when “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of” involved simpler sorts of calculation. As the capacities of human labor have been multiplied by social and technological factors, the sort of subsistence model presented by Locke — an “occupancy and use” where the labor available to till, plant, improve, cultivate, etc. is expected to produce fruits suitable for more-or-less individual use — necessarily has to give way to models that can account for very different sorts of “individual” capacities. It is in the context of those amplified capacities that the question of “enough to go around” becomes not just a difficult question to answer, but perhaps a difficult question to even really formulate.
We’ve moved from a context in which the combined capacities of every individual person, each pursuing something like a subsistence through the cultivation of the land, are presumably insufficient to appropriate all of the land available to one in which, thanks to various kinds of amplification of what we are still likely to consider “individual” capacities, that is not so obviously the case. As a result, while we can take from Locke a general sense of what it would look like for appropriation to be unobjectionable, his model may not be practicable for us as modern individuals — at least without some significant alterations in the social context.
Maybe we can draw a few more preliminary conclusions and then leave the return to What is Property? for the next installment.
When we look at what is perhaps the most compelling traditional argument for exclusive individual property, we find that the notion of property that it begins with seems to be broad and not necessarily archic in its assumptions or consequences. It is also fundamentally based in some kind of equity in possession, limited by a view of the world that assumes at least a rough balance between equitable possession and what seems to be a similarly equitable consumption, and ultimately seems to rest on the assumption that there is indeed “enough to go around.” Unfortunately, many of its most attractive elements seem based on material and social relations that are not the ones we experience in our own societies.
Given this last problem, it would certainly be fair to ask why we should spend so much time examining Locke’s account of appropriation. One key reason is that, frankly, anarchists have often given a lot less attention to questions of initial appropriation than they have to those relating to the use and abandonment of property. So, for example, the distinction between personal and private property often depends on the uses made of already appropriated materials, our objections to property in land revolve around absentee ownership, and so on… This is significantly not the case in What is Property? — where the first three chapters involve a systematic critique of most of the existing theories of just appropriation.
Looking forward to the next installment of this series, we’ll try to work fairly quickly through that critique, with an eye to any openings that might still remain to an an-archic ethics of individual appropriation. That, together with some discussion of the larger sense of property in an ecological context, ought to start to get us back onto more practical terrain.
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