property Archives - Page 4 of 8 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Varieties of “theft” and “property”

December 27, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0″] Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] It’s generally nice to avoid taking complex problems and making them even more complex—but not always. There may be some real advances in clarity to be gained from incorporating our new questions about “theft” into the larger puzzle regarding Proudhon and “property.” But we’re going to have to proceed cautiously. Let’s begin with a sort of catalog of the concepts that may or may not be in play, as we try to unpack Proudhon’s infamous phrase, “property is theft,” in the contents of his remarks […]

1839: Proudhon on property and theft

December 23, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

EPISODES in another history: I. Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time demonstrating how the very suggestive general observations in Proudhon’s What is Property? only really emerge as a property theory when we bring them together with developments in his later writings—and how, even then, we are arguably left to pick up his positive project, imagining a property that would not be theft, ourselves. As it turns out, there are also some clarifications to be made by looking back at Proudhon’s earlier work, from 1839, The Celebration of Sunday. The Celebration of Sunday is a peculiar […]

L. S. Bevington, “The Last Gasp of Propertyism”

July 10, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] It’s not much fun to be in a debate where the participants consistently talk past one another, but it can be fairly instructive to observe them. The debate in Tochatti’s Liberty is potentially instructive, while it certainly is not anything like a model for real meetings of minds. To recap: the communists of Liberty published the final section of Proudhon’s Theory of Property, together with a provocative argument that Proudhon’s stated personal preference for “Slavonic or Communal possession of land” somehow put “so-called Proudhonians” at odds with […]

Bevington and Seymour, “Proudhon and Communism” (1894)

July 8, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Debate on Proudhon and property: Contr’un Revisited: [commentary coming soon] I’ve long admired the “other” Liberty, the anarchist-communist paper published in England by James Tochatti in the 1890s. (You can admire some of the later issues here.) But I hadn’t had an opportunity to sit down with more than just scattered issues until last week, when I spent several hours going through the microfilm of the run. There are a number of articles that I’ll be reproducing here, or in the Labyrinth archive, but the material that is probably of most immediate interest to the readership of this blog is […]

Proudhon, The Theory of Property – Chapter 2

March 24, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Here’s another short chapter from The Theory of Property: THE THEORY OF PROPERTY Pierre-Joseph Proudhon CHAPTER II That property is absolute: prejudice opposed to absolutism. The recognition or institution of property is the most extraordinary, if not the most mysterious, act of the Collective Reason, an act that much more extraordinary and mysterious as, by its principle, property rejects collectivity and reason equally. Nothing is more simple, more clear than the material fact of appropriation: a corner of land is unoccupied; a man comes and establishes himself there, exactly as the eagle does in his canton, the fox in a […]

A Fourierist account of property

February 9, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] I’ve been ranging through my personal archives, and through pretty much everything else I can get my hands on lately, looking for material to help fill gaps in the general analysis of property that I’m writing for The Mutualist #2: “Owning Up.” The plan is to dedicate the whole issue to a fleshed-out summary of the property theory I’ve been developing over the last 3-4 years (hopefully in time for the Bay Area Bookfair), and finish up a radically-rewritten version of “The Anarchism of Approximations,” so I can focus much of […]

On occupancy and use

January 17, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_2third] [This piece first appeared at the Forums of the Libertarian Left, in a thread on “Occupancy and Use.” It seems to add enough to the current series on mutualist land tenure to repost here. The thread began with some very basic questions about how occupancy and use land tenure would play out, and how to respond to the common silliness about people out shopping losing their homes to mutualists, etc.] With any of the basic principles of “property,” you’re going to have to eventually confront a bunch of messy details before you’ve got the “anarchic common law” that could […]

Responses on mutualist property theory: Self-ownership

January 12, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

Given the amount that I’ve already written about mutualist property theory, both historically and in the context of “the gift economy of property,” and the specific context of the C4SS symposium, there wasn’t much chance that my post on mutualist land theory was going to be a summary of my own theory. Instead, it was really a series of reasons why I couldn’t just engage the question in terms of abandonment, with some gestures back at the theory I’ve been building. That sort of thing never quite cuts it in the blogosphere, as the comments make clear. I sympathize with […]

Elements of appropriation

January 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

I broke down various meanings and aspects of property awhile back. Since some of what I wrote in the last post depends on an understanding of appropriation that I haven’t made explicit in some time, maybe a sort of summary is in order. In order to have an adequate theory of appropriation—in traditional, more-or-less Lockean terms—we need—one way or another—to provide ourselves with at least: An understanding of the subject of appropriation (“individual,” “collective,” irreducibly individual-collective, etc.; A theory of the nature of that subject’s relation to itself as “self-ownership,” “self-enjoyment,” etc.; A theory of nature (active or passive? productive? […]

Thoughts on mutualist land theory

January 6, 2011 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] There’s a call at the Center for a Stateless Society for responses to a document on “Land Tenure and Anarchic Common Law,” which “which synthesizes remarks by Kevin Carson, Brad Spangler, and Gary Chartier.” The basic argument is that “occupancy and use” and “Lockean” (non-proviso neo-lockean) theories differ primarily over the question of abandonment of “justly acquired” property. The assumption is that the theories are in something like agreement on “just acquisition” because both employ a homesteading mechanism. It’s the sort of thing that first makes me want to say: “Property is theft!” I’ve been […]