COMMON GROUND:
THE QUESTION OF PROPERTY
(From Just Peace #32, Summer, 1995)
Is there a common denominator among the many and varied social
issues with which we in the progressive community are concerned?
Is there some root cause underlying such diverse things as environmental
and spiritual deterioration, racial and sexual injustice, political
and economic inequality, interpersonal and international violence?
There is, of course, and when we discuss it together we approach
it in several different ways. We sometimes talk about class society
as "the heart of the matter"; sometimes we focus on
patriarchy as the root problem; sometimes violence in human relations.
Another way of approaching the root cause of the social evils
and ills of modern humanity is to consider what has been called
"the question of property".
In modern societies each of us, individually and in families,
is assigned a 'chunk of stuff', larger or smaller, consisting
of various things -- land, buildings, vehicles, clothes, furniture,
money, small businesses, portfolios of stock and other financial
assets -- to which we have individually exclusive rights enforceable
by the power of the state. No one else can use our 'stuff' without
express permission, on pain of legal prosecution. Conversely,
we each may do with our own individual property completely as
we please, within broadly drawn bounds on legal behavior. We may
abandon or destroy it if we wish, or sell it, or insist that others
who wish to use it pay us what we ask for our permission, etc.
The social system in which we are assigned our individual 'chunks
of stuff' is nearly universal by now. Nonetheless it remains very
much at issue.
It is a strange system, this private property. Nothing feels more
unnatural and mean than the "No Trespassing" sign that
confronts you on a fence across your path as you walk in the woods
on a cloudless spring day with the entire blue universe above
your head. Nothing seems more peculiar than having, among other
things assigned you in your collection of individually-owned 'stuff',
the sole right to close down a business upon which many hundreds
of other people's livelihoods may depend -- the right to scatter
them all to the four winds at your arbitrary whim if you wish,
regardless of what they themselves might prefer.
But strange though this system often seems, it is widely thought
to be a good thing to have responsibilities divided up among people
this way. It is said that as we are each given full responsibility
for nurturing and developing our own small piece of the world,
we thereby together insure a world in which our posterity may
thrive. Yet it is not at all clear, now that we have nearly completely
arranged our responsibilities this way, that this world and the
society we have thus created can much longer thrive. And in asking
what's gone wrong, we simply cannot ignore the role that this
property system itself has played as a fundamental root cause
of social ill.
To begin with, behind the fences that our property unavoidably
puts up between us, we often tend to withdraw from each other
into our own little physical and social spaces -- after all, amidst
our own property we are free, while elsewhere, on others' property,
we are not. We may then become uncomprehending and thoughtless
of the rest of the world, since nearly all of it is someone else's.
And equally, we may become enthralled and enchanted by our own
things -- other things belong to other people, but these are ours
alone. Thus do we come to be possessed by our posessions, and
even confuse our property with our very selves. We are made self-centered
by this system, careless and ignorant of the world and of each
other as fellow human beings and as siblings of all living creatures.
Then there is the problem that in this system people get 'assigned'
greatly different amounts of property, such that it is quite possible,
indeed easy, to end up with less property than is needed for simple
subsistence. In our own property system in the U.S., nearly one-in-six
of us is in precisely such circumstances, as defined by the official
'poverty rate' today. And since in a property system one virtually
must have some property to live -- everything is property, including
what is needed to survive -- one cannot simply opt out of the
system: if you don't commit yourself intently to the struggle
for property, you may end up in great trouble.
In fact, the inequality that exists among the 'chunks of stuff'
assigned to people in this system today is astonishing: The wealthiest
1% of families in the U.S. owns over one-third of all the personal
wealth of the nation measured as net worth; while the total wealth
of the bottom 40% of families, after subtracting their indebtedness,
is so negligible that it amounts to zero-percent of the total.
This is most definitely a form of class society, in this case
one in which the have-not's must sell their labor to the have's
in order to get sufficient property to secure their subsistence.
Thus are the have-not's dependent upon and nearly powerless before
the have's, whose bidding they are compelled take in the workplace
in order to keep their jobs. And thus are the vast majority of
us brought to a circumstance of competing with our fellow humans
in the workplace and the labor market for jobs and livelihoods.
First, property encloses us within fences; then, it subjects us
to this kind of competition with each other, making us all the
more greedy, anxious, striving, self-centered, and acquisitive
of material possession. We most easily forget the arts of cooperation,
learning instead those of self-concern.
Moreover, with such inequality all about us, we see and feel ourselves
a part of a highly stratified hierarchy, with many fine gradations
of status from bottom to top. We may tend to think then, as people
have in other similarly stratified societies throughout history,
that all reality is hierarchical, that in various ways and for
various reasons other people belong 'above' us, while others yet
belong 'below' us. There are 'better' kinds of people and 'worse'
kinds, or 'more advanced' or 'less', and so forth. We rank them
all -- by color, culture, behavior and 'attitude', by age, by
sex. And of course, all the rest of the society of living nature,
being non-human, is of 'lower rank'.
Property then, and the particular kind of class society it engenders,
has thoroughly alienated us: from each other, from our individual
and collective self-initiative, and from the larger world we live
in. When we do not see others as threats to our individual well-being,
we see them as instruments in our pursuit of 'material security',
for we are most insecure. Especially alien to us are people of
other cultures, traditions or ways of being -- we may even look
upon them as different species from ourselves -- but even our
next door neighbors are utter strangers. Similarly the larger
physical world and the society of life on earth represent for
us alien things that we fear and seek to overcome, to master as
instruments.
Finally, there are the profoundly insidious effects of that most
characteristic form of modern property, the business corporation.
Business is the ultimate form of property. If you own a business
or a share in one, you can usually get all the benefits of your
property without having to be responsible for its care: you can
hire professional managers to take care of it for you. As the
most avowedly competitive and avaricious of wage-employees, professional
managers can always be counted upon to run your property well
for you. Schooled in the lessons of the competitive marketplace,
they are fully devoted to maximizing "the bottom line"
on your property -- for businesses that don't intently seek every
dollar of profit available sooner or later go under before their
more dedicated rivals. Thus can you be assured that your property
will be well used for the purpose of getting you as much more
property as can be got, as your managers take the keenest advantage
of every possible means available, legal and illegal (if it can
be gotten away with cheaply enough).
Thus the business corporation is notoriously representative of
all that is most pernicious in the property system. Businesses
routinely subject their labor-forces to codified, arbitrary stratifications
of status, rank and income; oppressive technologies and workplace
environments; and despotic 'personnel' policies dedicated against
employees' rights to form unions, exercise free speech or be informed
about unsafe work conditions. They relocate production facilities
at the blink of an eye to take advantage of "good business
conditions" available elsewhere, blithely and obliviously
scattering their employees and surrounding communities across
creation like so much refuse. As they seek new locations they
pit local communities nationwide and worldwide against each other
in a competition to see who can offer them the cheapest and most
docile work-forces, the weakest workplace- and product-safety
and environmental regulations, and the lowest taxes. And their
influence over public policy at all levels, Federal, state and
local -- via their lobbying, political contributions, media ownership,
old-boy networks and positions of 'community leadership' -- makes
a mockery of the concept of democratic government by a free people.
The property system then is most definitely at the heart of the
entire diversity of issues that we progressives have taken up.
Some would say that if it is appropriately comprehended and constructively
utilized the property system can be part of the solution to the
many ills of society today. In one sense that is true, as I will
try to explain in a follow-up to this article in the next Just
Peace. But I would emphasize here that constructively applying
the property system will necessitate changing it, not strengthening
it in its present form. Thus for example, the problem of environmental
racism, the issue we gathered to discuss at the Common Ground
II conference, will not be resolved merely by strengthening the
private property rights of people in those disadvantaged groups
who have been most affected by corporate and governmental environmental
and resource destruction. Court lawsuits, for instance, that uphold
people's rights to healthful environments, even major suits successfully
brought with large settlements, only begin to address the issue.
Much more is necessary, as I will explain.