This is a very long post. If you get all the way through it, there is a treat at the bottom just for you.

Somewhere lying on a desk in the back of our cultured minds is a definition of property. We read it once, and can’t recite it verbatim, but we have a good idea of what it is: stuff that can be owned. But who gets to own what? Who decides this? What if we don’t like those decisions? These questions arose in the comments of a recent post, where I had mentioned something called the mental environment, and my belief that it is owned collectively. This issue is very important, since property is the fundamental concept of capitalism.

To explore this issue further, and respond to Josh, we have to examine the concept of ownership. Dictionary definitions only use synonyms–to own is to possess is to have–and are completely unhelpful. Wikipedia offered the most useful definition of personal property as, “property from which you have the right to exclude others.”

On a surface level, this is all obvious. I work for money, use that money to buy objects, and those objects are mine. Basically, they represent the fruit of my labor. And nobody can take that labor from me, so nobody should be able to take my possessions from me. We all know, however, that possessions can be taken from us, and this act is called theft. Time cannot be stolen in the same way, because it is intangible. So what does it mean that objects can be taken from us? Having the right to exclude others from ones property is not the same as having the ability to do so.

So how is the right to property enforced? Through social conventions. Values and laws discourage us with internal and external consequences, respectively. But neither values nor laws represent fundamental truths about the universe. They are but ideas created by humans and generally agreed upon.

When I own, say, a pair of jeans, this ownership is recognizable in social behaviors. I store them at my house when they are not on my legs, and nobody else uses them (unless I lend them, in which case they are returned, or give them away, in which case the property is transfered). Again, we see the right to exclusivity mentioned by Wikipedia. What must be stressed is that this exclusivity is comprised entirely of social relationships. There is nothing metaphysical binding the pair of jeans to me, or me to them. It is simply a social arrangement.

All property is managed through social arrangements. But who is making these arrangements? It is my hope that you are sufficiently convinced that property is a social convention. The key word here is ’social,’ that is, pertaining to group interactions. So groups of individuals get together and arrange guidelines for how they will interact with material objects. This makes sense. Groups of individuals get together and arrange guidelines for all sorts of interactions. For example, four roommates have a sit-down and decide their house rules for doing dishes and taking out the trash. This is a beneficial arrangement if everyone has equal say, and the group chooses the arrangement which provides the greatest benefit to the greatest number of individuals.

However, we can imagine an instance where everyone does not have equal say. Imagine one roommate brings a gun to the sit-down, points it at his roommates, and says, “You guys are going to do all my dishes and take out all my trash.” If they comply, this is called coercion. Now let’s imagine that they comply out of fear, but after a while they get used to it, and it simply becomes the way things are done–that is, it becomes convention. Is this a fair and beneficial arrangement? No. Is it just? No. Should it persist simply because it is convention? No.

And so it is with property in capitalist states. A long time ago, there was a sit-down. The rich white men made a list of rules for how property would be handled, and they did so in a way that would benefit rich white men into perpetuity. Now we find ourselves living under an evolved form of that same arrangement. But conditions were not equal when that list was made, and everyone most certainly did not have an equal say in the arrangement. Our property laws and conventions most certainly do not provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of individuals.

The original drafting was undemocratic, and the evolution has been similarly undemocratic. People of color, women, poor folks, and many “others” have been systematically excluded from the decision-making process which spawned our current conventions. This is a very serious problem. The question, then, what recourse do we have?

Let’s return to the four roommates. What can they do? Another sit-down talk might result in more coercion, since three of them are dealing with an oppressive force. Simply asking for a change will not be well received, as the oppressor’s intentions are clear: he does not want to do chores. In the case of our society, I think the oppressors’ intentions are equally clear: those with property want to keep it and get more of it. We can’t use conventional channels to seek recourse for fundamental structural flaws, because those flaws are present in nearly every aspect of the system.

That is institutionalism. That is the momentum of the past. And in the wake of all this, our best hope for having our voices heard is through unconventional means.

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Cheers to anyone who read this whole post. Enjoy this gift from me to you: