HOW DID WE GET HERE?(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)
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Next we're going to meet a monster and do our best to kill it. This monster is the ghost of the man John Locke, a philosopher known as "the father of liberalism". We're going to spend some time dragging Locke through the mud because his ideas became a lynchpin in our whole system of property, justifying atrocities that continue even as we read this together now. It's not that Locke was single-handedly responsible for our plight, but he does serve as an example of the kind of men who used high-sounding words and "moral" arguments to draw us all into a nightmare that enables *them* to "live the dream".
We'll start with this excerpt from an article by political economist @blair_fix "Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources?" (by all means read the entire excellent article, but for now this excerpt serves our purposes):
"The original sin
From its outset, the field of political economy was not designed, in any meaningful sense, to understand resource flows. Instead, it was designed to explain *class relations*. The goal of early political economists was to justify the income of different classes (workers, landowners and capitalists). They chose to do so by rooting this income in the ‘production of wealth’. What followed from this original sin was centuries of conflating income with ‘production’. This conflation is what allowed Robert Solow to proclaim that the world could “get along without natural resources”.
Let’s retrace this flawed thinking. It starts with a failure to understand property rights. Political economists largely understand property as a productive asset — a way of thinking that dates to the 17th-century work of John Locke (or perhaps earlier). Locke proclaimed that property rights stemmed from ‘natural law’. A man, Locke argued, has a natural right to own what he ‘produces’:
_____...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.
_____Locke’s thinking became known as the ‘labor theory of property’. This theory (and its derivatives) is why political economists misunderstand the role of natural resources. Here’s what happens. If we accept Locke’s argument that you have a right to own what you produce, it follows that your wealth should stem from your output.
Most political economists after Locke accepted this reasoning (at least in part). That meant that the debate was not about whether wealth was ‘produced’, but rather, about *which* ‘factors of production’ were ‘productive’. The physiocrats thought land alone was productive. Marx insisted that only labor was productive. Neoclassical economists proclaimed that, alongside labor, capital too was productive. The debate between these schools played out over centuries. The problem, though, is that it’s based on a flawed premise. The debate assumes that value is ‘produced’. (It’s not.)
To see the flaw, let’s go back to Locke’s theory of property rights. Notice that it’s not really a ‘theory’ in the scientific sense. It doesn’t explain *why* property rights exist. It explains why they *ought* to exist. Locke proclaimed that a man ought to own what he produces. That is his ‘natural right’.
This change from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is important. It means that we’re not dealing with a scientific theory. We’re dealing with a system of *morality*. The philosopher David Hume was perhaps the first to understand this moral sleight of hand. He noticed that moral philosophers made their arguments more convincing by framing what ‘ought’ to be in terms of what ‘is’. Here’s Hume reflecting on this trick:
_____In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.
_____With David Hume’s observation in mind, let’s return to Locke’s ‘theory’ of property. It’s not a ‘theory’ at all — it’s a moral treatise. According to Locke, we *ought* to own what we produce. But that doesn’t mean that we *do*.
To see the consequences of this mistake, we need an actual scientific theory of property rights — a theory that explains why property exists, not why it ‘ought’ to exist. The most convincing theory of private property, in my opinion, comes from the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. To understand property, Nitzan and Bichler argue that we should turn Locke’s idea on its head. Property isn’t a ‘natural right’. It’s an act of *power*.
Property, Nitzan and Bichler observe, is an act of exclusion. If I own something, that means that I have the right to exclude others from using it. It’s this exclusionary power that defines private property. Here are Nitzan and Bichler describing this act:
_____The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get into someone else’s car and drive away, or give an order to sell all of Warren Buffet’s shares in Berkshire Hathaway. The sole purpose of private ownership is to prevent us from doing so. In this sense, private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power.
_____When we think like Nitzan and Bichler, we get a very different view of income. Recall that most political economists see property in terms of the ‘things’ that are owned. They then argue that income stems from these ‘things’. Nitzan and Bichler upend this logic. Property, they argue, is about the *act* of ownership — the institutional act of exclusion. Income stems from this exclusionary act. We earn income from the *fence* of property rights, not from what’s inside the fence. In other words, if you can’t restrict access to your property, you can’t earn income from it."
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/06/18/can-the-world-get-along-without-natural-resources/
5/30
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Here are two short threads from @HeavenlyPossum on the Labor Theory of Property and John Locke:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Labor Theory of Property is an outgrowth of settler colonialism and the ideological justifications for the latter.
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In the second of his Two Treatises on Government (1689), notorious slaver and ur-liberal John Locke proposed what has come to be known as “Lockean” property rights. Locke’s argument, a labor theory of property, was that we own ourselves, so we logically own our labor (lest we become slaves, which is how Locke made his fortune). When we perform labor on otherwise unowned resources, those resources become ours: “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…” 1/5 #Locke #Lockean #property #privateproperty #heavenlypossumthread
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
6/30
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More on Locke and others like him from "The Prehistory of Private Property":
"Locke could hardly have been unaware that his theory provided a justification for an ongoing process disappropriating European commoners and indigenous peoples alike or that that process amounted to redistribution without compensation from poor to rich. This observation raises serious doubts that the principles contemporary propertarians have inherited from him reflect some deeper commitment to nonaggression or noninterference.
Lockeanism eventually revolutionized the world’s conception of what property was by portraying full liberal ownership as if it were something natural that had always existed, even though it was only then being established by enclosure and colonialization. Lockean and propertarian *stories* might have been more important than their *theories* in that effort. The “original appropriator” in Locke’s story resembles European colonialists rather than prehistoric indigenous North Americans who first farmed the continent. Locke’s appropriator establishes the fee-simple rights that colonial governments (building a global cash economy) tend to establish rather than the complex, overlapping rights indigenous farmers in stateless societies tend to establish."
"The intent of Blackstone, Locke, Grotius, and other early modern property theorists was not to describe what property actually was or even what kind of institutions most people wanted at the time. Instead, it was “a common strategy of claiming the ground of property so as to preempt serious consideration of alternatives like common property” [Olsen,E. J. 2019, “The Early Modern ‘Creation’ of Property and its Enduring influence,” European Journal of Political Theory, Online Early, 1–23]. In that way, private property theory furnished propaganda for the enclosure and colonial movements that forcibly established that institution around the world."
Books - Karl Widerquist
List of Books Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge (2024) The Problem of Property: Taking the Freedom of Nonowners Seriously (2023) The Prehistory of Private Property: Implications for Modern Political Theory (2021) A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens (2018) Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (2017) Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic
Karl Widerquist - (widerquist.com)
7/30
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Let's spend some time looking at Enclosure both historically and as a continuing reality. We'll start with a quick look at one small example of how people organized life on their own just before having it turned upside down by Enclosure:
@HeavenlyPossum on the Irish rundale system of common property:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
The dominant pattern of Irish community organization used to be something called the “rundale.” The rundale was a system for managing and dividing up village agricultural land according to need. The word derives from two Gaelic words—“roinn,” or division, and “daíl,” a meeting or assembly. The rundale, then, was “the meeting to divide up the land.” Each peasant village, or clachan, owned land in common. Some of it was used as common grazing land for cows and other livestock; some was used for gardens by individual households, and some was used as crop land to grow oats, rye, barley, and potatoes. Periodically—I presume each year—the clachan would meet in a daíl to redistribute crop land among households. 1/5
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
8/30
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Looking further back we see that humans all over the globe have been actively managing our environment successfully and sustainably for many millennia, which reveals falsehoods embedded in the Lockean (white, European, patriarchal) view of humanity, history and land use. From the research article "People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years":
"The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and use by Indigenous and traditional peoples. With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies. Global land use history confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet.
"Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis."
Those in power have been telling us that *we* (people in general or "human nature") are the problem. The evidence tells us otherwise: the problem originated with a specific group of people who had the power to enforce their will over the entire globe eventually. We'll look more later at the disasterous results of colonialism.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118
9/30
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With all the above context in mind let us examine the process of Enclosure.
Here is an introduction to "The Tragedy of the Commons" from @HeavenlyPossum:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
There is no such thing as the tragedy of the commons: a thread. The oldest published reference to the idea is in a lecture by an early political economist at Oxford, William Foster Lloyd, in 1832 titled "On the Checks to Population." Lloyd first articulated the argument that many of us have been taught as an inevitable and immutable fact of economic life: that any resource owned in common will be exploited to the point of ruin. "Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so hare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures? No inequality, in respect of natural or acquired fertility, will account for the phenomenon." https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972412 1/ #capitalism #commons #tragedyofthecommons #anticapitalism #ostrom #anticapitalism #anarchism
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
10/30
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Here is an insightful, extensive and detailed look at the history of Enclosure in Britain and the so-called "Tragedy of the Commons":
A Short History of Enclosure in Britain | The Land Magazine
Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals.
(www.thelandmagazine.org.uk)
11/30
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@HeavenlyPossum on the enclosure of our roads and car dependency as capitalist rent:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
In 2010, Raquel Nelson attempted to cross a street in Marietta, Georgia, with her three children. Rather than walking a third of a mile away to the nearest crosswalk and then another third of a mile to her home, she attempted to directly cross. While she was doing so, Jerry Guy, who was driving a car while intoxicated, struck and killed Nelson’s four-years-old son A.J. Guy was convicted of hit-and-run and sentenced to six months in prison. Nelson—who was not driving a car—was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 36 months in prison. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/07/14/mother-convicted-of-vehicular-homicide-for-crossing-street-with-children/ 1/9
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
(for more horrifying details of car culture see this article which fleshes out the statistics very well though it falls short by only dealing with superficial causes and solutions:
https://devonzuegel.com/post/we-should-be-building-cities-for-people-not-cars )12/30
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@HeavenlyPossum on art as an enclosed commons:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
If you spend time with kids, one thing you’ll quickly notice is how incredibly creative they are. They churn out art at prolific rates, and seek out opportunities to create it as a form of play. I have two kids and have often struggled with figuring out storage solutions for their art, all of which is precious to me. I was a kid once too, and I have memories of making lots of art as a kid. But, at some point, I just sort of stopped. This isn’t true for everyone, of course; some people go on to become professional artists, while others keep it up as a hobby. I suspect, though, that most people reading this will share my experience: like most imaginative play, we leave the daily production of art behind in our childhoods. Isn’t that strange? 1/8
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
13/30
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@HeavenlyPossum - An investigation into money, credit, and the social role of landlords:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
It is a common capitalist trope that landlords “provide” housing to people. They are, the story goes, doing everyone a service! And we all know the appropriate response: it’s actually the tenant who provides the landlord with housing, by paying capital costs (like the landlord’s mortgage, which was borrowed to pay the people who actually built the home) in their rent payments. Landlords don’t provide, they *hoard,* collecting tolls by restricting access to housing. Some of the cleverer ideologues might argue: the landlords play an important role by paying the capital costs up front. Without landlords to rent out housing incrementally, everyone would have to save up enough capital to buy outright, and most of us would be too poor to buy a house outright. So it’s worth asking: why do landlords have access to all that capital up front, and can spend it all at once, while others don’t and have to pay for it a bit at a time? 1/11
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
14/30
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The result of all this has been to force us into a "market society".
@HeavenlyPossum on the imposition of markets and the demolition of society:
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
We live in what Karl Polanyi called a "market society," in which commercial market exchanges have almost completely supplanted non-market exchange. Gone are the great pillars of pre-capitalist economies: domestic household production, reciprocity, and redistribution. In their place are buying and selling. To access virtually any resource, including basic sustenance, we must first sell (usually ourselves). 1/15
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
15/30
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Another quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property":
"No argument about the freedom to appropriate can support the market economy, because capitalism makes people no freer to appropriate property than the common property regime, public property regime, or any other system. A person born into the contemporary market economy is as unfree to appropriate land as a person born to a common property regime or a public property regime that allows no private landownership. The right to appropriate scarce resources, as economist define the term (i.e. anything with a monetary value), is inconsistent with a system of equal freedom from coercion. The propertyless today are not and cannot be equally free to appropriate.
"Lomasky’s “liberty to acquire” holdings actually means the “liberty” to purchase goods. That’s not a liberty at all. That’s a positive opportunity. The goods you are expected to buy are made out of resources you have forcibly been excluded from using yourself. The chance to take orders from one resource owner so that you can “earn” the right to buy goods from other resource owners might be useful, but it is not freedom from some form of coercion that exists in societies with a common property regime."16/30
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Here is @AdrianRiskin on the role of state violence in market society:
State Violence, The Diamond/Water Paradox, and an Invisible Axiom of Classical Economics
17/30
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Ok, so capitalism can be a tad harsh , but we are told it's worth it because capitalism has "lifted billions out of poverty!" and that even the poor of today are wealthier than kings of old. Let's unpack these claims and take a close look at the concepts of "wealth" and "poverty".
@HeavenlyPossum on Wealth
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
This is an incredibly common and incredibly stupid take on wealth: that people today have so much more “stuff” than people in the past, so we—even the poorest among us—are richer than ancient kings and titans of industry. 1/9 https://twitter.com/cafreiman/status/1635430623958401024
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
18/30
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@HeavenlyPossum on Poverty
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
Property is a social relationship—an agreement about the use and disposition of stuff. Beyond what you can grasp in your own hands, everything you own is by agreement with other people who could, but don’t, take for themselves the things you’ve claimed. Wealth is a subset of property, a social relationship of *command.* Wealth is the social ability to command and compel other people to bring you things you want or labor for you at your direction. If wealth is a relationship of command, then poverty, its inverse, is the state of being subject to command. 1/thread #property #poverty #wealth #capitalism #anticapitalism #propertyrights #privateproperty
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
19/30
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@HeavenlyPossum on Hunger
HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])
A few years ago, NPR published an article about an “archeological mystery.” In Ghana, a place now associated with poverty and hunger, archeologists found that food security peaked about 500 years ago, in the midst of an epic two-century long drought, and declined in the mid-19th century. Now, in Ghana, people struggle to find enough to eat during the annual dry season, switching to less-nutritious foods—if they can even afford them in markets. And I’ve always been surprised at the author’s surprise. Where, exactly, is the mystery? 1/11 https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/20/486670144/an-archaeological-mystery-in-ghana-why-didn-t-past-droughts-spell-famine
kolektiva.social (kolektiva.social)
20/30
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"Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century"
Highlights:
- The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods.
- Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
- The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
- In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered.
- Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
Abstract:
This paper assesses claims that, prior to the 19th century, around 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty (defined as the inability to access essential goods), and that global human welfare only began to improve with the rise of capitalism. These claims rely on national accounts and PPP exchange rates that do not adequately capture changes in people’s access to essential goods. We assess this narrative against extant data on three empirical indicators of human welfare: real wages (with respect to a subsistence basket), human height, and mortality. We ask whether these indicators improved or deteriorated with the rise of capitalism in five world regions - Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and China – using the chronology put forward by world-systems theorists. The evidence we review here points to three conclusions. (1) It is unlikely that 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty prior to the 19th century. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year, except during periods of severe social dislocation, such as famines, wars, and institutionalized dispossession – particularly under colonialism. (2) The rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, key welfare metrics have still not recovered. (3) Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began several centuries after the rise of capitalism. In the core regions of Northwest Europe, progress began in the 1880s, while in the periphery and semi-periphery it began in the mid-20th century, a period characterized by the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements that redistributed incomes and established public provisioning systems.
21/30
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Let's continue to look at the real results of capitalism, colonialism, state, and the religious rituals of "economics" - environmental destruction, violent coercion and exploitation of humans:
How Colonialism Spawned and Continues to Exacerbate the Climate Crisis
How Colonialism Spawned and Continues to Exacerbate the Climate Crisis
Colonialism was motivated by the promise of plundering the environment and subjugating populations. Its legacy makes it far more challenging to address the climate crisis and implement equitable solutions.
State of the Planet (news.climate.columbia.edu)
22/30
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Here is @KevinCarson1 on the Victims of Capitalism (note this was published in May 2020, if written now it would also include millions more deaths due to capitalism's failure to prioritize human safety and well-being, throwing us under the bus of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic in favor of an imaginary entity "the economy"):
Victims of Capitalism Day
At Reason Ilya Somin, in keeping with his annual practice since 2007, has chosen May 1 — May Day — as his date for observing “Victims of Communism Day.” Somin cites the “authoritative” Black Book of Communism as his source for a death toll of 80-100 million in the 20th century. To put that “authoritative”...
Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org)
23/30
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To go off on a tangent for just a moment: we should be clear that we are not going to be rescued by converting our cars to electricity or by switching our current insane energy "needs" to "renewable" sources. Technology will not save us. We are not going to be able to have our cake and eat it too:
The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics
The green techno-dream is so vastly destructive, they say, ‘we have to come up with a different plan.’Do I report what I’ve learned about solar PVs - or live with it, privately?
Do I report what I’ve learned about solar PVs— or live with it, privately?
Years ago, I told an engineer that I want to cause minimal ecological harm.
(katiesinger.substack.com)
24/30