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Westward-Individualism
21st April 2010, 00:07
We would argue (as non-propertarian anarchists) that there are no property rights in an anarchist society.

We'd argue there are "possessions" with no force-agency to protect or guarantee them.

Now -- here's my question.

How would we say when arguing for the elimination of Gov't that everything should be then [I]"privatized?"

I can't figure out the word -- it's not Possessitized, hahahaha.

We can't use "privatized" because it suggests "rights" and "ownership" and thus "property" -- and "hijacking" a word or phrase is idiotic.

We need a word there.

Dermezel
21st April 2010, 00:17
There'd be no way to stop- Cults, Serial Killers, Religious Mobs, Private Mercenary Armies, Corporations using any of the previously mentioned.

Left-Reasoning
21st April 2010, 02:41
A propertarian anarchist is a contradiction in terms.

Dermezel
21st April 2010, 02:47
Okay here's a question I have about anarchy, what if a plague spreads? Like human to human bird flu, or ebola or AIDs? What's the anarchist solution to that?

Dean
21st April 2010, 03:45
We would argue (as non-propertarian anarchists) that there are no property rights in an anarchist society.

We'd argue there are "possessions" with no force-agency to protect or guarantee them.

Now -- here's my question.

How would we say when arguing for the elimination of Gov't that everything should be then [I]"privatized?"

I can't figure out the word -- it's not Possessitized, hahahaha.

We can't use "privatized" because it suggests "rights" and "ownership" and thus "property" -- and "hijacking" a word or phrase is idiotic.

We need a word there.
Collectivized.

As (Proudhon, I think?) said, property is not only slavery, it is also freedom. It is disingenuous to say that property is to be simply "done away with" in communist society - rather, the definitive character of property toward economic life is to be abolished.

Insofar as property has a public character, it should represent public interests. With capital, private interests are represented via public economic systems. This is unsatisfactory because it involves the public life in the creation of wealth which culminates chiefly and ultimately in the hands of the aforementioned private interests. It's exploitation of the public, and insofar as it is effective, it begets more exploitation via reinvestment.

Endomorphian
21st April 2010, 04:52
Or socialized.

I assume we speak from the perpsective of organizers and not futurists. I'm slightly irritated observing all words associated with commerce go through etymological transformations.

Dermezel
21st April 2010, 04:53
Or socialized.

I assume we speak from the perpsective of organizers and not futurists. I'm slightly irritated observing all words associated with commerce go through etymological transformations.

Socialists are Futurists.

Endomorphian
21st April 2010, 04:56
Okay here's a question I have about anarchy, what if a plague spreads? Like human to human bird flu, or ebola or AIDs? What's the anarchist solution to that?

Governments ("voluntary protection agencies/communes," meh), housing agencies, et al could demand that you acquire a 'vaccination' before providing new or continous service.

Endomorphian
21st April 2010, 04:57
Socialists are Futurists.

Sorry for the confusion; I was (ab)using the word loosely to refer to people who have to call the car of the future a "transmobile delivery device."

Dermezel
21st April 2010, 04:59
Sorry for the confusion; I was (ab)using the word loosely to refer to people who have to call the car of the future a "transmobile delivery device."

WTF? LOL.

Yeah Libertarians tend to dominate Futurist-Scifi circles which is lame. We Socialists have to take it back. That's like Monarchists dominating Novels. No can do.

We are the future, not them.

Dermezel
21st April 2010, 05:00
And why is this? Because they are primitives. They don't see Society itself as a technology. I do.

Socialism, to me, is not just a culture, or movement, or political system. It is also a technology. A technical advancement.

Libertarians bar social change as a technical advancement, in doing so they prove that they are closet Luddites.

RGacky3
21st April 2010, 12:16
First of all Anarchists do not want pritization over socialization, socialized industry is better than privatized industry because its more subject to popular control, whereas privatized industry is only subject to monied control.

Second of all our MAIN fight is against the Capitalist ruling class, they are the real ruling class of modern society, not the government, we oppose the government too, but mainly as its role as defender of the ruling class.

Dean
21st April 2010, 14:45
Second of all our MAIN fight is against the Capitalist ruling class, they are the real ruling class of modern society, not the government, we oppose the government too, but mainly as its role as defender of the ruling class.

The government is a capitalist class.

RGacky3
21st April 2010, 14:47
The government is a capitalist class.

Most people in government are part of the capitalist class, the government works for the Capitalist class (simply because the Capitalist class has tons and tons of power). However, if I had a choice of socialized something rather than privatized? I pick socialized, because at least the government responds to public pressure, Capitalits do not. But I'd rather have socialization with out the state.

Skooma Addict
21st April 2010, 14:50
Most people in government are part of the capitalist class, the government works for the Capitalist class (simply because the Capitalist class has tons and tons of power). However, if I had a choice of socialized something rather than privatized? I pick socialized, because at least the government responds to public pressure, Capitalits do not. But I'd rather have socialization with out the state.

Yes they do. It is odd to me that so many self proclaimed anarchists consistently fight for an expansion of government and government power.

LeftSideDown
21st April 2010, 16:10
Libertarians bar social change as a technical advancement, in doing so they prove that they are closet Luddites.

Libertarians =\= conservatives. If people want to change society they are welcome to it. The second they try to use force to do it, thats when we oppose them. Libertarians would let people: be homosexual, be prostitutes, have abortions, do drugs, and just about anything else where they are not harming others involuntarily. These are all big social issues; how can you say libertarians bar social change? Are you saying 50 years ago all these things were okay and libertarians only support people's right to do this because we think they will stop social change? Come now.

Skooma Addict
21st April 2010, 16:17
To be fair, private property (like all forms of property) does require force to maintain. So a person who disagrees with private property can claim that they are not initiating aggression when they violate another persons property rights, just like a slave is not initiating aggression when he steals from his master. Now, this argument can obviously also be turned around against the socialists who advocate common property.

LeftSideDown
21st April 2010, 16:34
To be fair, private property (like all forms of property) does require force to maintain. So a person who disagrees with private property can claim that they are not initiating aggression when they violate another persons property rights, just like a slave is not initiating aggression when he steals from his master. Now, this argument can obviously also be turned around against the socialists who advocate common property.

Someone could say that abortion is murder and go around righteously killing abortion doctors. The belief that something is wrong does not give one the right to go about stealing from those who disagree. If they don't like private property they don't have to own any (besides their body of course).

Skooma Addict
21st April 2010, 16:59
Someone could say that abortion is murder and go around righteously killing abortion doctors. The belief that something is wrong does not give one the right to go about stealing from those who disagree. If they don't like private property they don't have to own any (besides their body of course).

Someone who says abortion is murder and goes around killing abortion doctors causes me to suffer a negative emotional reaction and a sense of disgust. For me, such an act is wrong and immoral. That is all I can say on the matter. However, for the person doing the act, that may not be the case. You cannot prove to that person that they are acting immorally. It is impossible.

Private property is a social construct which must be enforced in order for civilization and prosperity. But if you disagree with private property, then you are not initiating aggression when you violate it.

As for the claim that I own myself, that is a fallacy which mostly results from a misunderstanding of what I really am. As if I am some being which is is the same and constant throughout time. In fact, I cease to exist when I go to sleep. Read Metzinger on the topic.

But anyways, that is a line of argument that I don't want to get into. How about this, prove to me that I own myself.

Agnapostate
21st April 2010, 17:29
No form of socialism involves the abolition of property rights, anarchism included. Socialism merely extends property rights to the vast majority of the population, eliminating the theft of the product of their labor inherent in the capitalist economy.

Skooma Addict
21st April 2010, 17:32
Workers contracting with capitalists is in no way a violation of property rights.

Agnapostate
21st April 2010, 17:38
Workers contracting with capitalists is in no way a violation of property rights.

Under your idiotic assumption of free market conditions, I'm sure that's true, Oaf. Some of us live outside of these utopian fantasies, however.

Don't derail the thread.

Dean
21st April 2010, 18:05
I've deleted the last two posts as spam. Can you both try to keep it civil & on-topic? Thanks.
04-21-10 Dean

Left-Reasoning
21st April 2010, 20:56
Workers contracting with capitalists is in no way a violation of property rights.

It sure is, because the capitalists have no right to "own" the means of production and thereby live off the labor of others.

IcarusAngel
21st April 2010, 21:46
No form of socialism involves the abolition of property rights, anarchism included. Socialism merely extends property rights to the vast majority of the population, eliminating the theft of the product of their labor inherent in the capitalist economy.

True. So really Libertarian property is what is theft.

Apparently, leftism is about revolutionizing property rights, social relations, economic relations, in society.

Skooma Addict
21st April 2010, 21:57
It sure is, because the capitalists have no right to "own" the means of production and thereby live off the labor of others.

And can you explain how private ownership over the means of production is inconsistent with property rights?

REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL
22nd April 2010, 00:37
Someone could say that abortion is murder and go around righteously killing abortion doctors. The belief that something is wrong does not give one the right to go about stealing from those who disagree. If they don't like private property they don't have to own any (besides their body of course).

And you called me dumb?

*facepalm*

The belief in question here *IS* private property, you can't defend its existance by then claiming that nobody has to own any if they don't want too when Olaf was talking about the use of force.

Its akin to defending killing abortion doctors by claiming "You don't have to have an abortion if you don't want too" i.e. totally nonsensical.

Agnapostate
22nd April 2010, 01:15
And can you explain how private ownership over the means of production is inconsistent with property rights?

The economic framework of capitalism involves a scheme in which the private ownership of the means of production (acquired through a coercive process of "primitive accumulation") and consequent hierarchical subordination of labor under capital enables the extraction of surplus value from the working class in the production process through the use of wage labor and subsequent utilization in the circulation process in order to perpetuate a vicious cycle of capital accumulation.

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/oo18/Dolgoff/ed4a754f.png

Now, having dealt with you and your insistence on repeating nonsense no matter how many times it's been rebutted in the past, I'm quite sure that nothing anyone says will cause you to learn some economics. Going with my anticipatory reflexes alone, I'm guessing you'll be saying something about a labor contract being a voluntary transaction based on mutual need just as any other.

But really? David Ellerman writes this:


When a robber denies another person's right to make an infinite number of other choices besides losing his money or his life and the denial is backed up by a gun, then this is clearly robbery even though it might be said that the victim making a 'voluntary choice' between his remaining options. When the legal system itself denies the natural rights of working people in the name of the prerogatives of capital, and this denial is sanctioned by the legal violence of the state, then the theorists of 'libertarian' capitalism do not proclaim institutional robbery, but rather they celebrate the 'natural liberty' of working people to choose between the remaining options of selling their labor as a commodity and being unemployed.

This isn't a diatribe against remuneration. It's obvious that equality of payment regardless of labor effort provides a perverse incentive to shirk or not work entirely. So one could say that the pointed gun is always there, but it would be the capitalist labor market that offers the limited nature of options.

We see that robbery committed via means of a gun is condemned as coercion because though the victim "consents" to being robbed and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is likely to be an injurious and possibly fatal gunshot wound. Similarly, though the wage laborer "consents" to enter into a contract with his or her employer and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is unemployment and subjection to the conditions of indigence and destitution, which may include homelessness, perpetual hunger and thirst, malnourishment, poor health, and in some third-world and even first-world countries, death. This is perhaps not typically as grave as an injurious and potentially fatal gunshot wound, but propertarians would certainly condemn a robber who threatens to beat instead of shoot his victim just as swiftly.

This problem is augmented further when we consider the fact that "labor is often sold under special disadvantages arising from the closely connected group of facts that labor power is 'perishable', that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market," as noted by Alfred Marshall. This further complicates the negative conditions of power and coercion that mark entry into the capitalist labor market. In addition to that, we have a propensity for manipulative persuasion based on the conditioning of the working class to be inferior to the capital/coordinator classes in terms of contract negotiation. This problem was noted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb:


The manual worker is, from his position and training, far less skilled than the employer...in the art of bargaining itself. This art forms a large part of the daily life of the entrepreneur, whilst the foreman is specially selected for his skill in engaging and superintending workmen. The manual worker, on the other hand, has the smallest experience of, and practically no training in, what is essentially one of the arts of the capitalist employer. He never engages in any but one sort of bargaining, and that only on occasions which may be infrequent, and which in any case make up only a tiny fraction of his life.

The issue of mutual service ("the capitalist and the worker need each other!") is also unconvincing, since the labor class only "needs" capitalists if their control of productive resources is not challenged. A capitalist will never operate an assembly line without workers. Nothing stops workers from operating an assembly line without capitalists except legal protection for the social construct of his private ownership. But considering the fact that workers' ownership and management is a more efficient and production program than capitalist ownership and hierarchical management, the capitalist class provides nothing of value in the "transaction."

Agnapostate
22nd April 2010, 01:16
"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society."

anticap
22nd April 2010, 01:34
this argument can obviously also be turned around against the socialists who advocate common property.

Not so. Private property was invented. Cut from whole cloth.

Common "property" (a misnomer, but I don't want to beat that horse here, so I'll roll with it) is the default state and need not be justified. Reality shows us a rock, circling a ball of fire. Upon this rock, life emerged and evolved, eventually producing an ape that has named itself Homo sapiens. During all the intervening billions of years, the resources found on this rock were shared in common by the various lifeforms that evolved there. It was only after this egotistical ape invented private property that this all changed. Those who disagree with that pretentious social construct are perfectly entitled to resist it. This who agree with it are not entitled to enforce it, or to equate it with the state of affairs that existed prior, which were in fact its complete opposite.


Private property is a social construct which must be enforced.... But if you disagree with private property, then you are not initiating aggression when you violate it.

You've redeemed yourself here. I'm glad to see that you've finally come to accept reality.


prove to me that I own myself.

I too would like to see this proved.

Left-Reasoning
22nd April 2010, 01:46
And can you explain how private ownership over the means of production is inconsistent with property rights?

Surely it is absurd to say that a man who has not worked in the mine a day in his life "owns" the mine and that those who labor upon it must render to him tribute for the privilege to do so.

Skooma Addict
22nd April 2010, 02:21
The economic framework of capitalism involves a scheme in which the private ownership of the means of production (acquired through a coercive process of "primitive accumulation") and consequent hierarchical subordination of labor under capital enables the extraction of surplus value from the working class in the production process through the use of wage labor and subsequent utilization in the circulation process in order to perpetuate a vicious cycle of capital accumulation.I do not see an actual answer to my initial question here. I also hope you aren't confusing value with costs. I don't see how a person acquiring means of production is coercive. Even still, you are supposed to explain how it is inconsistent with private property. Whether or not it is "coercive" depends on whether or not you agree with private property, so that is an entirely different question.


Now, having dealt with you and your insistence on repeating nonsense no matter how many times it's been rebutted in the past, I'm quite sure that nothing anyone says will cause you to learn some economics. Going with my anticipatory reflexes alone, I'm guessing you'll be saying something about a labor contract being a voluntary transaction based on mutual need just as any other.
Arrogantly telling me to learn economics does not help your point, as the vast majority of economists agrees with me that the private ownership over the means of production is consistent with private property.

And no, your guess is wrong. Whether or not the relationship is voluntary depends on whether or not the worker adheres to private property. I already made this point on numerous occasions.


The issue of mutual service ("the capitalist and the worker need each other!") is also unconvincing, since the labor class only "needs" capitalists if their control of productive resources is not challenged. A capitalist will never operate an assembly line without workers. Nothing stops workers from operating an assembly line without capitalists except legal protection for the social construct of his private ownership. But considering the fact that workers' ownership and management is a more efficient and production program than capitalist ownership and hierarchical management, the capitalist class provides nothing of value in the "transaction."It is just that many times a hierarchical firm is more efficient and would be of greater benefit to workers than other forms of firms. In fact we already had a discussion about this....



Common "property" (a misnomer, but I don't want to beat that horse here, so I'll roll with it) is the default state and need not be justified.
Even if that were true, you would still need to justify it. This should be pretty obvious. Warfare is the "common state" and so it need not be justified, correct?


You've redeemed yourself here. I'm glad to see that you've finally come to accept reality.
What do you mean finally? I have held this view for quite some time.


Surely it is absurd to say that a man who has not worked in the mine a day in his life "owns" the mine and that those who labor upon it must render to him tribute for the privilege to do so.No, it is not absurd in my opinion. Anyways, the fact that you personally disprove of it does not mean it is inconsistent with private property.

anticap
22nd April 2010, 22:07
Libertarians =\= conservatives.

Yuh-huh (http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html).

LeftSideDown
22nd April 2010, 23:57
Yuh-huh (http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html).

Did you even read that? Amid the misrepresentations and fallacies lay nothing of value. He did nothing to define "right" "conservative" or "libertarian" because any definition of these terms that ended up disagreeing would've automatically discredited any position he might've taken.

I read about half. Thats all I could read. Without defining these terms how can you have any paper or make any assertion about any of them?

Here is the difference. Conservatives oppose change for the sake of opposing change. They serve as a brake on society, always saying "woah, slow down, not so fast there" but they have no principles of their own. All they do is advocate the positions of liberals but urge caution and slowness.

Besides, you must differentiate between european conservatives and american conservatives. Conservatives in America and libertarians share much because America's past is very much rooted in classical liberalism. Hence, while conservatives espouse the principles of "laissez-faire, property rights, and individualism" they never actually defend these. They advocate laissez-faire, except when they want to get involved. Property rights except when they need property for their wars. Individualism except when they appeal for a mass effort. European conservatives have historically been feudalists or monarchists but they have evolved much like conservatives in America. All they urge is slowness in progress, always looking behind their shoulders and exclaiming how great things used to be.

Libertarians advocate personal freedom, property rights, and laissez faire because they want progress. The only thing they wish to slow down is the growth of government and that process they would much rather permanently stop.

anticap
23rd April 2010, 03:15
I linked it a bit facetiously, which I assumed would be gleaned from my choice of words. I didn't mean to literally equate the two, for goodness' sake.

Anyway, yes, I've read (all of) it, and so should you. I hope you at least got to my favorite part:


You might object that what I’ve said may apply to the minarchist majority of libertarians, but not to the self-styled anarchists among them. Not so. To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who’d abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else. But this incestuous family squabble is no affair of mine. Both camps call for partial or complete privatization of state functions but neither questions the functions themselves. They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don’t quibble over their coercers’ credentials. If you can’t pay or don’t want to, you don’t much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

Dermezel
23rd April 2010, 04:57
Workers contracting with capitalists is in no way a violation of property rights.

Actually it is because they expropriate surplus value. The whole basis for property laws is that they ensure each citizen has increased well-being, and gets a fair share of socially created wealth. That is why John Locke wrote that there was a right "to property" not just a right from confiscation.

When the capitalist expropriates surplus value he is taking something that all of society had a role in creating for himself. It is like in a hunter-gatherer society if we all collectively kill the Mammoth, and then some Witch Doctor waves his wand and says the whole Mammoth belongs to him now.

Also the initial basis of capitalism was widespread theft:



In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population [1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n1) consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage-labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage-labourers, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, &c. [2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n2) In all countries of Europe, feudal production is characterised by division of the soil amongst the greatest possible number of sub-feudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent-roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors. [3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n3) Although, therefore, the English land, after the Norman Conquest, was distributed in gigantic baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant properties, only here and there interspersed with great seignorial domains. Such conditions, together with the prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed of that wealth of the people which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his “Laudes legum Angliae;” but it excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth.
The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour-market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his “Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,” describes how the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country. “What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. “If,” says Harrison, “the old records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk... that England was neuer less furnished with people than at the present... Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them... I could saie somewhat.” The complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the conditions of production. A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working-class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
Legislation was terrified at this revolution. It did not yet stand on that height of civilization where the “wealth of the nation” (i.e., the formation of capital, and the reckless exploitation and impoverishing of the mass of the people) figure as the ultima Thule of all state-craft. In his history of Henry VII., Bacon says: “Inclosures at that time (1489) began to be more frequent, whereby arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived) were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and (by consequence) a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the like... In remedying of this inconvenience the king’s wisdom was admirable, and the parliament’s at that time... they took a course to take away depopulating enclosures, and depopulating pasturage.” An Act of Henry VII., 1489, cap. 19, forbad the destruction of all “houses of husbandry” to which at least 20 acres of land belonged. By an Act, 25 Henry VIII., the same law was renewed. it recites, among other things, that many farms and large flocks of cattle, especially of sheep, are concentrated in the hands of a few men, whereby the rent of land has much risen and tillage has fallen off, churches and houses have been pulled down, and marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families. The Act, therefore, ordains the rebuilding of the decayed farm-steads, and fixes a proportion between corn land and pasture land, &c. An Act of 1533 recites that some owners possess 24,000 sheep, and limits the number to be owned to 2,000. [4] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n4) The cry of the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after Henry VII., against the expropriation of the small farmers and peasants, were alike fruitless. The secret of their inefficiency Bacon, without knowing it, reveals to us. “The device of King Henry VII.,” says Bacon, in his “Essays, Civil and Moral,” Essay 29, “was profound and admirable, in making farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is, maintained with such a proportion of land unto them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.” [5] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n5) What the capitalist system demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital. During this transformation period, legislation also strove to retain the 4 acres of land by the cottage of the agricultural wage-labourer, and forbad him to take lodgers into his cottage. In the reign of James I., 1627, Roger Crocker of Front Mill, was condemned for having built a cottage on the manor of Front Mill without 4 acres of land attached to the same in perpetuity. As late as Charles I.’s reign, 1638, a royal commission was appointed to enforce the carrying out of the old laws, especially that referring to the 4 acres of land. Even in Cromwell’s time, the building of a house within 4 miles of London was forbidden unless it was endowed with 4 acres of land. As late as the first half of the 18th century complaint is made if the cottage of the agricultural labourer has not an adjunct of one or two acres of laud. Nowadays he is lucky if it is furnished with a little garden, or if he may rent, far away from his cottage, a few roods. “Landlords and farmers,” says Dr. Hunter, “work here hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the labourers too independent.” [6] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n6)
The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. [7] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n7) “Pauper ubique jacet,” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the 43rd year of her reign the nation was obliged to recognise pauperism officially by the introduction of a poor-rate. “The authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for [contrary to traditional usage] it has no preamble whatever.” [8] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n8) By the 16th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared perpetual, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form. [9] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n9) These immediate results of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. The property of the church formed the religious bulwark of the traditional conditions of landed property. With its fall these were no longer tenable. [10] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n10)
Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken squires and to their servants, the country clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About 1750, the yeomanry had disappeared, [11] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n11) and so had, in the last decade of the 18th century, the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side here the purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the forcible means employed.
After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the State, “indemnified” the State by taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement, which, mutatis mutandis, had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry.
The “glorious Revolution” brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of surplus-value. [12] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n12) They inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. [13] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n13) All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again during the republican revolution, form the basis of the to-day princely domains of the English oligarchy. [14] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n14) The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large farm-system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to hand. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large manufacturers, then depending on protective duties. The English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest quite as wisely as did the Swedish bourgeoisie who, reversing the process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the peasantry, helped the kings in the forcible resumption of the Crown lands from the oligarchy. This happened since 1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI.
Communal property — always distinct from the State property just dealt with — was an old Teutonic institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have seen how the forcible usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well. [15] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n15) The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a “general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor. [16] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n16)
Whilst the place of the independent yeoman was taken by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile rabble dependent on the pleasure of the landlords, the systematic robbery of the Communal lands helped especially, next to the theft of the State domains, to swell those large farms, that were called in the 18th century capital farms [17] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n17) or merchant farms, [18] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n18) and to “set free” the agricultural population as proletarians for manufacturing industry.
The 18th century, however, did not yet recognise as fully as the 19th, the identity between national wealth and the poverty of the people. Hence the most vigorous polemic, in the economic literature of that time, on the “enclosure of commons.” From the mass of materials that lie before me, I give a few extracts that will throw a strong light on the circumstances of the time. “In several parishes of Hertfordshire,” writes one indignant person, “24 farms, numbering on the average 50-150 acres, have been melted up into three farms.” [19] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n19) “In Northamptonshire and Leicestershire the enclosure of common lands has taken place on a very large scale, and most of the new lordships, resulting from the enclosure, have been turned into pasturage, in consequence of which many lordships have not now 50 acres ploughed yearly, in which 1,500 were ploughed formerly. The ruins of former dwelling-houses, barns, stables, &c.,” are the sole traces of the former inhabitants. “An hundred houses and families have in some open-field villages dwindled to eight or ten.... The landholders in most parishes that have been enclosed only 15 or 20 years, are very few in comparison of the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It is no uncommon thing for 4 or 5 wealthy graziers to engross a large enclosed lordship which was before in the hands of 20 or 30 farmers, and as many smaller tenants and proprietors. All these are hereby thrown out of their livings with their families and many other families who were chiefly employed and supported by them.” [20] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n20) It was not only the land that lay waste, but often land cultivated either in common or held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was annexed by the neighbouring landlords under pretext of enclosure. “I have here in view enclosures of open fields and lands already improved. It is acknowledged by even the writers in defence of enclosures that these diminished villages increase the monopolies of farms, raise the prices of provisions, and produce depopulation ... and even the enclosure of waste lands (as now carried on) bears hard on the poor, by depriving them of a part of their subsistence, and only goes towards increasing farms already too large.” [21] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n21) “When,” says Dr. Price, “this land gets into the hands of a few great farmers, the consequence must be that the little farmers” (earlier designated by him “a multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and families by the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, &c., and who therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence”) “will be converted into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a necessity of going to market for all they want.... There will, perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion to it.... Towns and manufactures will increase, because more will be driven to them in quest of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has been actually operating in this kingdom.” [22] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n22) He sums up the effect of the enclosures thus: “Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings; and, at the same time, their subsistence in that state has become more difficult.” [23] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n23) In fact, usurpation of the common lands and the revolution in agriculture accompanying this, told so acutely on the agricultural labourers that, even according to Eden, between 1765 and 1780, their wages began to fall below the minimum, and to be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their wages, he says, “were not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life.”
Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an opponent of Dr. Price. “Not is it a consequence that there must be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their labour in the open field.... If, by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation” (to which, of course, the “converted” ones do not belong) “should wish for ... the produce being greater when their joint labours are employed on one farm, there will be a surplus for manufactures, and by this means manufactures, one of the mines of the nation, will increase, in proportion to the quantity of corn produced.” [24] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n24)
The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most shameless violation of the “sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of violence to persons, as soon as they are necessary to lay the foundations of the capitalistic mode of production, is shown by Sir F. M. Eden, philanthropist and tory, to boot. The whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th to the end of the 18th century, lead him merely to the comfortable conclusion: “The due proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of the 14th and the greater part of the 15th century, there was one acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable land. About the middle of the 16th century the proportion was changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2, later on, of 2 acres of pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion of 3 acres of pasture to one of arable land was attained.”
In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times, have the agricultural population received a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords?
The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a former chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled lands were held.
The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman. [25] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n25) This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart [26] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n26) and James Anderson. [27] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n27) In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. [28] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n28) As an example of the method [29] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n29) obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both. [30] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n30)
But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic and of the mountains, for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second time the Gaels were hunted out. [31] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n31)
But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into deer preserves. Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London aldermen. Scotland is therefore the last refuge of the “noble passion.” “In the Highlands,” says Somers in 1848, “new forests are springing up like mushrooms. Here, on one side of Gaick, you have the new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other you have the new forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the Black Mount, an immense waste also recently erected. From east to west — from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to the crags of Oban — you have now a continuous line of forests; while in other parts of the Highlands there are the new forests of Loch Archaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, &c. Sheep were introduced into glens which had been the seats of communities of small farmers; and the latter were driven to seek subsistence on coarser and more sterile tracks of soil. Now deer are supplanting sheep; and these are once more dispossessing the small tenants, who will necessarily be driven down upon still coarser land and to more grinding penury. Deer-forests [32] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n32) and the people cannot co-exist. One or other of the two must yield. Let the forests be increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a century, as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will perish from their native soil... This movement among the Highland proprietors is with some a matter of ambition... with some love of sport... while others, of a more practical cast, follow the trade in deer with an eye solely to profit. For it is a fact, that a mountain range laid out in forest is, in many cases, more profitable to the proprietor than when let as a sheep-walk. ... The huntsman who wants a deer-forest limits his offers by no other calculation than the extent of his purse.... Sufferings have been inflicted in the Highlands scarcely less severe than those occasioned by the policy of the Norman kings. Deer have received extended ranges, while men have been hunted within a narrower and still narrower circle.... One after one the liberties of the people have been cloven down.... And the oppressions are daily on the increase.... The clearance and dispersion of the people is pursued by the proprietors as a settled principle, as an agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are cleared from the wastes of America or Australia; and the operation goes on in a quiet, business-like way, &c.” [33] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n33)
The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm


Stealing land from the peasants and forcing them into brutal work was the basis of capitalism from the beginning. It all rests on a gross violation of basic property rights and is presented as the opposite through sleight of hand legal maneuvers.

Or just consider the latest round of fraud committed by Big Banks and corporations- again violations of property and the public trust- again done to expropriate wealth. Claiming that Big Banks and Corporations never violate property rights is absurd.

RGacky3
26th April 2010, 10:29
Yes they do. It is odd to me that so many self proclaimed anarchists consistently fight for an expansion of government and government power.

No they do not, they respond to pressure from people who pay them, i.e. money.

Its funny that self-proclaimed libertarians consistantly fight for corporate power, and corporate interests, because clearly, corporations are interested in your liberty right?

Endomorphian
27th April 2010, 01:44
When the capitalist expropriates surplus value he is taking something that all of society had a role in creating for himself.

No, all people do not contribute to the wealth of commodities. A farmer in Israel does not contribute his labor to my production of (say) campaign stickers in the US, nor should the workers producing said products have to listen to his thoughts.

gorillafuck
27th April 2010, 01:54
No, all of society does not contribute to the wealth of a commodity. A farmer in Israel does not contribute wealth to my production of (say) campaign stickers in the US, nor should the workers producing said products have to listen to his thoughts.
Just out of curiosity, how would property be acquired in a mutualist society? I am curious as to how that would happen, if you agree that capitalists unfairly acquire their property.