"Property is the last of the false gods."--Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
'Tis the season of the gift, a time to show the world generosity and shared abundance. For many, this season represents obligation and anxiety. As my world tilts away from the sun, I can't help but grow more pensive, and today I ruminate on the gift: A possession given from one person to another, increasing someone's wealth at the expense of your own.
That is a uniquely capitalist way of looking at the gift. Most of our history, gifts were more personal, even spiritual. We viewed wealth and property differently. I marvel at the simplicity and the entirely foreign culture most civilization's possessed for the lion's share of Man's history. I can not help but wonder what it would be like to see the world through eyes indoctrinated in a gift economy instead of one that worships ownership. I wonder about the indoctrination of my own culture.
Is ownership a good thing? We usually think of it as so, but have we really considered the implications? What does ownership really mean to all of us? Is it helping or hurting us? We are taught to share in Kindergarten, but most of us shun the practice as adults. What would it mean to have an aversion to owning instead?
Talking about ownership in this society, is a like discussing water with a fish. We are so steeped in a culture of ownership, it makes the effects of ownership hard to see. Still, today, I feel compelled to try.
Theft and Ownership:
At its origin, ownership is theft. How did something originally become owned? It was stolen. Shoot a wild animal with an arrow and the meat becomes yours to feed your family. Cut down a forest and the wood becomes owned by those who felled the trees. The commons were stolen by the nobles. The American continent was stolen from the indigenous people, who had a very different concept of ownership. Those who stole the continent gave it to the Anglo settlers, who claimed the land by homesteading it.
Those more willing to cheat, lie, steal and kill for greed are often the very people the ownership culture rewards. The grander the destruction of shared resources, the bigger the rewards reaped. Ponzi schemes, war profiteers, and bank CEO's, who destroy whole economies, draw benefits far beyond what most of us can imagine. We have built a society that worships the sociopath.
We see ownership as having the right not just to use something, but to destroy it. Pacific Lumber bought the last of the redwoods to cut them down and sell their wood—never mind the wood could not possibly replace the beauty and peace of a redwood forest. Public water is bottled by Coke-a-Cola and sold as their beverage. As more of our world becomes “owned”, the air, water, and land become destroyed and we feel powerless to protect what can never be owned. Companies waste these things in order to make something they can rightfully claim as owned, so it can be sold. Invariably this theft leads to destruction of the commons, war, genocide, destruction of the natural world. For all the lip service about why we fought a decade long war in Iraq, the oil giants of Shell and BP got the spoils of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 a barrel, and built the pipeline they needed through Afghanistan to get the oil to Europe.
We created a culture where even our thoughts and ideas can be owned. We copyright our words and ideas so they can not be stolen from us. This restricts what can be done with an idea. Oil companies routinely buy technology that could replace our dependance on oil with Earth friendly technologies, so the patent can never be used—essentially destroying the invention. Ownership of ideas stymies their use as a building block for other ideas. It slows our progress, instead of enhancing it.
The inventors of the internet first imagined it as an intellectual commons. Commercial interests have invaded the internet, but it still keeps its basic ownerless model (much to the chagrin of the telecom companies). Information flows through the internet and our progress takes huge leaps forward due to the unrestricted flow of knowledge. More than technology advances due to the free flow of ideas. Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street could hardly have happened without the propagation of new ideas through the electronic commons. Much different than the restricted flow of information and ideas allowed by traditional news media owned by governments or private interests.
What I Didn't Learn in Kindergarten:
We frequently see shared things are somehow less for the sharing. There are some things we all agree should be shared. Things that would restrict the average person unreasonably or endanger people if access to them was restricted. We are fine with sharing the local fire department, the police or the military. These are things we all need in common for the good of everyone.
But what about healthcare. Around 45,000 people a year die from lack of adequate healthcare in America--needless deaths because someone else owned the health care these people needed, and they could not afford to access it. Ownership quite literally killed these people. Add those to the war dead and genocide for confiscation of resources, and ownership is racking up quite a toll.
I confessed, I like owning my own home—or at least the illusion of owning it. Of late, the vulnerable underbelly of home ownership has been exposed. People have become homeless in the housing crisis that forces perfectly good homes to sit empty. More people will no doubt die of exposure due to this type of ownership. Even banks abandon these homes, taking the insurance money so they need not be saddled with property tax or fines for blighting the neighborhood. Cities are tearing these homes down, rather than allow vandalization and squatters. Banks can do this because they own the debt, and the home, itself, is worthless to them. On a grander scale the WTO and the World Bank starved millions to repay debt to the already wealthy. The lives of the poor are considered worth less than the concept of debt. It appears the efficiency of ownership is nothing more than a myth.
In fact it seems a damn waste. The ownership society is geared to waste. We could use less if we all shared the things we used only sometimes—a book, the lawn mower, the washer and dryer, even a house with too many or too few rooms. Yet we are geared to ownership so every one must have these things or do without them.
Crime and Punishment:
November 7, 1775, South Carolina Gazette about his runaway slave: "...for though he is my Property, he has the audacity to tell me he will be free, that he will serve no Man, and that he will be conquered or governed by no Man." POCLAD
When my job vanished during the economic crash, I discovered the other downside of home ownership. I found a great job elsewhere but I could not sell my house to take the job. I didn't own the house—it owned me! We think of ownership as power, but is it really enslavement?
Ownership is blatantly unfair. We all know this. That is part of its mystic. We are all motivated to be on the positive side of the unfairness.
When someone gives me a handmade gift as a token of friendship, I feel like ownership is a good thing. On the other hand, if a rich man gives his son a couple of houses and a loaded bank account as a gift, then his son starts life advantaged over everyone else. He will likely repeat this cycle with his son. This leads to an ever increasing circle of wealth for the few.
As wealth becomes more abundant in some families, other families become equally entrenched in poverty. They have fewer resources, education and opportunity. Their meals are less nutritious, their environments marginal and they are more likely to be exposed to noxious substances. It is not by accident that 30% of the world is starving and 30% of the world is clinically obese.
Those with the wealth grow distant from the misery of the poor and have little understanding or compassion for the people in that situation. The wealthy delude themselves into believing they are better, forgetting that their fortune was the result of the willingness to steal form those who are less fortunate. They see the poor as a different species and have contempt for them. This invariably results in further oppression.
In days gone by, that oppression was overtly expressed as slavery—actual ownership of another human. Now it is more subtle but has equally devastating consequences.
Capitalists own the means to make money. Without money, we are unfed, unwashed and unsheltered. Men are reduced to slaves by their inability to own the means of manufacturing their own bread and shelter. They must have a job to survive. With fewer jobs, they must be satisfied with an increasingly marginal existence, even to the point of slow starvation.
If they sport the wrong color skin, or practice the wrong religion, they are more likely to run afoul of the law. Prisoners, quite literally, are forced to work as slaves for the rich. Prisons don't just house thieves and violent criminals, of course. Sometimes they house people who lack some sort of ownership themselves. If you are homeless, you are likely to end up incarcerated. If you have debts you can not pay, you might find yourself in prison. Worse, if you lack sanity, you are unlikely to own enough money to purchase the care you need, and you are likely to find yourself behind bars.
None of this makes any sense, of course, as none of these people are likely to find a home, money for a debt, or sanity in prison. Well, it doesn't make sense unless you own a prison. Incarceration, itself, is a form of human ownership, a type of human trafficking. The more people in prison, the more the prison industry gets paid by the state. So instead of treating the mentally ill and sheltering the homeless, we imprison them. More and more we also imprison those who disagree with the powerful—those likely to vote against the dominant paradigm. This has happened in so many places and times and in so many ways, one has to wonder if ownership breeds the will to make other humans objects of possession. Does ownership create slaves?
Those not incarcerated need to compete against the free labor offered at a reduced rate by the prison. The free are forced to drop their wages in order to do so. To survive, they must work harder and longer. They have little time to develop themselves further—to get an education, develop a new skill, or think about how to change the system to their advantage. This creates more disadvantaged people and increases the risk that a person will resort to criminal activity to get the things they need and want, in an endless cycle.
The US has more per capita people in prison than any other nation. We could do with a lot less of them. If ownership did not exist, what would we but people in prison for? Certainly not for stealing property. After all, what would you steal if no one owned anything? If we shared, there would be no homeless. If we shared our healthcare the mentally unstable would get the care they needed. Who would populate our prisons?
That unfairness doesn't just extend to the financial situation. Those same families who have bequeathed great wealth, are also bequeathing great power. They have worked to stack the legal and political deck in their favor by using what they own to buy whole governments; enslaving not a class or a race of people, but whole civilizations.
Anti-Federalist, "Centinel," who penned: "A republican or free government can only exist... where property is pretty equally divided. In such a government the people are sovereign and their sense or opinion is the criterion of every public measure; for when this ceases to be the case, the nature of government is changed and an aristocracy, monarchy, or despotism will rise on its ruins." POCLAD
People who worship ownership instruct the government to value property over everything else—including people, morals, even their own future. They set the government to murder the Luddites for breaking looms, massacre the striking workers in Hay Market square, and even pepper spray the OWS protestors. Property literally becomes more valuable than our lives. Can we really say a small chunk of grass in Manhattan is more important than the health of a single person? The civil liberties of an entire nation? Is that the world we want to create? If we ceased to honor ownership, over all else, we could build a society that honors life or happiness instead.
The World of the Gift:
When a South American Tribesman was asked where he stores food, he replied, “In the belly of my brother.” He could not actually understand the concept of storage or hoarding. The food was always there and belonged to everyone. If he was not able to get the food, his brother, whom he had helped to feed, would help him.
All of his possessions were simple and made from supplies on hand. When his area of the forest was hunted out, he and his clan simply walked away and rebuilt homes and tools in a new part of the forest. For him, ownership is a type of insanity. Who would squirrel away what is all around you fresh?
What would that be like? Not only to ignore ownership, but to be incapable of grasping the concept? Would we be a happier lot for it? In truth, I don't know...but I have my suspicions the answer is yes.
We are told from birth that ownership society is the only way a complex society can exist together. Lately I find that difficult to keep believing. If we shed ownership as the primary force in our society, wouldn't we all be better off? We could pick community, life, happiness as the primary goal of our culture. Wouldn't that be a better goal for us all?
Far from being impossible, this would be a return to the values we held for most of our past.
Most cultures of the world held property to be one's personal possessions, such as clothing, household goods and the tools of one's trade. Land, on the other hand, was held in common and often viewed as inseparable from God or Nature, denied to human ownership. Under Iroquois Confederacy law, the buying, selling and monopolizing of land was illegal and immoral. The commons concept underlay many cultures' mode of community organization. These included indigenous traditions of Native Americans, West African villages, the Irish kinship-based society before the English conquest, and the more recent Mexican ejido communal land system. These cultural commons varied widely in organization, being based on clan rights, gender rights, or powers conferred on some other social group. They had differing practices regarding member participation, equity and relationship to the natural world. POCLAD
Cultural wisdom dictates such a structure can not exist in the complexities of modern society, yet I don't think anyone told
the Basques. Even in our own country, the states that share more and emphasize ownership less seem to be faring better in this difficult time.
The Spirit Level studies seem to bear this out: A culture of sharing decreases almost all of societies ills.
It is very possible that the misery of the last few decades is all in our heads. That it is an idea we cling to, but that has become worn out. Perhaps the Mayans are actually right. This coming year might be the end of civilization as we know it...and that could be a good thing,