                B.3 Why are anarchists against private property?

   Private property is one of the three things all anarchists oppose,
   along side hierarchical authority and the state. Today, the dominant
   system of private property is capitalist in nature and, as such,
   anarchists tend to concentrate on this system and its property rights
   regime. We will be reflecting this here but do not, because of this,
   assume that anarchists consider other forms of private property regime
   (such as, say, feudalism) as acceptable. This is not the case --
   anarchists are against every form of property rights regime which
   results in the many working for the few.

   Anarchist opposition to private property rests on two, related,
   arguments. These were summed up by Proudhon's maxims (from
   What is Property? that "property is theft" and "property is despotism."
   In his words, "Property . . . violates equality by the rights of
   exclusion and increase, and freedom by despotism . . . [and has]
   perfect identity with robbery." [Proudhon, What is Property, p. 251]
   Anarchists, therefore, oppose private property (i.e. capitalism)
   because it is a source of coercive, hierarchical authority as well as
   exploitation and, consequently, elite privilege and inequality. It is
   based on and produces inequality, in terms of both wealth and power.

   We will summarise each argument in turn.

   The statement "property is theft" is one of anarchism's most famous
   sayings. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that anyone who rejects
   this statement is not an anarchist. This maxim works in two related
   ways. Firstly, it recognises the fact that the earth and its resources,
   the common inheritance of all, have been monopolised by a few.
   Secondly, it argues that, as a consequence of this, those who own
   property exploit those who do not. This is because those who do not own
   have to pay or sell their labour to those who do own in order to get
   access to the resources they need to live and work (such as workplaces,
   machinery, land, credit, housing, products under patents, and such like
   -- see [1]section B.3.2 for more discussion).

   As we discuss in [2]section B.3.3, this exploitation (theft) flows from
   the fact that workers do not own or control the means of production
   they use and, as a consequence, are controlled by those who do during
   work hours. This alienation of control over labour to the boss places
   the employer in a position to exploit that labour -- to get the worker
   to produce more than they get paid in wages. That is precisely why the
   boss employs the worker. Combine this with rent, interest and
   intellectual property rights and we find the secret to maintaining the
   capitalist system as all allow enormous inequalities of wealth to
   continue and keep the resources of the world in the hands of a few.

   Yet labour cannot be alienated. Therefore when you sell your labour you
   sell yourself, your liberty, for the time in question. This brings us
   to the second reason why anarchists oppose private property, the fact
   it produces authoritarian social relationships. For all true
   anarchists, property is opposed as a source of authority, indeed
   despotism. To quote Proudhon on this subject:

     "The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign -- for all
     these titles are synonymous -- imposes his will as law, and suffers
     neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the
     legislative and the executive power at once . . . [and so] property
     engenders despotism . . . That is so clearly the essence of property
     that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and
     observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and
     abuse . . . if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be
     kings, and despotic kings -- kings in proportion to their facultes
     bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the
     sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how
     could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and
     confusion?" [Op. Cit., pp. 266-7]

   In other words, private property is the state writ small, with the
   property owner acting as the "sovereign lord" over their property, and
   so the absolute king of those who use it. As in any monarchy, the
   worker is the subject of the capitalist, having to follow their orders,
   laws and decisions while on their property. This, obviously, is the
   total denial of liberty (and dignity, we may note, as it is degrading
   to have to follow orders). And so private property (capitalism)
   necessarily excludes participation, influence, and control by those who
   use, but do not own, the means of life.

   It is, of course, true that private property provides a sphere of
   decision-making free from outside interference -- but only for the
   property's owners. But for those who are not property owners the
   situation if radically different. In a system of exclusively private
   property does not guarantee them any such sphere of freedom. They have
   only the freedom to sell their liberty to those who do own private
   property. If I am evicted from one piece of private property, where can
   I go? Nowhere, unless another owner agrees to allow me access to their
   piece of private property. This means that everywhere I can stand is a
   place where I have no right to stand without permission and, as a
   consequence, I exist only by the sufferance of the property owning
   elite. Hence Proudhon:

     "Just as the commoner once held his land by the munificence and
     condescension of the lord, so to-day the working-man holds his
     labour by the condescension and necessities of the master and
     proprietor." [Proudhon, Op. Cit., p. 128]

   This means that far from providing a sphere of independence, a society
   in which all property is private thus renders the property-less
   completely dependent on those who own property. This ensures that the
   exploitation of another's labour occurs and that some are subjected to
   the will of others, in direct contradiction to what the defenders of
   property promise. This is unsurprising given the nature of the property
   they are defending:

     "Our opponents . . . are in the habit of justifying the right to
     private property by stating that property is the condition and
     guarantee of liberty.

     "And we agree with them. Do we not say repeatedly that poverty is
     slavery?

     "But then why do we oppose them?

     "The reason is clear: in reality the property that they defend is
     capitalist property, namely property that allows its owners to live
     from the work of others and which therefore depends on the existence
     of a class of the disinherited and dispossessed, forced to sell
     their labour to the property owners for a wage below its real value
     . . . This means that workers are subjected to a kind of slavery,
     which, though it may vary in degree of harshness, always means
     social inferiority, material penury and moral degradation, and is
     the primary cause of all the ills that beset today's social order."
     [Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution, p. 113]

   It will, of course, be objected that no one forces a worker to work for
   a given boss. However, as we discuss in [3]section B.4.3, this
   assertion (while true) misses the point. While workers are not forced
   to work for a specific boss, they inevitably have to work for a boss.
   This is because there is literally no other way to survive -- all other
   economic options have been taken from them by state coercion. The net
   effect is that the working class has little choice but to hire
   themselves out to those with property and, as a consequence, the
   labourer "has sold and surrendered his liberty" to the boss. [Proudhon,
   Op. Cit., p. 130]

   Private property, therefore, produces a very specific form of authority
   structure within society, a structure in which a few govern the many
   during working hours. These relations of production are inherently
   authoritarian and embody and perpetuate the capitalist class system.
   The moment you enter the factory gate or the office door, you lose all
   your basic rights as a human being. You have no freedom of speech nor
   association and no right of assembly. If you were asked to ignore your
   values, your priorities, your judgement, and your dignity, and leave
   them at the door when you enter your home, you would rightly consider
   that tyranny yet that is exactly what you do during working hours if
   you are a worker. You have no say in what goes on. You may as well be a
   horse (to use John Locke's analogy -- see [4]section B.4.2) or a piece
   of machinery.

   Little wonder, then, that anarchists oppose private property as Anarchy
   is "the absence of a master, of a sovereign" [Proudhon, Op. Cit., p.
   264] and call capitalism for what it is, namely wage slavery!

   For these reasons, anarchists agree with Rousseau when he stated:

     "The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of
     saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him
     was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars,
     murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been
     spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the
     ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this
     impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong
     to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'" ["Discourse on
     Inequality," The Social Contract and Discourses, p. 84]

   This explains anarchist opposition to capitalism. It is marked by two
   main features, "private property" (or in some cases, state-owned
   property -- see [5]section B.3.5) and, consequently, wage labour and
   exploitation and authority. Moreover, such a system requires a state to
   maintain itself for as "long as within society a possessing and
   non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the
   state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the
   protection for its privileges." [Rudolf Rocker,
   Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 11] Thus private ownership of the means of
   production is only possible if there is a state, meaning mechanisms of
   organised coercion at the disposal of the propertied class (see
   [6]section B.2).

   Also, it ought to be easy to see that capitalism, by giving rise to an
   ideologically inalienable "right" to private property, will also
   quickly give rise to inequalities in the distribution of external
   resources, and that this inequality in resource distribution will give
   rise to a further inequality in the relative bargaining positions of
   the propertied and the property less. While apologists for capitalism
   usually attempt to justify private property by claiming that
   "self-ownership" is a "universal right" (see section B.4.2 -- [7]"Is
   capitalism based on self-ownership?"), it is clear that capitalism
   actually makes universal autonomy implied by the flawed concept of
   self-ownership (for the appeal of the notion of self-ownership rests on
   the ideal that people are not used as a means but only as an end in
   themselves). The capitalist system, however, has undermined autonomy
   and individual freedom, and ironically, has used the term
   "self-ownership" as the basis for doing so. Under capitalism, as will
   be seen in [8]section B.4, most people are usually left in a situation
   where their best option is to allow themselves to be used in just those
   ways that are logically incompatible with genuine self-ownership, i.e.
   the autonomy which makes it initially an appealing concept.

   Only libertarian socialism can continue to affirm the meaningful
   autonomy and individual freedom which self-ownership promises whilst
   building the conditions that guarantee it. Only by abolishing private
   property can there be access to the means of life for all, so making
   the autonomy which self-ownership promises but cannot deliver a reality
   by universalising self-management in all aspects of life.

   Before discussing the anti-libertarian aspects of capitalism, it will
   be necessary to define "private property" as distinct from "personal
   possessions" and show in more detail why the former requires state
   protection and is exploitative.

B.3.1 What is the difference between private property and possession?

   Anarchists define "private property" (or just "property," for short) as
   state-protected monopolies of certain objects or privileges which are
   used to control and exploit others. "Possession," on the other hand, is
   ownership of things that are not used to exploit others (e.g. a car, a
   refrigerator, a toothbrush, etc.). Thus many things can be considered
   as either property or possessions depending on how they are used.

   To summarise, anarchists are in favour of the kind of property which
   "cannot be used to exploit another -- those kinds of personal
   possessions which we accumulate from childhood and which become part of
   our lives." We are opposed to the kind of property "which can be used
   only to exploit people -- land and buildings, instruments of production
   and distribution, raw materials and manufactured articles, money and
   capital." [Nicholas Walter, About Anarchism, p. 40] As a rule of thumb,
   anarchists oppose those forms of property which are owned by a few
   people but which are used by others. This leads to the former
   controlling the latter and using them to produce a surplus for them
   (either directly, as in the case of a employee, or indirectly, in the
   case of a tenant).

   The key is that "possession" is rooted in the concept of "use rights"
   or "usufruct" while "private property" is rooted in a divorce between
   the users and ownership. For example, a house that one lives in is a
   possession, whereas if one rents it to someone else at a profit it
   becomes property. Similarly, if one uses a saw to make a living as a
   self-employed carpenter, the saw is a possession; whereas if one
   employs others at wages to use the saw for one's own profit, it is
   property. Needless to say, a capitalist workplace, where the workers
   are ordered about by a boss, is an example of "property" while a
   co-operative, where the workers manage their own work, is an example of
   "possession." To quote Proudhon:

     "The proprietor is a man who, having absolute control of an
     instrument of production, claims the right to enjoy the product of
     the instrument without using it himself. To this end he lends it."
     [Op. Cit., p. 293]

   While it may initially be confusing to make this distinction, it is
   very useful to understand the nature of capitalist society. Capitalists
   tend to use the word "property" to mean anything from a toothbrush to a
   transnational corporation -- two very different things, with very
   different impacts upon society. Hence Proudhon:

     "Originally the word property was synonymous with proper or
     individual possession. It designated each individual's special right
     to the use of a thing. But when this right of use . . . became
     active and paramount -- that is, when the usufructuary converted his
     right to personally use the thing into the right to use it by his
     neighbour's labour -- then property changed its nature and this idea
     became complex." [Op. Cit., pp. 395-6]

   Proudhon graphically illustrated the distinction by comparing a lover
   as a possessor, and a husband as a proprietor! As he stressed, the
   "double definition of property -- domain and possession -- is of
   highest importance; and must be clearly understood, in order to
   comprehend" what anarchism is really about. So while some may question
   why we make this distinction, the reason is clear. As Proudhon argued,
   "it is proper to call different things by different names, if we keep
   the name 'property' for the former [possession], we must call the
   latter [the domain of property] robbery, repine, brigandage. If, on the
   contrary, we reserve the name 'property' for the latter, we must
   designate the former by the term possession or some other equivalent;
   otherwise we should be troubled with an unpleasant synonym." [Op. Cit.,
   p. 65 and p. 373]

   The difference between property and possession can be seen from the
   types of authority relations each generates. Taking the example of a
   capitalist workplace, its clear that those who own the workplace
   determine how it is used, not those who do the actual work. This leads
   to an almost totalitarian system. As Noam Chomsky points out, "the term
   'totalitarian' is quite accurate. There is no human institution that
   approaches totalitarianism as closely as a business corporation. I
   mean, power is completely top-down. You can be inside it somewhere and
   you take orders from above and hand 'em down. Ultimately, it's in the
   hands of owners and investors." Thus the actual producer does not
   control their own activity, the product of their labour nor the means
   of production they use. In modern class societies, the producer is in a
   position of subordination to those who actually do own or manage the
   productive process.

   In an anarchist society, as noted, actual use is considered the only
   title. This means that a workplace is organised and run by those who
   work within it, thus reducing hierarchy and increasing freedom and
   equality within society. Hence anarchist opposition to private property
   and capitalism flows naturally from anarchism's basic principles and
   ideas. Hence all anarchists agree with Proudhon:

     "Possession is a right; property is against right. Suppress property
     while maintaining possession." [Op. Cit., p. 271]

   As Alexander Berkman frames this distinction, anarchism "abolishes
   private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and with
   it goes capitalistic business. Personal possession remains only in the
   things you use. Thus, your watch is your own, but the watch factory
   belongs to the people. Land, machinery, and all other public utilities
   will be collective property, neither to be bought nor sold. Actual use
   will be considered the only title -- not to ownership but to
   possession." [What is Anarchism?, p. 217]

   This analysis of different forms of property is at the heart of both
   social and individualist anarchism. This means that all anarchists seek
   to change people's opinions on what is to be considered as valid forms
   of property, aiming to see that "the Anarchistic view that occupancy
   and use should condition and limit landholding becomes the prevailing
   view" and so ensure that "individuals should no longer be protected by
   their fellows in anything but personal occupation and cultivation [i.e.
   use] of land." [Benjamin Tucker, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 159
   and p. 85] The key differences, as we noted in [9]section A.3.1, is how
   they apply this principle.

   This anarchist support for possession does not imply the break up of
   large scale organisations such as factories or other workplaces which
   require large numbers of people to operate. Far from it. Anarchists
   argue for association as the complement of possession. This means
   applying "occupancy and use" to property which is worked by more than
   one person results in associated labour, i.e. those who collectively
   work together (i.e. use a given property) manage it and their own
   labour as a self-governing, directly democratic, association of equals
   (usually called "self-management" for short).

   This logically flows from the theory of possession, of "occupancy and
   use." For if production is carried on in groups who is the legal
   occupier of the land? The employer or their manager? Obviously not, as
   they are by definition occupying more than they can use by themselves.
   Clearly, the association of those engaged in the work can be the only
   rational answer. Hence Proudhon's comment that "all accumulated capital
   being social property, no one can be its exclusive proprietor." "In
   order to destroy despotism and inequality of conditions, men must . . .
   become associates" and this implies workers' self-management --
   "leaders, instructors, superintendents . . . must be chosen from the
   labourers by the labourers themselves." [Proudhon, Op. Cit., p. 130, p.
   372 and p. 137]

   In this way, anarchists seek, in Proudhon's words, "abolition of the
   proletariat" and consider a key idea of our ideas that "Industrial
   Democracy must. . . succeed Industrial Feudalism." [Proudhon, Selected
   Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, p. 179 and p. 167] Thus an
   anarchist society would be based on possession, with workers'
   self-management being practised at all levels from the smallest one
   person workplace or farm to large scale industry (see [10]section I.3
   for more discussion).

   Clearly, then, all anarchists seek to transform and limit property
   rights. Capitalist property rights would be ended and a new system
   introduced rooted in the concept of possession and use. While the exact
   nature of that new system differs between schools of anarchist thought,
   the basic principles are the same as they flow from the same anarchist
   theory of property to be found in Proudhon's,
   What is Property?.

   Significantly, William Godwin in his
   Enquiry Concerning Political Justice makes the same point concerning
   the difference between property and possession (although not in the
   same language) fifty years before Proudhon, which indicates its central
   place in anarchist thought. For Godwin, there were different kinds of
   property. One kind was "the empire to which every [person] is entitled
   over the produce of his [or her] own industry." However, another kind
   was "a system, in whatever manner established, by which one man enters
   into the faculty of disposing of the produce of another man's
   industry." This "species of property is in direct contradiction" to the
   former kind (he similarities with subsequent anarchist ideas is
   striking). For Godwin, inequality produces a "servile" spirit in the
   poor and, moreover, a person who "is born to poverty, may be said,
   under a another name, to be born a slave." [The Anarchist Writings of
   William Godwin, p. 133, p. 134, p. 125 and p. 126]

   Needless to say, anarchists have not be totally consistent in using
   this terminology. Some, for example, have referred to the capitalist
   and landlord classes as being the "possessing classes." Others prefer
   to use the term "personal property" rather than "possession" or
   "capital" rather than "private property." Some, like many individualist
   anarchists, use the term "property" in a general sense and qualify it
   with "occupancy and use" in the case of land, housing and workplaces.
   However, no matter the specific words used, the key idea is the same.

B.3.2 What kinds of property does the state protect?

   Kropotkin argued that the state was "the instrument for establishing
   monopolies in favour of the ruling minorities." [Anarchism, p. 286] In
   every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to
   the means of production in order to extract tribute from labour.
   Capitalism is no exception. In this system the state maintains various
   kinds of "class monopolies" (to use Tucker's phrase) to ensure that
   workers do not receive their "natural wage," the full product of their
   labour. While some of these monopolies are obvious (such as tariffs,
   state granted market monopolies and so on), most are "behind the
   scenes" and work to ensure that capitalist domination does not need
   extensive force to maintain.

   Under capitalism, there are four major kinds of property, or
   exploitative monopolies, that the state protects:

   (1) the power to issue credit and currency, the basis of capitalist
       banking;
       (2) land and buildings, the basis of landlordism;
       (3) productive tools and equipment, the basis of industrial
       capitalism;
       (4) ideas and inventions, the basis of copyright and patent
       ("intellectual property") royalties.

   By enforcing these forms of property, the state ensures that the
   objective conditions within the economy favour the capitalist, with the
   worker free only to accept oppressive and exploitative contracts within
   which they forfeit their autonomy and promise obedience or face misery
   and poverty. Due to these "initiations of force" conducted previously
   to any specific contract being signed, capitalists enrich themselves at
   our expense because we "are compelled to pay a heavy tribute to
   property holders for the right of cultivating land or putting machinery
   into action." [Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 103] These
   conditions obviously also make a mockery of free agreement (see
   [11]section B.4).

   These various forms of state intervention are considered so normal many
   people do not even think of them as such. Thus we find defenders of
   "free market" capitalism thundering against forms of "state
   intervention" which are designed to aid the poor while seeing nothing
   wrong in defending intellectual property rights, corporations, absentee
   landlords and the other multitude of laws and taxes capitalists and
   their politicians have placed and kept upon the statute-books to skew
   the labour market in favour of themselves (see [12]section F.8 on the
   state's role in developing capitalism in the first place).

   Needless to say, despite the supposedly subtle role of such "objective"
   pressures in controlling the working class, working class resistance
   has been such that capital has never been able to dispense with the
   powers of the state, both direct and indirect. When "objective" means
   of control fail, the capitalists will always turn to the use of state
   repression to restore the "natural" order. Then the "invisible" hand of
   the market is replaced by the visible fist of the state and the
   indirect means of securing ruling class profits and power are
   supplemented by more direct forms by the state. As we indicate in
   [13]section D.1, state intervention beyond enforcing these forms of
   private property is the norm of capitalism, not the exception, and is
   done so to secure the power and profits of the capitalist class.

   To indicate the importance of these state backed monopolies, we shall
   sketch their impact.

   The credit monopoly, by which the state controls who can and cannot
   issue or loan money, reduces the ability of working class people to
   create their own alternatives to capitalism. By charging high amounts
   of interest on loans (which is only possible because competition is
   restricted) few people can afford to create co-operatives or one-person
   firms. In addition, having to repay loans at high interest to
   capitalist banks ensures that co-operatives often have to undermine
   their own principles by having to employ wage labour to make ends meet
   (see [14]section J.5.11). It is unsurprising, therefore, that the very
   successful Mondragon co-operatives in the Basque Country created their
   own credit union which is largely responsible for the experiment's
   success.

   Just as increasing wages is an important struggle within capitalism, so
   is the question of credit. Proudhon and his followers supported the
   idea of a People's Bank. If the working class could take over and
   control increasing amounts of money it could undercut capitalist power
   while building its own alternative social order (for money is
   ultimately the means of buying labour power, and so authority over the
   labourer - which is the key to surplus value production). Proudhon
   hoped that by credit being reduced to cost (namely administration
   charges) workers would be able to buy the means of production they
   needed. While most anarchists would argue that increased working class
   access to credit would no more bring down capitalism than increased
   wages, all anarchists recognise how more cheap credit, like more wages,
   can make life easier for working people and how the struggle for such
   credit, like the struggle for wages, might play a useful role in the
   development of the power of the working class within capitalism.
   Obvious cases that spring to mind are those where money has been used
   by workers to finance their struggles against capital, from strike
   funds and weapons to the periodical avoidance of work made possible by
   sufficiently high money income. Increased access to cheap credit would
   give working class people slightly more options than selling their
   liberty or facing misery (just as increased wages and unemployment
   benefit also gives us more options).

   Therefore, the credit monopoly reduces competition to capitalism from
   co-operatives (which are generally more productive than capitalist
   firms) while at the same time forcing down wages for all workers as the
   demand for labour is lower than it would otherwise be. This, in turn,
   allows capitalists to use the fear of the sack to extract higher levels
   of surplus value from employees, so consolidating capitalist power
   (within and outwith the workplace) and expansion (increasing set-up
   costs and so creating oligarchic markets dominated by a few firms). In
   addition, high interest rates transfer income directly from producers
   to banks. Credit and money are both used as weapons in the class
   struggle. This is why, again and again, we see the ruling class call
   for centralised banking and use state action (from the direct
   regulation of money itself, to the attempted management of its flows by
   the manipulation of the interest) in the face of repeated threats to
   the nature (and role) of money within capitalism.

   The credit monopoly has other advantages for the elite. The 1980s were
   marked by a rising debt burden on households as well as the increased
   concentration of wealth in the US. The two are linked. Due to "the
   decline in real hourly wages, and the stagnation in household incomes,
   the middle and lower classes have borrowed more to stay in place" and
   they have "borrowed from the very rich who have [become] richer." By
   1997, US households spent $1 trillion (or 17% of the after-tax incomes)
   on debt service. "This represents a massive upward redistribution of
   income." And why did they borrow? The bottom 40% of the income
   distribution "borrowed to compensate for stagnant or falling incomes"
   while the upper 20% borrowed "mainly to invest." Thus "consumer credit
   can be thought of as a way to sustain mass consumption in the face of
   stagnant or falling wages. But there's an additional social and
   political bonus, from the point of view of the creditor class: it
   reduces pressure for higher wages by allowing people to buy goods they
   couldn't otherwise afford. It helps to nourish both the appearance and
   reality of a middle-class standard of living in a time of polarisation.
   And debt can be a great conservatising force; with a large monthly
   mortgage and/or MasterCard bill, strikes and other forms of
   troublemaking look less appealing than they would other wise." [Doug
   Henwood, Wall Street, pp. 64-6]

   Thus credit "is an important form of social coercion; mortgaged workers
   are more pliable." [Henwood, Op. Cit., p. 232] Money is power and any
   means which lessens that power by increasing the options of workers is
   considered a threat by the capitalist class -- whether it is tight
   labour markets, state provided unemployment benefit, or cheap,
   self-organised, credit -- will be resisted. The credit monopoly can,
   therefore, only be fought as part of a broader attack on all forms of
   capitalist social power.

   In summary, the credit monopoly, by artificially restricting the option
   to work for ourselves, ensures we work for a boss while also enriching
   the few at the expense of the many.

   The land monopoly consists of enforcement by government of land titles
   which do not rest upon personal occupancy and use. It also includes
   making the squatting of abandoned housing and other forms of property
   illegal. This leads to ground-rent, by which landlords get payment for
   letting others use the land they own but do not actually cultivate or
   use. It also allows the ownership and control of natural resources like
   oil, gas, coal and timber. This monopoly is particularly exploitative
   as the owner cannot claim to have created the land or its resources. It
   was available to all until the landlord claimed it by fencing it off
   and barring others from using it.

   Until the nineteenth century, the control of land was probably the
   single most important form of privilege by which working people were
   forced to accept less than its product as a wage. While this monopoly
   is less important in a modern capitalist society (as few people know
   how to farm), it still plays a role (particularly in terms of ownership
   of natural resources). At a minimum, every home and workplace needs
   land on which to be built. Thus while cultivation of land has become
   less important, the use of land remains crucial. The land monopoly,
   therefore, ensures that working people find no land to cultivate, no
   space to set up shop and no place to sleep without first having to pay
   a landlord a sum for the privilege of setting foot on the land they own
   but neither created nor use. At best, the worker has mortgaged their
   life for decades to get their wee bit of soil or, at worse, paid their
   rent and remained as property-less as before. Either way, the landlords
   are richer for the exchange.

   Moreover, the land monopoly did play an important role in creating
   capitalism (also see [15]section F.8.3). This took two main forms.
   Firstly, the state enforced the ownership of large estates in the hands
   of a single family. Taking the best land by force, these landlords
   turned vast tracks of land into parks and hunting grounds so forcing
   the peasants little option but to huddle together on what remained.
   Access to superior land was therefore only possible by paying a rent
   for the privilege, if at all. Thus an elite claimed ownership of vacant
   lands, and by controlling access to it (without themselves ever
   directly occupying or working it) they controlled the labouring classes
   of the time. Secondly, the ruling elite also simply stole land which
   had traditionally been owned by the community. This was called
   enclosure, the process by which common land was turned into private
   property. Economist William Lazonick summaries this process:

     "The reorganisation of agricultural land [the enclosure movement] .
     . . inevitably undermined the viability of traditional peasant
     agriculture . . . [it] created a sizeable labour force of
     disinherited peasants with only tenuous attachments to the land. To
     earn a living, many of these peasants turned to 'domestic industry'
     - the production of goods in their cottages . . . It was the
     eighteenth century expansion of domestic industry . . . that laid
     the basis for the British Industrial Revolution. The emergence of
     labour-saving machine technology transformed . . . textile
     manufacture . . . and the factory replaced the family home as the
     predominant site of production." [Business Organisation and the Myth
     of the Market Economy, pp. 3-4]

   By being able to "legally" bar people from "their" property, the
   landlord class used the land monopoly to ensure the creation of a class
   of people with nothing to sell but their labour (i.e. liberty). Land
   was taken from those who traditionally used it, violating common
   rights, and it was used by the landlord to produce for their own profit
   (more recently, a similar process has been going on in the Third World
   as well). Personal occupancy was replaced by landlordism and
   agricultural wage slavery, and so "the Enclosure Acts . . . reduced the
   agricultural population to misery, placed them at the mercy of the
   landowners, and forced a great number of them to migrate to the towns
   where, as proletarians, they were delivered to the mercy of the
   middle-class manufacturers." [Peter Kropotkin, The Great French
   Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 117-8]

   A variation of this process took place in countries like America, where
   the state took over ownership of vast tracks of land and then sold it
   to farmers. As Howard Zinn notes, the Homestead Act "gave 160 acres of
   western land, unoccupied and publicly owned, to anyone who would
   cultivate it for fives years. Anyone willing to pay $1.25 an acre could
   buy a homestead. Few ordinary people had the $200 necessary to do this;
   speculators moved in and bought up much of the land." [A People's
   History of the United States, p. 233] Those farmers who did pay the
   money often had to go into debt to do so, placing an extra burden on
   their labour. Vast tracks of land were also given to railroad and other
   companies either directly (by gift or by selling cheap) or by lease (in
   the form of privileged access to state owned land for the purpose of
   extracting raw materials like lumber and oil). Either way, access to
   land was restricted and those who actually did work it ended up paying
   a tribute to the landlord in one form or another (either directly in
   rent or indirectly by repaying a loan).

   This was the land monopoly in action (also see sections [16]F.8.3,
   [17]F.8.4 and [18]F.8.5 for more details) and from it sprang the tools
   and equipment monopoly as domestic industry could not survive in the
   face of industrial capitalism. Confronted with competition from
   industrial production growing rich on the profits produced from cheap
   labour, the ability of workers to own their own means of production
   decreased over time. From a situation where most workers owned their
   own tools and, consequently, worked for themselves, we now face an
   economic regime were the tools and equipment needed for work are owned
   by a capitalists and, consequently, workers now work for a boss.

   The tools and equipment monopoly is similar to the land monopoly as it
   is based upon the capitalist denying workers access to their capital
   unless the worker pays tribute to the owner for using it. While capital
   is "simply stored-up labour which has already received its pay in full"
   and so "the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and
   nothing more" (to use Tucker's words), due to legal privilege the
   capitalist is in a position to charge a "fee" for its use. This is
   because, with the working class legally barred from both the land and
   available capital (the means of life), members of that class have
   little option but to agree to wage contracts which let capitalists
   extract a "fee" for the use of their equipment (see [19]section B.3.3).

   Thus the capital-monopoly is, like the land monopoly, enforced by the
   state and its laws. This is most clearly seen if you look at the main
   form in which such capital is held today, the corporation. This is
   nothing more than a legal construct. "Over the last 150 years," notes
   Joel Bakan, "the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to
   becomes the world's dominant economic institution." The law has been
   changed to give corporations "limited liability" and other perks in
   order "to attract valuable incorporation business . . . by jettisoning
   unpopular [to capitalists] restrictions from . . . corporate laws."
   Finally, the courts "fully transformed the corporation onto a 'person,'
   with its own identity . . . and empowered, like a real person, to
   conduct business in its own name, acquire assets, employ workers, pay
   taxes, and go to court to assert its rights and defend its actions." In
   America, this was achieved using the 14th Amendment (which was passed
   to protect freed slaves!). In summary, the corporation "is not an
   independent 'person' with its own rights, needs, and desires . . . It
   is a state-created tool for advancing social and economic policy." [The
   Corporation, p. 5, p. 13, p. 16 and p. 158]

   Nor can it be said that this monopoly is the product of hard work and
   saving. The capital-monopoly is a recent development and how this
   situation developed is usually ignored. If not glossed over as
   irrelevant, some fairy tale is spun in which a few bright people saved
   and worked hard to accumulate capital and the lazy majority flocked to
   be employed by these (almost superhuman) geniuses. In reality, the
   initial capital for investing in industry came from wealth plundered
   from overseas or from the proceeds of feudal and landlord exploitation.
   In addition, as we discuss in [20]section F.8, extensive state
   intervention was required to create a class of wage workers and ensure
   that capital was in the best position to exploit them. This explicit
   state intervention was scaled down once the capital-monopoly found its
   own feet.

   Once this was achieved, state action became less explicit and becomes
   focused around defending the capitalists' property rights. This is
   because the "fee" charged to workers was partly reinvested into
   capital, which reduced the prices of goods, ruining domestic industry
   and so narrowing the options available to workers in the economy. In
   addition, investment also increased the set-up costs of potential
   competitors, which continued the dispossession of the working class
   from the means of production as these "natural" barriers to entry into
   markets ensured few members of that class had the necessary funds to
   create co-operative workplaces of appropriate size. So while the land
   monopoly was essential to create capitalism, the "tools and equipment"
   monopoly that sprang from it soon became the mainspring of the system.

   In this way usury became self-perpetuating, with apparently "free
   exchanges" being the means by which capitalist domination survives. In
   other words, "past initiations of force"
   combined with the current state protection of property ensure that
   capitalist domination of society continues with only the use of
   "defensive" force (i.e. violence used to protect the power of property
   owners against unions, strikes, occupations, etc.). The "fees"
   extracted from previous generations of workers has ensured that the
   current one is in no position to re-unite itself with the means of life
   by "free competition" (in other words, the paying of usury ensures that
   usury continues). Needless to say, the surplus produced by this
   generation will be used to increase the capital stock and so ensure the
   dispossession of future generations and so usury becomes
   self-perpetuating. And, of course, state protection of "property"
   against "theft" by working people ensures that property remains theft
   and the real thieves keep their plunder.

   As far as the "ideas" monopoly is concerned, this has been used to
   enrich capitalist corporations at the expense of the general public and
   the inventor. Patents make an astronomical price difference. Until the
   early 1970s, for example, Italy did not recognise drug patents. As a
   result, Roche Products charged the British National Health Service over
   40 times more for patented components of Librium and Valium than
   charged by competitors in Italy. As Tucker argued, the patent monopoly
   "consists in protecting investors and authors against competition for a
   period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward
   enormously in excess of the labour measure of their services, -- in
   other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of
   years and facts of nature, and the power to extract tribute from others
   for the use of this natural wealth which should be open to all." [The
   Individualist Anarchists, p. 86]

   The net effect of this can be terrible. The Uruguay Round of global
   trade negotiations "strengthen intellectual property rights. American
   and other Western drug companies could now stop drug companies in India
   and Brazil from 'stealing' their intellectual property. But these drug
   companies in the developing world were making these life-saving drugs
   available to their citizens at a fraction of the price at which the
   drugs were sold by the Western drug companies . . . Profits of the
   Western drug companies would go up . . . but the increases profits from
   sales in the developing world were small, since few could afford the
   drugs . . . [and so] thousands were effectively condemned to death,
   becomes governments and individuals in developing countries could no
   longer pay the high prices demanded." [Joseph Stiglitz, Globalisation
   and its discontents, pp. 7-8] While international outrage over AIDS
   drugs eventually forced the drug companies to sell the drugs at cost
   price in late 2001, the underlying intellectual property rights regime
   was still in place.

   The irony that this regime was created in a process allegedly about
   trade liberalisation should not go unnoticed. "Intellectual property
   rights," as Noam Chomsky correctly points out, "are a protectionist
   measure, they have nothing to do with free trade -- in fact, they're
   the exact opposite of free trade." [Understanding Power, p. 282] The
   fundamental injustice of the "ideas monopoly" is exacerbated by the
   fact that many of these patented products are the result of government
   funding of research and development, with private industry simply
   reaping monopoly profits from technology it did not spend a penny to
   develop. In fact, extending government aid for research and development
   is considered an important and acceptable area of state intervention by
   governments and companies verbally committed to the neo-liberal agenda.

   The "ideas monopoly" actually works against its own rationale. Patents
   suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. The research
   scientists who actually do the work of inventing are required to sign
   over patent rights as a condition of employment, while patents and
   industrial security programs used to bolster competitive advantage on
   the market actually prevent the sharing of information, so reducing
   innovation (this evil is being particularly felt in universities as the
   new "intellectual property rights" regime is spreading there). Further
   research stalls as the incremental innovation based on others' patents
   is hindered while the patent holder can rest on their laurels as they
   have no fear of a competitor improving the invention. They also hamper
   technical progress because, by their very nature, preclude the
   possibility of independent discovery. Also, of course, some companies
   own a patent explicitly not to use it but simply to prevent someone
   else from so doing.

   As Noam Chomsky notes, today trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA
   "impose a mixture of liberalisation and protection, going far beyond
   trade, designed to keep wealth and power firmly in the hands of the
   masters." Thus "investor rights are to be protected and enhanced" and a
   key demand "is increased protection for 'intellectual property,'
   including software and patents, with patent rights extending to process
   as well as product" in order to "ensure that US-based corporations
   control the technology of the future" and so "locking the poor majority
   into dependence on high-priced products of Western agribusiness,
   biotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry and so on." [World Orders,
   Old and New, p. 183, p. 181 and pp. 182-3] This means that if a company
   discovers a new, more efficient, way of producing a drug then the
   "ideas monopoly" will stop them and so "these are not only highly
   protectionist measures . . . they're a blow against economic efficiency
   and technological process -- that just shows you how much 'free trade'
   really is involved in all of this." [Chomsky, Understanding Power, p.
   282]

   All of which means that the corporations (and their governments) in the
   developed world are trying to prevent emergence of competition by
   controlling the flow of technology to others. The "free trade"
   agreements are being used to create monopolies for their products and
   this will either block or slow down the rise of competition. While
   corporate propagandists piously denounce "anti-globalisation" activists
   as enemies of the developing world, seeking to use trade barriers to
   maintain their (Western) lifestyles at the expense of the poor nations,
   the reality is different. The "ideas monopoly" is being aggressively
   used to either suppress or control the developing world's economic
   activity in order to keep the South as, effectively, one big sweatshop.
   As well as reaping monopoly profits directly, the threat of "low-wage"
   competition from the developing world can be used to keep the wage
   slaves of the developed world in check and so maintain profit levels at
   home.

   This is not all. Like other forms of private property, the usury
   produced by it helps ensure it becomes self-perpetuating. By creating
   "legal" absolute monopolies and reaping the excess profits these
   create, capitalists not only enrich themselves at the expense of
   others, they also ensure their dominance in the market. Some of the
   excess profits reaped due to patents and copyrights are invested back
   into the company, securing advantages by creating various "natural"
   barriers to entry for potential competitors. Thus patents impact on
   business structure, encouraging the formation and dominance of big
   business.

   Looking at the end of the nineteenth century, the ideas monopoly played
   a key role in promoting cartels and, as a result, laid the foundation
   for what was to become corporate capitalism in the twentieth century.
   Patents were used on a massive scale to promote concentration of
   capital, erect barriers to entry, and maintain a monopoly of advanced
   technology in the hands of western corporations. The exchange or
   pooling of patents between competitors, historically, has been a key
   method for the creation of cartels in industry. This was true
   especially of the electrical appliance, communications, and chemical
   industries. For example, by the 1890s, two large companies, General
   Electric and Westinghouse, "monopolised a substantial part of the
   American electrical manufacturing industry, and their success had been
   in large measure the result of patent control." The two competitors
   simply pooled their patents and "yet another means of patent and market
   control had developed: corporate patent-pooling agreements. Designed to
   minimise the expense and uncertainties of conflict between the giants,
   they greatly reinforced the position of each vis--vis lesser
   competitors and new entrants into the field." [David Noble, American By
   Design, p. 10]

   While the patent system is, in theory, promoted to defend the small
   scale inventor, in reality it is corporate interests that benefit. As
   David Noble points out, the "inventor, the original focus of the patent
   system, tended to increasingly to 'abandon' his patent in exchange for
   corporate security; he either sold or licensed his patent rights to
   industrial corporations or assigned them to the company of which he
   became an employee, bartering his genius for a salary. In addition, by
   means of patent control gained through purchase, consolidation, patent
   pools, and cross-licensing agreements, as well as by regulated patent
   production through systematic industrial research, the corporations
   steadily expanded their 'monopoly of monopolies.'" As well as this,
   corporations used "patents to circumvent anti-trust laws." This reaping
   of monopoly profits at the expense of the customer made such
   "tremendous strides" between 1900 and 1929 and "were of such
   proportions as to render subsequent judicial and legislative effects to
   check corporate monopoly through patent control too little too late."
   [Op. Cit., p. 87, p. 84 and p. 88]

   Things have changed little since Edwin Prindle, a corporate patent
   lawyer, wrote in 1906 that:

     "Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling
     competition. They occasionally give absolute command of the market,
     enabling their owner to name the price without regard to the cost of
     production. . . Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly
     . . . The power which a patentee has to dictate the conditions under
     which his monopoly may be exercised had been used to form trade
     agreements throughout practically entire industries." [quoted by
     Noble, Op. Cit., p. 89]

   Thus, the ruling class, by means of the state, is continually trying to
   develop new forms of private property by creating artificial scarcities
   and monopolies, e.g. by requiring expensive licenses to engage in
   particular types of activities, such as broadcasting or producing
   certain kinds of medicines or products. In the "Information Age," usury
   (use fees) from intellectual property are becoming a much more
   important source of income for elites, as reflected in the attention
   paid to strengthening mechanisms for enforcing copyright and patents in
   the recent GATT agreements, or in US pressure on foreign countries
   (like China) to respect such laws.

   This allows corporations to destroy potential competitors and ensure
   that their prices can be set as high as possible (and monopoly profits
   maintained indefinitely). It also allows them to enclose ever more of
   the common inheritance of humanity, place it under private ownership
   and charge the previous users money to gain access to it. As Chomsky
   notes, "U.S. corporations must control seeds, plant varieties, drugs,
   and the means of life generally." [World Orders, Old and New, p. 183]
   This has been termed "bio-piracy" (a better term may be the new
   enclosures) and it is a process by which "international companies [are]
   patenting traditional medicines or foods." They "seek to make money
   from 'resources' and knowledge that rightfully belongs to the
   developing countries" and "in so doing, they squelch domestic firms
   that have long provided the products. While it is not clear whether
   these patents would hold up in court if they were effectively
   challenged, it is clear that the less developed countries many not have
   the legal and financial resources required to challenge the patent."
   [Joseph Stiglitz, Op. Cit., p. 246] They may also not withstand the
   economic pressures they may experience if the international markets
   conclude that such acts indicate a regime that is less that business
   friendly. That the people who were dependent on the generic drugs or
   plants can no longer afford them is as irrelevant as the impediments to
   scientific and technological advance they create.

   In other words, capitalists desire to skew the "free market" in their
   favour by ensuring that the law reflects and protects their interests,
   namely their "property rights." By this process they ensure that
   co-operative tendencies within society are crushed by state-supported
   "market forces."
   As Noam Chomsky puts it, modern capitalism is "state protection and
   public subsidy for the rich, market discipline for the poor."
   ["Rollback, Part I", Z Magazine] Self-proclaimed defenders of "free
   market" capitalism are usually nothing of the kind, while the few who
   actually support it only object to the "public subsidy" aspect of
   modern capitalism and happily support state protection for property
   rights.

   All these monopolies seek to enrich the capitalist (and increase their
   capital stock) at the expense of working people, to restrict their
   ability to undermine the ruling elites power and wealth. All aim to
   ensure that any option we have to work for ourselves (either
   individually or collectively) is restricted by tilting the playing
   field against us, making sure that we have little option but to sell
   our labour on the "free market" and be exploited. In other words, the
   various monopolies make sure that "natural" barriers to entry (see
   [21]section C.4) are created, leaving the heights of the economy in the
   control of big business while alternatives to capitalism are
   marginalised at its fringes.

   So it is these kinds of property and the authoritarian social
   relationships that they create which the state exists to protect. It
   should be noted that converting private to state ownership (i.e.
   nationalisation) does not fundamentally change the nature of property
   relationships; it just removes private capitalists and replaces them
   with bureaucrats (as we discuss in [22]section B.3.5).

B.3.3 Why is property exploitative?

   To answer this question, consider the monopoly of productive "tools and
   equipment." This monopoly, obtained by the class of industrial
   capitalists, allows this class in effect to charge workers a "fee" for
   the privilege of using the monopolised tools and equipment.

   This occurs because property, in Proudhon words, "excommunicates" the
   working class. This means that private property creates a class of
   people who have no choice but to work for a boss in order to pay the
   landlord rent or buy the goods they, as a class, produce but do not
   own. The state enforces property rights in land, workplaces and so on,
   meaning that the owner can bar others from using them and enforce their
   rules on those they do let use "their" property. So the boss "gives you
   a job; that is, permission to work in the factory or mill which was not
   built by him but by other workers like yourself. And for that
   permission you help to support him for . . . as long as you work for
   him." [Alexander Berkman, What is Anarchism?, p. 14] This is called
   wage labour and is, for anarchists, the defining characteristic of
   capitalism.

   This class of people who are dependent on wages to survive was
   sometimes called the "proletariat" by nineteenth century anarchists.
   Today most anarchists usually call it the "working class" as most
   workers in modern capitalist nations are wage workers rather than
   peasants or artisans (i.e. self-employed workers who are also exploited
   by the private property system, but in different ways). It should also
   be noted that property used in this way (i.e. to employ and exploit
   other people's labour) is also called "capital" by anarchists and other
   socialists. Thus, for anarchists, private property generates a class
   system, a regime in which the few, due to their ownership of wealth and
   the means of producing it, rule over the many who own very little (see
   [23]section B.7 for more discussion of classes).

   This ensures that the few can profit from the work of others:

     "In the capitalist system the working man cannot [in general] work
     for himself . . . So . . . you must find an employer. You work for
     him . . . In the capitalist system the whole working class sells its
     labour power to the employing class. The workers build factories,
     make machinery and tools, and produce goods. The employers keep the
     factories, the machinery, the tools and the goods for themselves as
     their profit. The workers only get their wages . . . Though the
     workers, as a class, have built the factories, a slice of their
     daily labour is taken from them for the privilege of using those
     factories . . . Though the workers have made the tools and the
     machinery, another slice of their daily labour is taken from them
     for the privilege of using those tools and machinery . . .

     "Can you guess now why the wisdom of Proudhon said that the
     possessions of the rich are stolen property? Stolen from the
     producer, the worker."
     [Berkman, Op. Cit., pp. 7-8]

   Thus the daily theft/exploitation associated with capitalism is
   dependent on the distribution of wealth and private property (i.e. the
   initial theft of the means of life, the land, workplaces and housing by
   the owning class). Due to the dispossession of the vast majority of the
   population from the means of life, capitalists are in an ideal position
   to charge a "use-fee" for the capital they own, but neither produced
   nor use. Having little option, workers agree to contracts within which
   they forfeit their autonomy during work and the product of that work.
   This results in capitalists having access to a "commodity" (labour)
   that can potentially produce more value than it gets paid for in wages.

   For this situation to arise, for wage labour to exist, workers must not
   own or control the means of production they use. As a consequence, are
   controlled by those who do own the means of production they use during
   work hours. As their labour is owned by their boss and as labour cannot
   be separated from the person who does it, the boss effectively owns the
   worker for the duration of the working day and, as a consequence,
   exploitation becomes possible. This is because during working hours,
   the owner can dictate (within certain limits determined by worker
   resistance and solidarity as well as objective conditions, such as the
   level of unemployment within an industry or country) the organisation,
   level, duration, conditions, pace and intensity of work, and so the
   amount of output (which the owner has sole rights over even though they
   did not produce it).

   Thus the "fee" (or "surplus value") is created by owners paying workers
   less than the full value added by their labour to the products or
   services they create for the firm. The capitalist's profit is thus the
   difference between this "surplus value," created by and appropriated
   from labour, minus the firm's overhead and cost of raw materials (See
   also section C.2 -- [24]"Where do profits come from?").

   So property is exploitative because it allows a surplus to be
   monopolised by the owners. Property creates hierarchical relationships
   within the workplace (the "tools and equipment monopoly" might better
   be called the "power monopoly") and as in any hierarchical system,
   those with the power use it to protect and further their own interests
   at the expense of others. Within the workplace there is resistance by
   workers to this oppression and exploitation, which the "hierarchical .
   . . relations of the capitalist enterprise are designed to resolve this
   conflict in favour of the representatives of capital." [William
   Lazonick, Op. Cit., p. 184]

   Needless to say, the state is always on hand to protect the rights of
   property and management against the actions of the dispossessed. When
   it boils down to it, it is the existence of the state as protector of
   the "power monopoly" that allows it to exist at all.

   So, capitalists are able to appropriate this surplus value from workers
   solely because they own the means of production, not because they earn
   it by doing productive work themselves. Of course some capitalists may
   also contribute to production, in which case they are in fairness
   entitled to the amount of value added to the firm's output by their own
   labour; but owners typically pay themselves much more than this, and
   are able to do so because the state guarantees them that right as
   property owners (which is unsurprising, as they alone have knowledge of
   the firms inputs and outputs and, like all people in unaccountable
   positions, abuse that power -- which is partly why anarchists support
   direct democracy as the essential counterpart of free agreement, for no
   one in power can be trusted not to prefer their own interests over
   those subject to their decisions). And of course many capitalists hire
   managers to run their businesses for them, thus collecting income for
   doing nothing except owning.

   Capitalists' profits, then, are a form of state-supported exploitation.
   This is equally true of the interest collected by bankers and rents
   collected by landlords. Without some form of state, these forms of
   exploitation would be impossible, as the monopolies on which they
   depend could not be maintained. For instance, in the absence of state
   troops and police, workers would simply take over and operate factories
   for themselves, thus preventing capitalists from appropriating an
   unjust share of the surplus they create.

B.3.4 Can private property be justified?

   No. Even though a few supporters of capitalism recognise that private
   property, particularly in land, was created by the use of force, most
   maintain that private property is just. One common defence of private
   property is found in the work of Robert Nozick (a supporter of "free
   market" capitalism). For Nozick, the use of force makes acquisition
   illegitimate and so any current title to the property is illegitimate
   (in other words, theft and trading in stolen goods does not make
   ownership of these goods legal). So, if the initial acquisition of land
   was illegitimate then all current titles are also illegitimate. And
   since private ownership of land is the basis of capitalism, capitalism
   itself would be rendered illegal.

   To get round this problem, Nozick utilises the work of Locke ("The
   Lockean Proviso") which can be summarised as:

   1. People own themselves and, consequently, their labour.
       2. The world is initially owned in common (or unowned in Nozick's
       case.)
       3. By working on common (or unowned) resources, people turn it into
       their own property because they own their own labour.
       4. You can acquire absolute rights over a larger than average share
       in the world, if you do not worsen the condition of others.
       5. Once people have appropriated private property, a free market in
       capital and labour is morally required.

   However, there are numerous flaws in this theory. Most obvious is why
   does the mixing of something you own (labour) with something owned by
   all (or unowned) turn it in your property? Surely it would be as likely
   to simply mean that you have lost the labour you have expended (for
   example, few would argue that you owned a river simply because you swam
   or fished in it). Even if we assume the validity of the argument and
   acknowledge that by working on a piece of land creates ownership, why
   assume that this ownership must be based on capitalist property rights?
   Many cultures have recognised no such "absolute" forms of property,
   admitted the right of property in what is produced but not the land
   itself.

   As such, the assumption that expending labour turns the soil into
   private property does not automatically hold. You could equally argue
   the opposite, namely that labour, while producing ownership of the
   goods created, does not produce property in land, only possession. In
   the words of Proudhon:

     "I maintain that the possessor is paid for his trouble and industry
     . . . but that he acquires no right to the land. 'Let the labourer
     have the fruits of his labour.' Very good; but I do not understand
     that property in products carries with it property in raw material.
     Does the skill of the fisherman, who on the same coast can catch
     more fish than his fellows, make him proprietor of the
     fishing-grounds? Can the expertness of a hunter ever be regarded as
     a property-title to a game-forest? The analogy is perfect, -- the
     industrious cultivator finds the reward of his industry in the
     abundancy and superiority of his crop. If he has made improvements
     in the soil, he has the possessor's right of preference. Never,
     under any circumstances, can he be allowed to claim a property-title
     to the soil which he cultivates, on the ground of his skill as a
     cultivator.

     "To change possession into property, something is needed besides
     labour, without which a man would cease to be proprietor as soon as
     he ceased to be a laborer. Now, the law bases property upon
     immemorial, unquestionable possession; that is, prescription. Labour
     is only the sensible sign, the physical act, by which occupation is
     manifested. If, then, the cultivator remains proprietor after he has
     ceased to labor and produce; if his possession, first conceded, then
     tolerated, finally becomes inalienable, -- it happens by permission
     of the civil law, and by virtue of the principle of occupancy. So
     true is this, that there is not a bill of sale, not a farm lease,
     not an annuity, but implies it . . .

     "Man has created every thing -- every thing save the material
     itself. Now, I maintain that this material he can only possess and
     use, on condition of permanent labor, -- granting, for the time
     being, his right of property in things which he has produced.

     "This, then, is the first point settled: property in product, if we
     grant so much, does not carry with it property in the means of
     production; that seems to me to need no further demonstration. There
     is no difference between the soldier who possesses his arms, the
     mason who possesses the materials committed to his care, the
     fisherman who possesses the water, the hunter who possesses the
     fields and forests, and the cultivator who possesses the lands: all,
     if you say so, are proprietors of their products -- not one is
     proprietor of the means of production. The right to product is
     exclusive --jus in re; the right to means is common -- jus ad rem."
     [What is Property?, pp. 120-1]

   Proudhon's argument has far more historical validity than Nozick's.
   Common ownership of land combined with personal use has been the
   dominant form of property rights for tens of thousands of years while
   Nozick's "natural law" theory dates back to Locke's work in the seventh
   century (itself an attempt to defend the encroachment of capitalist
   norms of ownership over previous common law ones). Nozick's theory only
   appears valid because we live in a society where the dominant form of
   property rights are capitalist. As such, Nozick is begging the question
   -- he is assuming the thing he is trying to prove.

   Ignoring these obvious issues, what of Nozick's actual argument?

   The first thing to note is that it is a fairy tale, it is a myth. The
   current property system and its distribution of resources and ownership
   rights is a product of thousands of years of conflict, coercion and
   violence. As such, given Nozick's arguments, it is illegitimate and the
   current owners have no right to deprive others of access to them or to
   object to taxation or expropriation. However, it is precisely this
   conclusion which Nozick seeks to eliminate by means of his story. By
   presenting an ahistoric thought experiment, he hopes to convince the
   reader to ignore the actual history of property in order to defend the
   current owners of property from redistribution. Nozick's theory is only
   taken seriously because, firstly, it assumes the very thing it is
   trying to justify (i.e. capitalist property rights) and, as such, has a
   superficial coherence as a result and, secondly, it has obvious
   political utility for the rich.

   The second thing to note is that the argument itself is deeply flawed.
   To see why, take (as an example) two individuals who share land in
   common. Nozick allows for one individual to claim the land as their own
   as long as the "process normally giving rise to a permanent
   bequeathable property right in a previously unowned thing will not do
   so if the position of others no longer at liberty to use the thing is
   therefore worsened." [Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 178] Given this,
   one of our two land sharers can appropriate the land as long as they
   can provide the other with a wage greater than what they were
   originally producing. If this situation is achieved then, according to
   Nozick, the initial appropriation was just and so are all subsequent
   market exchanges. In this way, the unowned world becomes owned and a
   market system based on capitalist property rights in productive
   resources (the land) and labour develop.

   Interestingly, for a ideology that calls itself "libertarian" Nozick's
   theory defines "worse off" in terms purely of material welfare,
   compared to the conditions that existed within the society based upon
   common use. However, the fact is if one person appropriated the land
   that the other cannot live off the remaining land then we have a
   problem. The other person has no choice but to agree to become employed
   by the landowner. The fact that the new land owner offers the other a
   wage to work their land that exceeds what the new wage slave originally
   produced may meet the "Lockean Proviso" misses the point. The important
   issue is that the new wage slave has no option but to work for another
   and, as a consequence, becomes subject to that person's authority. In
   other words, being "worse off" in terms of liberty (i.e. autonomy or
   self-government) is irrelevant for Nozick, a very telling position to
   take.

   Nozick claims to place emphasis on self-ownership in his ideology
   because we are separate individuals, each with our own life to lead. It
   is strange, therefore, to see that Nozick does not emphasise people's
   ability to act on their own conception of themselves in his account of
   appropriation. Indeed, there is no objection to an appropriation that
   puts someone in an unnecessary and undesirable position of
   subordination and dependence on the will of others.

   Notice that the fact that individuals are now subject to the decisions
   of other individuals is not considered by Nozick in assessing the
   fairness of the appropriation. The fact that the creation of private
   property results in the denial of important freedoms for wage slaves
   (namely, the wage slave has no say over the status of the land they had
   been utilising and no say over how their labour is used). Before the
   creation of private property, all managed their own work, had
   self-government in all aspects of their lives. After the appropriation,
   the new wage slave has no such liberty and indeed must accept the
   conditions of employment within which they relinquish control over how
   they spend much of their time. That this is issue is irrelevant for the
   Lockean Proviso shows how concerned about liberty capitalism actually
   is.

   Considering Nozick's many claims in favour of self-ownership and why it
   is important, you would think that the autonomy of the newly
   dispossessed wage slaves would be important to him. However, no such
   concern is to be found -- the autonomy of wage slaves is treated as if
   it were irrelevant. Nozick claims that a concern for people's freedom
   to lead their own lives underlies his theory of unrestricted
   property-rights, but, this apparently does not apply to wage slaves.
   His justification for the creation of private property treats only the
   autonomy of the land owner as relevant. However, as Proudhon rightly
   argues:

     "if the liberty of man is sacred, it is equally sacred in all
     individuals; that, if it needs property for its objective action,
     that is, for its life, the appropriation of material is equally
     necessary for all . . . Does it not follow that if one individual
     cannot prevent another . . . from appropriating an amount of
     material equal to his own, no more can he prevent individuals to
     come." [Op. Cit., pp. 84-85]

   The implications of Nozick's argument become clear once we move beyond
   the initial acts of appropriation to the situation of a developed
   capitalist economy. In such a situation, all of the available useful
   land has been appropriated. There is massive differences in who owns
   what and these differences are passed on to the next generation. Thus
   we have a (minority) class of people who own the world and a class of
   people (the majority) who can only gain access to the means of life on
   terms acceptable to the former. How can the majority really be said to
   own themselves if they may do nothing without the permission of others
   (the owning minority).

   Under capitalism people are claimed to own themselves, but this is
   purely formal as most people do not have independent access to
   resources. And as they have to use other peoples' resources, they
   become under the control of those who own the resources. In other
   words, private property reduces the autonomy of the majority of the
   population and creates a regime of authority which has many
   similarities to enslavement. As John Stuart Mill put it:

     "No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great
     majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a
     place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an
     employer, and debarred by the accident of birth to both the
     enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others
     inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is
     an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have
     hitherto struggles, the poor are not wrong in believing." ["Chapters
     on Socialism", Principles of Political Economy, pp. 377-8]

   Capitalism, even though claiming formal self-ownership, in fact not
   only restricts the self-determination of working class people, it also
   makes them a resource for others. Those who enter the market after
   others have appropriated all the available property are limited to
   charity or working for others. The latter, as we discuss in [25]section
   C, results in exploitation as the worker's labour is used to enrich
   others. Working people are compelled to co-operate with the current
   scheme of property and are forced to benefit others. This means that
   self-determination requires resources as well as rights over one's
   physical and mental being. Concern for self-determination (i.e.
   meaningful self-ownership) leads us to common property plus workers'
   control of production and so some form of libertarian socialism - not
   private property and capitalism.

   And, of course, the appropriation of the land requires a state to
   defend it against the dispossessed as well as continuous interference
   in people's lives. Left to their own devices, people would freely use
   the resources around them which they considered unjustly appropriated
   by others and it is only continuous state intervention that prevents
   then from violating Nozick's principles of justice (to use Nozick's own
   terminology, the "Lockean Proviso" is a patterned theory, his claims
   otherwise not withstanding).

   In addition, we should note that private ownership by one person
   presupposes non-ownership by others ("we who belong to the proletaire
   class, property excommunicates us!" [Proudhon, Op. Cit., p. 105]) and
   so the "free market" restricts as well as creates liberties just as any
   other economic system. Hence the claim that capitalism constitutes
   "economic liberty" is obviously false. In fact, it is based upon
   denying liberty for the vast majority during work hours (as well as
   having serious impacts on liberty outwith work hours due to the effects
   of concentrations of wealth upon society).

   Perhaps Nozick can claim that the increased material benefits of
   private property makes the acquisition justified. However, it seems
   strange that a theory supporting "liberty" should consider well off
   slaves to be better than poor free men and women. As Nozick claims that
   the wage slaves consent is not required for the initial acquisition, so
   perhaps he can claim that the gain in material welfare outweighs the
   loss of autonomy and so allows the initial act as an act of
   paternalism. But as Nozick opposes paternalism when it restricts
   private property rights he can hardly invoke it when it is required to
   generate these rights. And if we exclude paternalism and emphasise
   autonomy (as Nozick claims he does elsewhere in his theory), then
   justifying the initial creation of private property becomes much more
   difficult, if not impossible.

   And if each owner's title to their property includes the historical
   shadow of the Lockean Proviso on appropriation, then such titles are
   invalid. Any title people have over unequal resources will be qualified
   by the facts that "property is theft" and that "property is despotism."
   The claim that private property is economic liberty is obviously
   untrue, as is the claim that private property can be justified in terms
   of anything except "might is right."

   In summary, "[i]f the right of life is equal, the right of labour is
   equal, and so is the right of occupancy." This means that "those who do
   not possess today are proprietors by the same title as those who do
   possess; but instead of inferring therefrom that property should be
   shared by all, I demand, in the name of general security, its entire
   abolition." [Proudhon, Op. Cit., p. 77 and p. 66] Simply put, if it is
   right for the initial appropriation of resources to be made then, by
   that very same reason, it is right for others in the same and
   subsequent generations to abolish private property in favour of a
   system which respects the liberty of all rather than a few.

   For more anarchist analysis on private property and why it cannot be
   justified (be it by occupancy, labour, natural right, or whatever)
   consult Proudhon's classic work
   What is Property?. For further discussion on capitalist property rights
   see [26]section F.4.

B.3.5 Is state owned property different from private property?

   No, far from it.

   State ownership should not be confused with the common or public
   ownership implied by the concept of "use rights." The state is a
   hierarchical instrument of coercion and, as we discussed in [27]section
   B.2, is marked by power being concentrated in a few hands. As the
   general populate is, by design, excluded from decision making within it
   this means that the state apparatus has control over the property in
   question. As the general public and those who use a piece of property
   are excluded from controlling it, state property is identical to
   private property. Instead of capitalists owning it, the state
   bureaucracy does.

   This can easily be seen from the example of such so-called "socialist"
   states as the Soviet Union or China. To show why, we need only quote a
   market socialist who claims that China is not capitalist. According to
   David Schweickart a society is capitalist if, "[i]n order to gain
   access to means of production (without which no one can work), most
   people must contract with people who own (or represent the owners of)
   such means. In exchange for a wage of a salary, they agree to supply
   the owners with a certain quantity and quality of labour. It is a
   crucial characteristic of the institution of wage labour that the goods
   or services produced do not belong to the workers who produce them but
   to those who supply the workers with the means of production."
   Anarchists agree with Schweickart's definition of capitalism. As such,
   he is right to argue that a "society of small farmers and artisans . .
   . is not a capitalist society, since wage labour is largely absent." He
   is, however, wrong to assert that a "society in which most of [the]
   means of production are owned by the central government or by local
   communities -- contemporary China, for example -- is not a capitalist
   society, since private ownership of the means of production is not
   dominant." [After Capitalism, p. 23]

   The reason is apparent. As Emma Goldman said (pointing out the
   obvious), if property is nationalised "it belongs to the state; this
   is, the government has control of it and can dispose of it according to
   its wishes and views . . . Such a condition of affairs may be called
   state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense
   Communistic" (as that needs the "socialisation of the land and of the
   machinery of production and distribution" which "belong[s] to the
   people, to be settled and used by individuals or groups according to
   their needs" based on "free access"). [Red Emma Speaks, pp. 406-7]

   Thus, by Schweickart's own definition, a system based on state
   ownership is capitalist as the workers clearly do not own the own means
   of production they use, the state does. Neither do they own the goods
   or services they produce, the state which supplies the workers with the
   means of production does. The difference is that rather than being a
   number of different capitalists there is only one, the state. It is, as
   Kropotkin warned, the "mere substitution . . . of the State as the
   universal capitalist for the present capitalists." [Evolution and
   Environment, p. 106] This is why anarchists have tended to call such
   regimes "state capitalist" as the state basically replaces the
   capitalist as boss.

   While this is most clear for regimes like China's which are
   dictatorships, the logic also applies to democratic states. No matter
   if a state is democratic, state ownership is a form of exclusive
   property ownership which implies a social relationship which is totally
   different from genuine forms of socialism. Common ownership and use
   rights produce social relationships based on liberty and equality.
   State ownership, however, presupposes the existence of a government
   machine, a centralised bureaucracy, which stands above the members of
   society, both as individuals and as a group, and has the power to
   coerce and dominate them. In other words, when a state owns the means
   of life, the members of society remain proletarians, non-owners,
   excluded from control. Both legally and in reality, the means of life
   belong not to them, but to the state. As the state is not an
   abstraction floating above society but rather a social institution made
   up of a specific group of human beings, this means that this group
   controls and so effectively owns the property in question, not society
   as a whole nor those who actually use it. Just as the owning class
   excludes the majority, so does the state bureaucracy which means it
   owns the means of production, whether or not this is formally and
   legally recognised.

   This explains why libertarian socialists have consistently stressed
   workers' self-management of production as the basis of any real form of
   socialism. To concentrate on ownership, as both Leninism and social
   democracy have done, misses the point. Needless to say, those regimes
   which have replaced capitalist ownership with state property have shown
   the validity the anarchist analysis in these matters ("all-powerful,
   centralised Government with State Capitalism as its economic
   expression," to quote Emma Goldman's summation of Lenin's Russia [Op.
   Cit., p. 388]). State property is in no way fundamentally different
   from private property -- all that changes is who exploits and oppresses
   the workers.

   For more discussion see section H.3.13 -- [28]"Why is state socialism
   just state capitalism?"

References

   1. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB3.html#secb32
   2. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB3.html#secb33
   3. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB4.html#secb43
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   5. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB3.html#secb35
   6. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB2.html
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  12. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html
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  20. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html
  21. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secC4.html
  22. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB3.html#secb35
  23. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB7.html
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  25. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secCcon.html
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  27. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB2.html
  28. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH3.html#sech313
