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Critique of Copyright
For a future without Ownership

Private and Public Property

Private Property: A problem

In a capitalist economy, ownership of economic resources and power is distributed according to who is best able to pay for them. This is private property. The concept most people have of the institution of private property does not describe its authoritarian nature: it explains private property as the right of individuals to possess things.

In fact, this is the least remarkable and most minor aspect of private property as an institution. Long before the market economy, people possessed things. What, then, makes private property such a noteable way of organizing economics?

Most us have enough money to purchase at least a minimal amount of consumable goods, such as food and cars and television sets. What most of us don't have is enough money to afford the machinery of economic power: land, housing, businesses, factories, etc. These things are placed into the hands of a wealthy few (the "owning class", to use the lexicon of radical politics). What makes the rest of us is essentially the owned class.

To make a living, the owned class is forced to sell its labor to work the machinery that the owning class controls through private property. When Karl Marx was writing his various critiques of capitalism, the time frame was the industrial revolution, and the "machinery of economic power" was pretty often the literal machinery of factories. At this point in history, however, we are transforming into what might be called a post-industrial capitalism. Now economic power comes through the ownership of the offices of the service sector, or the machinery of the computers that run the information economy.

Work is the main occupation of most people's lives, and so the question of who owns the workplace is a crucial one. It is crucial because the hierarchy of bosses and bosses of bosses is degrading and unhealthy for the employees that have to spend eight hours a day trying to survive in a position of subservience within it.

But it is also critical because who owns the workplace and the economic resources decides what kind of work those workplaces and resources will got towards doing. Right now most labor is expended upon things that haven't been seen as necessary until very recently: producing a ridiculous variety of consumer goods, flipping burgers at fast food joints, and working counters and convenience stores.

Farmers comprise less than 5% of the population of the United States. Consider that 90% of the experience of the human species has been as tribes of pre-civilized hunter-gathereres. Consider further that the vast majority of the remaining 10% of our time as a species was spent in a variety of pre-industrial agricultural societies. In other words, for an incomprehensible amount of time, most people's working lives were spent mainly with securing food to eat in the form of growing, hunting, or gathering it. In other words, most people spend most of their time working at activities that were literally necessary for the survival of people. Now most of us spend our on-the-clock hours at activities that really have nothing to do with the survival of humans at all.

Looking at it this way, it's difficult to not ask why this shift has occured. The most common answer offered is improved standard of living, but it's not alltogether clear that we are better off now than we were running around hunting buffalo. Yes, the average life span is longer, and yes, we have large-screen televisions now. But on the other hand, if the few primitive societies that haven't been wiped out by the expansion inherent to civilization offer any indication, hunter-gatherers only work four hours a day (if you can call it work--hunting is an enjoyable enough activity that to this day people do it for sport, despite our society being structured to make it unnecessary, and picking berries is enough fun that tourists will pay money to do it at pick-your-own-berry stands in the contry). They also got far more hours of sleep on average, and napped frequently. Without advocating a primitivist solution to the problems of our current society, I think we can learn something from this example.

The reason we have gone from four-hour leisurely work days to eight-hour highly stressful ones is that the people who actually do the work have never gotten to decide what to do with the instruments of economic power. If you really gave them the choice, most people would probably choose more free time to pursue the things in life that inspire them and give them joy over some stuff they could go buy, but the choice is never really offered. Capitalism has placed this power into the hands of an elite few through private property, who decide who to put these resources to use based on what they blieve will make them the most money selling their products back to the rest of the population.

Private property is authoritarian in ways that extend beyond the work day. Once you walk out of work to return home, you are sucked back into it. You pay rent on your apartment or house right back to the owning class in return for a place to sleep at night, and pay money for groceries to them in return for survival. Then you buy any of a wide variety of other consumables to distract you from alienation, depression, powerlessness.

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