Anarchy: Is Private Property Public Theft?

Introduction to the July 2002 meeting of HKPC’s Kowloon Branch

By Stephen Peplow

From our perspective at the end of a century which has seen more bloodshed and revolution than most, it is easy to scoff at the 19th Century anarchists with their beards and their bombs, their naive faith in the ultimate goodness of human nature and their belief that one more assassination would tip the balance of the world towards social justice.

That first wave of anarchism was set off by the beginnings of centralisation and global capitalism. These two world trends continue and so does anarchism.

The counter-culture movement of the 1960s, John Lennon with his 'Imagine', the riots against the WTO, Green Politics, all have their roots in anarchism.

By their very nature Anarchists are poor organisers and sorting out their beliefs is confused and confusing. There seem to be these main ideas:

1. A hatred of authority, domination, and any sort of hierarchy. Some Anarchists deny the existence of society, saying that society is just a convenient label for interacting individuals. As a result Anarchists work towards the destruction of the nation-state which Anarchists feel infringes their natural rights.

2. A loathing of capitalism because capitalism is the domination of one class by another and requires the legitimating of state institutions.

From these comes the Anarchist rejection of property rights. Property beyond what one needs for one's continued existence is the root of all evil.

Anarchism comes and goes as a reaction against the inequities and corruption of capitalism. For many, anarchy represents a Utopian ideal which we know we lack the generosity of spirit and moral stature ever to attain.

Some individuals do get there, notably Mahatma Gandhi. He was strongly influenced by his friend Leo Tolstoy who borrowed the title of War and Peace and many of its ideas from his friend Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who made the famous remark about property being theft. Gandhi's ideas about non-violence and village communities come from various Anarchist sources.

To illustrate the meaning of property rights to Anarchists I have prepared short speeches in the imagined words of three very different people: Mr Warren Buffet on the need for both property rights and the nation-state; Mr Karl Marx on the need for the nation-state but no property-rights; and Miss Emma Goldman's rejection of both.

First, Mr Warren Buffet:

The fact that you are all sitting here well-fed you owe to the magic of the market. Only the market can efficiently allocate resources. Look at what happened to the Soviet Union when they tried central planning and the command economy. Remember the jokes about Skoda cars? What's the difference between a Skoda and a Jehovah's Witness/ You can always shut the door on a Jehova's Witness.

These markets depend on property rights. I have to be able to trace legal title all the way through. I bought this shirt in Marks and Spencer. They bought it from a wholesaler. He bought it from a factory. The factory bought the cotton from a farmer. At each point money changed hands in exchange for legal title.

Private property allows the market to respond to signals. If I don't like your company's shirts, I don't buy them and you go out of business. So you have to work out exactly what I want to buy and at what price, and then provide it. That's what a market does. That's freedom. Your dollar represents freedom in the same way as your vote.

Now in order for me to buy this shirt I need money. The beauty of money is that everything can be counted in it, even human life. We can fix a price on anything and then trade in that commodity. To get the money to buy the shirt I have two options:

either sell my labour

or

hire labour to work for me. Of course I will need capital to hire that worker but mostly that capital will come from inherited wealth. Let's keep it in the family!

Of course I need to make sure that the transactions in property that I make have legal title. That's why I need a state to make laws about property and then enforce them.

And now that we're globalising again, just like we did in the years up to World War One, I can send my capital anywhere it can find the best return on investment. So I need the same property rights rules worldwide. This property needs to include intellectual property and even things which I didn't invent, such as genes. This is why I think the WTO is so useful.

Now, some losers may say that capitalism concentrates wealth---which means property--- in the hands of a few. Listen to this:

Imagine we all live in a middle-class heaven where extremes of health and wealth have been eliminated. Everyone likes to watch basketball. Michael Jordan decides he will only play home matches if there's an extra ten dollars on every ticket and that all goes to him. If a million people watch him over a season he gets an extra ten million, which is far more than anyone else has. Now everyone who paid the money did so voluntarily. They are happy. Michael Jordan is even happier. Who loses? So what harm is there in a little tension between market efficiency and equitability?

And now Mr Karl Marx

Capitalism is a mode of production which developed from feudalism, which is based on inequality. The property rights you speak of do not describe the relationship between you and your property: they describe the fact that other people are excluded from the benefit stream of your beautiful shirt. Now, if you have a hundred shirts and I have none, is that just?

In your capitalist society you separate the haves from the havenots. Eventually the great majority of the citizens end up as the proletariat, selling their labour. The haves extract the surplus value from the havenots and invest in yet more profit-making ventures.

Your system based on private property has two key weaknesses: whenever you see an economy of scale you have to make use of it. This means large firms taking over smaller ones to cheapen their cost of production and increase their span of control.

And what happens to these workers displaced by your economies of scale? They have no income to buy your products and so we get the continual boom-bust cycle you love.

In fact it is this tension between classes which drives you on. You have commoditised things so much that you only care about the conditions of others when they bear upon your profits and power. Useless waste production is so much better from capital's perspective than any production that benefits the worst off. You need to make sure that the balance of power between you and labour doesn't change---keep the workers fettered to their places!

Your ideological experiment has been very successful. You have managed to convince nearly the whole world that the desire to make money is entirely natural.

Your markets have no ethical sense: they are simply exchanges and do not distribute wealth according to need. For distribution of wealth according to need, we must have a state. Only a state is powerful enough to ensure that everyone has enough to live a good life.

Think what happens when instead of spending all that effort competing we work together collectively. Each citizen contributes according to his ability and receives according to his needs.

Let me finish with an example of why concentration of private ownership is bad. A factory has to decide whether to install some new anti-pollution filters in its chimneys. These will be expensive and will depress profits. But not installing the filters causes costs of another type; raised air pollution. If ownership of the factory is in just a few hands, the filters won't get installed because the loss of profit that each owner will suffer will be perceived as worse than the air pollution which everybody has to suffer. If the ownership is widespread, then the reverse is true.

Now Miss Emma Goldman

I'd like to start with a little thought experiment: imagine that you have the opportunity of building the basic social structures of a new society, defining the liberties which your society will allow and its economic structure. The only thing is that you don't know the position that you will have in this society. Your imagined society will certainly be a lot more equitable than the one we have now, because you will always be afraid that in your imagined society you might be placed somewhere at the bottom.

If you gave everyone in the world the same experiment, the answers would be pretty much the same. So, why doesn't society change to reflect this common view? Because those with a vested interest in preserving the status quo---that is those with private property ---will obviously wish to imply that opposition to the current system cannot work in practice and that a new form of society will only lead to chaos.

Both capitalism and state socialism lead to centralisation and eventually monopoly. In capitalism those with property get more. Those without end up working their whole lives for the bosses and at the end of their working lives receive at best a meagre pension grudgingly paid out to prevent discontent amongst those still working.

The government of the day may appear to care about the poorest but in fact it is in the pay of large corporations.

When the highest aspirations of many students is to end up with an MBA from a prestigious university we can tell that the whole social system is arranged around capitalism and property rights.

State socialism is no better and in many ways worse. Command economies and central planning give bureaucrats huge opportunities for corruption and there is no way that central planning can work.

The real social revolution is centralisation and in the name of human dignity and individuality we protest against this drive towards conformity . We reject the notion of selling our labour and equally buying that of others. We mourn the loss of freedom which comes from belonging to a nation-state.

We believe that human society cannot call itself civilised if some members have great wealth while 800 million people are starving. We therefore believe that private ownership means theft from the rest of the world.