A few scattered thoughts on how private property—and specifically inheritable, alienable property in productive land—functions in a society.

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First, private property drives inequality and, with it, coercive hierarchies. This is one of Walter Scheidel’s premises in “The Great Leveler”—unless acted upon by exogenous forces, private property accrues to a smaller and smaller elite through sheer dumb luck.

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Scheidel relied on research like this, which find that chance differences in luck—a bad harvest that forces a family to sell property to another farmer, say—are reproduced from generation to generation and accumulate over time.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2792081/

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The end result, all else being equal, is a hereditary land-owning elite that can live off rents extracted from people unlucky enough to have been born into non-propertied families (aka most of us chumps).

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen-Shennan/publication/49835911_Property_and_Wealth_Inequality_as_Cultural_Niche_Construction/links/53eb68c40cf2593ba7087c8b/Property-and-Wealth-Inequality-as-Cultural-Niche-Construction.pdf

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Private property also strips us of our freedom of mobility, especially once all available land has been claimed by private owners. Private property mediates access either to owners or anyone lucky enough to have access to resources to pay extractive rents.

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Consider this, from Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall’s brilliant “Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philsophy.” To be without access to property is to be *criminalized.*

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As James Scott notes in “Against the Grain,” elites have to invest in mechanisms of bondage and oppression if workers have the choice to flee. But once all land has been staked and claimed, there’s nowhere to go but into the holdings of other members of the same elite class.

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Apropos my recent thread on guesting and hospitality, *mobility* is a key enabler of freedom and mitigation of conflict. Widerquist and McCall contrast the mobility of the hunter-gatherer...

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...to densely settled horticultural and agricultural societies, in which competing, exclusive claims on land correlate to violence:

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Rather than chalk this difference in violence to *density* rather than exclusionary property, consider that many societies mediate access to land not by guarding perimeters, but by negotiating membership in the community holding communal land rights.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2742484?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

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In this context, we can see things like guesting and hospitality, adoption, migration, the great tribal confederacies of the classical world, etc, as strategies for mediating access to common resources *without* violence.

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Widerquist & McCall note common property, unlike private, is typically managed nonviolently: “We have said that people in the band are ‘obliged’ to share what they have, but the enforcement mechanism is almost entirely criticism and ridicule, not coercion or interference.”

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Anyone interested in the management of common property should read Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons,” for which she won the Nobel Prize and which is full of examples of voluntary, localized control of common resources:

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Lastly, I’ll note that private property is inextricably linked to the formation of states, whether by driving the creation of propertied elites who turn economic into political power, or by making laborers “legible” to extractive elites.

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As James Scott has observed throughout his work, states are obsessed with making their public’s *legible* to state apparatuses—last names, permanent addresses, unique identifying numbers, etc—that allow states to tax, conscript, etc, more efficiently.

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Private property, which seems to have emerged in essentially its modern form with the emergence of the earliest Mesopotamian states, is probably no different. Scott notes in “Against the Grain” that unsettled peoples without private property are very difficult to tax:

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I would not be surprised if we were to discover some day that private property emerged organically and was seized by early states as a tool of taxation, or if it was *imposed* on early farmers as a means of making their yields more easily traceable by extractive states.

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As @davidwengrow notes in “What Makes Civilization?” the administrative records of the earliest states feature very little concern for irrigation or other organization of arable land, which had been managed communally for thousands of years before the emergence of states.

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Rather, they were interested in connecting specific patches of land with specific owners or families. Private property is an extractive state’s dream: clearly delineated, surveyed and assessed for productive value, linked to a specific individual.

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In short, if private property didn’t drive the emergence of extractive states, then those states would have to invent it. It’s too useful a tool of control and extraction, even if we don’t delve too deeply into the role Enclosure plays in capitalist exploitation.

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