Steve Roth: The Evolution of Ownership...get off my lawn

Steve Roth writes about The Evolution of Ownership…get off my lawn.

It’s not hard to see the crucial fact in this little fable: property rights are ultimately based, purely, on coercion and violence. If the controlling tribe can’t enforce its claim through violence, their “ownership” is meaningless. And those claimed rights are not just inclusionary (the one tribe can use the water). Property rights are primarily or even purely exclusionary. Owners can prevent others from doing anything with the owners’ property. Get off my lawn!

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In the modern world we’ve largely outsourced the execution of that violence, the monopoly on violence, to government. If a family sets up a picnic on “your” lawn, you can call the police and they’ll remove that family — by force if necessary. And we’ve multiplied the institutional and legal mechanics and machinery of ownership a zillionfold. The whole world’s financial machinery — the immensely complex web of claims, claims on claims, and claims on claims on claims, endlessly and densely iterated and interwoven — all comes down to (the threat of) physical force.

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Balance sheets, accounting, and their associated concepts (assets, liabilities, net worth, equity and equity shares) are the technology humans have developed to manage, control, and allocate our (violence-enforced) ownership claims, a crucial portion of our social relationships. At first the balance sheets were only implicit — when the tribe first laid claim to the spring. But humans started writing them down and formalizing them, tallying those ownership and obligation relationships, thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. (Coins weren’t invented till about 800 BC.)

Emphasis Mine

Roth gives a succinct history of property. The importance of the state in enforcing those rights are critical.

Different property rights are the basis of social classes. Slavery treats slaves as property. Feudalism treats a tract of land along with its people as property. Capitalism treats the products of labour as property.

In a Capitalist society, the government is not neutral, nor are the police, the justice system, or the army. They all exist to enforce and protect Capitalist property rights.

Socialist control of a Capitalist government is untenable because of the inherent contradiction between what the government protects and promotes, and what the mass of the people want.

A Socialist revolution means the sweeping away of the Capitalist instruments of power, and replacing them with Socialist ones.