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In his essay “From Commodities to Assets : Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance”, Jesús Suaste Cherizola usefully distinguishes “ownership” and “possession”. Ownership, as ownership in a social setting, is defined as follows:
“Ownership, indeed, is a type of relation that goes from a subject that ‘tells’, to a community that ‘believes’. Saying and believing are the two parts that, as we saw, constitute assets: a subject that claims and a community that abides.”
The terms “tells” and “believes” do quite a bit of work here and that is why they are in quotes. Telling can be done with the sword as well as the tongue or the pen and historically that has often been the case. Now, batons, rubber bullets and real real bullets can perform this task, before or after the lawyers. In the lyrics of Warren Zevon, “Bring lawyers, guns and money”. The term “believes” can encompass bends the knee or acquiesces (to superior force).
Possession means to have in one’s possession whether legally or not, according to the laws of ownership. As Jesús defines it:
“Possession designates a physical relation between a subject and a thing. Ownership designates a symbolic relation between human beings.”
When it comes to such useful definitions, we can also make a similar delineation between property and territory. Here I use the term “territory” not in the sense that nation states use and define the term, inside or outside international law. Instead, I use the term territory in the biological sense: the sense in which animals, and perhaps even plants, define and use their territory. Animals define their territories by actions, including actions which constitute or leave signs. An aggressive display is a sign. The scent marking of a territory is a sign. But an animal’s territory is quite different from a human’s property. The purpose of a territory is that it provides access to food and access to spaces for mating, breeding and other activities necessary to the individual and species. The animal in question, if successful in acquiring and defending territory, meets the possession requirement as Jesús defines it. It is not ownership of the territory in the human property sense.
When it comes to social and eusocial species, the territory, or much of it, is possessed in common. Many parts of the territory are ranged over by the entirety of the band (unless perhaps it is a species with castes like ants). This is not to say there are not pecking orders which occur proximally, literally within screeching, pecking or hitting distances or sometimes over chase distances. Humans as a eusocial species with many breeding pairs show the standard need for shared territory as a species and further show needs for individual territories for pair, often breeding pair, and familial behaviours. Again, the need biologically is for territory and a mix of exclusive and in common territories. The need biologically, socially, eusocially and communally is NOT for extensive, exclusive property and all that property entails under late stage capitalism.
We see the conflictual dynamic between the exclusive property concept and eusocial territorial geography play our over time, that is historically. The commons are enclosed and the peasant or indigent must find other ways of obtaining or “earning” part of their food requirements or otherwise starve and die. Yet roads, paths and rights of way remain, perforce must remain, or the movement necessary for trade, commerce and other activities cannot proceed. Indeed roads and paths are necessary too for the movement of the lord’s proxy or own enforcers; troops, sheriffs, bailiffs, gamekeepers and so on. The public square is necessary for the market. Of course in the long run, some of this gets enclosed too. Public roads become tollways, bridges become tollways. “Whatever the traffic will bear”, as Veblen so pithily puts it.
Yet the need for territory and territory in common, as opposed to property, remains. Most businesses require public areas for customers and shared areas for workers. Customers need their own communal territory, as it were, and personal territory, usually called personal space, to walk the aisles of any supermarket. Territory is dynamic not static. Property is a much more “static-ised” or congealed and inflexible set of relations. Shopping malls become communal spaces (in a sad decline of the quality of human culture it must be said) while still being the property of the property tycoon or rentier.
The “static-ised” (made static) and more inflexible set of relations enforced by property operate against the flexibility required by a eusocial and now crowded species to not only operate daily but to deal with new environmental challenges like climate change and all it brings like wild-fires and sea level rise and also to deal with new challenges like new zoonotic diseases, COVID-19 being the latest. Capitalism is often lauded for its dynamism, usually in overthrowing earlier socioeconomic relations, as in feudal relations, for example. What sadly is not noted is its sclerotic freezing of all relations into those necessary to conform to the needs and instructions of propertied capitalism via the rituals of capitalisation and its concomitant “Veblenian” sabotage of industry and society.
This grotesque and disastrous failure of capitalism (it is nothing less than this) has become painfully apparent with the failure to supress and eradicate the pathogen SARS-CoV-2 and the consequent pandemic progress of the disease it causes, COVID-19. Capitalism has found it necessary to sabotage public health to keep rentier income flowing. The push to stay open or open up, for business, in the face of the pandemic, thus unleashing ensuing and worsening waves of the pandemic plus accelerating the appearance of faster transmitting and immune/vaccine escaping mutants, has been nothing short of the abandonment of the ideal and practices of public and preventative health” a 150 year tradition (approximately and maybe longer) in the West and speaking just of the West for the moment.
The push to stay open or open up, for business has not discriminated between the essential and the non-essential. All business must be opened up regardless. Pubs, clubs, restaurants, bars, tourism and professional sport are treated as being as important and as essential as the more traditional essential activities and industries of a civilised (citified, urbanised and suburbanised) society. The concept of essential industry, using the term “industry” in its standard sense and its more nuanced Veblenian sense, has been lost. This is what happens when the rituals of capital must be applied across the board with regard only to capitalisation, assets and income and without regard to real outcomes; in that human health issues and the morbidity and death unleashed by COVID-19, in this case, are ignored and backgrounded so that the poor, the old and the vulnerable will die at a higher rate. It is a form of Social Darwinism which ignores the fact that we are a eusocial and cooperative species and that vulnerable members (vulnerable in one sense or another) can still make valuable contributions if protected and assisted. As it is now, the right of an airline tycoon, a sports franchise owner or a petite bourgeois coffee shop owner to make money is greater than the right of a vulnerable person to live. The airline tycoon and franchise owner are also given enormous government subsidies to keep doing what they are doing. Never mind that our climate would benefit from curtailing the high energy expenditures of non-essential flying (e.g. tourism) and building non-essential infrastructure like billion dollar sporting stadiums.
The operations of property mean that too many people do not have viable territory to live on. We must take the term “territory” here in its widest sense as physical and social territory.
To finish on a speculative note, ultimately property and money would have to be abolished to achieve a genuinely eusocial (that is socialist) society and civilization. To fail to entertain this level of imaginative hope is to hobble human imagination itself and to underplay emergent and evolutionary possibilities, not to mention revolutionary possibilities. What is finally needed to my mind is to go beyond the empirical and ontologically supportable investigation of what capitalism REALLY is (CasP adding considerably to and going beyond Marxian and Veblenian conceptions) and to propose how property and money could be abolished or partly and significantly abolished by radically circumscribing their operations. After analysis and empirical investigation of the extant situation, crucial and initially necessitous as it is, must come advocacy and action for radical change. Otherwise, what are we doing? Otherwise, it is academic analysis interminable. This last criticism is far more applicable to RWER than it is to the CasP project. Jonathan Nitzan has enunciated a program of analysis outside the academic mainstream and outside the received academies which leads to or is a precursor to new praxis. Are we ready to move on to the praxis recommendations and how would they be furthered?
Note: This is a tentative set of notes about these concepts and is posted to encourage debate along these lines. I see the manifest failure of capitalism to deal with climate change and emerging novel zoonoses, two huge challenges we now face, as fully bound up with the prescriptive inflexibility of capitalist rituals, which of course CasP theory and CasP empirical research greatly aid us to see clearly.
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Rowan,
You might find the work of American Legal Realists of the early 20th century of interest. They viewed property as a “bundle of rights” of which the right of possession is only one. They explain differences between different types of property based on which of the bundle of rights are present or absent. For example, a patent by law is considered a form of private property, but it only provides its owner the right to exclude others from practicing the patented invention, not the right to practice his own invention.
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Scot,
Thank you for that reply. Having no legal training nor any knowledge of legal history, I was not aware of the American Legal Realists and their movement. Nonetheless, having some analytical ability (I hope) and curiosity, I had begun to think in that general arena or maybe at the edges of it. In developing my own views on a number of matters, I coined the term Left Realism. By that term, I meant being Left politically without being unrealistically idealistic about human nature or the contest of ideas in socioeconomics. I meant retaining pragmatism about the necessity of force in some circumstances, civil and military, but I also meant considerably more than that. However, I soon found Left Realism was a term already coined and used in criminology. Let us take the Wikipedia explanation and definition:
“Left realism emerged in criminology from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the left’s failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working-class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventive measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.” – Wikipedia.
My developed views of a political-economic Left Realism would certainly appropriate wholesale and acknowledge the Left Realism view of criminology. In a social democracy or the approach to same, a thorough-going Left Realism would not leave right realism “to monopolize the political agenda on law and order” nor to monopolize the political agenda on military strategy and geostrategy. Left Realism would continue to advocate Democratic Socialism, not the dictatorship of the party, which so often degenerates into the dictatorship of the Leader framed within the cult of personality.
To get back to the point, Realism can mean two things in political economy. It can mean alignment with empiricism or it can mean alignment with conservatism as obeisance (by the masses) to tradition and authority which latter are accretions and powers developed and determined by those in power, past and present. To propose the abolition of, or the emergence and evolution away from, property and money is not new. It typically meets conceptual resistance from the right first as a declaration of its being unrealistic and then if it shows any sign of actually working anywhere, in any form, it faces violent reactionary resistance or intervention to smash it. If anything, totalitarian leftism seems to be the form leftism is pushed to in order to survive against the violent destruction of any serious initial move to the left over the last hundred plus years.
To be empirical is to be radical. Being empirical is alone a movement to the radical and this is as true in political economy as it is in science and technology, especially but not only when we see empiricism overthrowing or undercutting religious and ideological doctrines and all appeals to tradition and authority. That is precisely what I see CasP doing in relation to political economy. CasP’s appeal to empiricism, science, realism and a realist ontology radically undercuts other traditions of “classical” and even “liberal” political economy, while taking from them that part which is not thus refuted or is ethically supportable in terms of consequentialist ethics. In contrast, tradition and authority are unempirical at the ideational and impact level (though conservatives and the reactionary right will instrumentally, pragmatically and amorally employ production science) and based on fundamentally unempirical appeals to their own authority and power. A conservative statement that something is “unrealistic”, like abolishing or at least very significantly reducing the prerogatives of property ownership, is really an exercise in ossification (freezing political economy relations in their current form) and an exercise in “extantism”.
“Extantism” is another of those terms I attempted to invent only to find it was already appropriated for a much more limited concept. And again the legal eagles, as the masters of semantic imperialism, were there before me! “Extantism” is a term in international law. Extantism is developed as follows (the best reference I could find quickly):
“Membership of an international or regional organisation legitimises the existence of a small state and confirms its territorial integrity and sovereignty; this is a concept known as extantism (Maass, 2017, p.108). Constructivist literature posits that the institutionalisation of rules and norms in international organisations make these open to debate and question for all member states regardless of their size. Consequently, small states have the opportunity to influence these rules and norms, whereas without international organisations these would presumably be imposed upon them by larger states. “Tiny, yet in Charge: Small States and the Council of the European Union Presidency” – George Hintzen.
In my thinking, “extantism” is the doctrine that only that which became extant was possible. In the stronger form it even asserts that only the current extant will be possible, indefinitely into the future. So, contemporary extantism views current arrangements as the only ones which could have arisen and which are permanently guaranteed as the only arrangements possible in future. It’s an “end of history” theory. Clearly new arrangements have arisen in the past but now history has ended and capitalism is eternal. It is obvious from my clear sarcasm that I do not subscribe to this form of extantism.
Now, this is a bit of a riff on your reply, Scot, I hope not too discursive, but I think it places me in that camp which does not accept capitalism as eternal. It places me in the camp which says we humans must radically change away from the arrangements of capitalism or else see our socioeconomic system collapse with certainty and ourselves go extinct, very likely. It further places me in the camp which says this is possible, including the radical abolition or radical curtailing of property and property rights (not possessions), and of money in its current form and perhaps even in any form other than as tokens as “permissions to consume a fair amount with regard to the fair and equitable needs of all and with regard to particular circumstance”.
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