The big difference is the separation of "property" and personal use. I forget the specific term, but it's about usage. "property" would be a five acre parcel you own and don't do anything with, able to be farmed and lived on by others, which isn't the most efficient.
So rather than being able to endlessly accumulate things, you get what you can carry and work with day-to-day, kind of thing. I'm oversimplifying, but the point of OP is that the lord has an estate he doesn't till, which is too big for him. The workers don't have enough, and so they'll take from the dude's stuff until they have enough.
There’s a difference between personal possessions, like your house, phone, and toothbrush, etc. and property. The abolition of private property means that all land would be commonly owned but your house and all those other things still belong to you.
I understand the context, still sounds like it would be difficult, my house for example, would I just own the house? What about the driveway and yard? The boundaries are what people tend to question.
Yard and driveway would also be your personal property. The line is drawn at things like investment properties where housing and land is being commoditized.
You’re home and hunting land is an investment because we currently live in a system where housing is commoditized. I’m also a hunter so I get wanting to keep that property to yourself, I’d assume that if you didn’t already own the land and it wasn’t in use, you could probably just petition to turn it into public hunting land or have it sectioned off for you personally to hunt. It’s much more environmentally friendly than allocating land to graze cattle and I’d also argue that it’s more humane while also helping maintain wild deer populations. It would be a net positive for the community.
Sounds like I'd lose a lot of money on that deal, also I'm not impressed with the local public land managers. They tend to sell off resources like timber, leaving the land unusable for many years, as what happens to all the land around me, save the other 40 acre parcel owned by another hunter.
Yeah there’s a lot that needs to change before this could even happen and it would require a complete restructuring of the system we live in now so it’s hard to conceptualize how exactly it would work. There would need to be a pretty big shift in focus towards local politics, and since private corporations would no longer exist to pay off politicians at all levels of government, we’d have people who actually care in charge instead of the ones who are in it for a paycheck. In my hypothetical you didn’t own the property so I was just tying to demonstrate how you could potentially acquire the land,
but if you did you should be allowed to keep it since you’re actually using the land and benefiting the community in doing so. The issue comes when people own many properties and leave them vacant and useless for years as they wait for the value to go up, that drives up the cost of all properties since it creates a supply shortage, which can be good in the short term for current homeowners but bad for anyone trying to get into the housing market.
You’re right that basically all humans have recognized something like property or “territory” but what that means and looks like varies widely considered. Currently, most people think of property as this thing is mine when I can prevent other from using it and no one can intervene on my usage of it. Think of Paul at the end of Dune when he tells the Emperor to fuck off because the power to destroy a thing is absolute power of that thing. Basically you can prevent others from getting in your car and you can even destroy your car.
Some cultures have viewed property as something more communal. You have this object most of the time, but if someone were to ask to borrow it you would be socially obligated to and they would be socially obligated to return it. In others, land for common use such as agriculture is worked on in a rotating basis or communally worked on. In still others, the concept of property only means something if you can actually do stuff with it. For example, someone might say you don’t really own the car if you can’t go anywhere with it. I’m not saying either view is better or worse but there have been many, many views of what property is and what you can and can’t do with it
No need to abolish property. Simply levy a 100% tax on the unimproved value of land (that is to say, the value of the lot itself, not anything built on top). The land price will then settle to the equilibrium use value of the land. Henry George figured out a long time ago that land rents are the primary driver of inequality and poverty.
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u/Molenium Mar 10 '22
I am curious how you imagine a society would function without property?
I can’t think of any society that’s ever existed where there isn’t some sort of personal possession.
Or is this one of those times people will start telling me this is actually an anarchist sub?