Haven’t written in a while… been busy I suppose.
I was on Saltspring for almost a week. Housesitting… for $400 a day. My responsibilities included, caring for a dog, and existing within an agreed upon set of physical boundaries (the property). That was crazy. That’s like a year’s salary for me. So I might buy a sail boat… go sailing.
I’ve been thinking about this whole private property thing. You know. All land is owned by someone and all must require purchasing or permission to use. And that’s kind of bunk. This land is free dagnammit and so am I by-golly and fer fuck’s sakes I’m gonna help myself.
The story, as I understand it from the editor’s introduction to John Locke’s Second Treatise, is as follows:
In the beginning, god made everything.. and man (his words, not mine). And everything was for man to use for his sustenance and happiness. All men are created equal and so we have equal right to sustenance and happiness, meaning land. And we needed no government because we are an inherently rational race and so we know that we need to get along in order to work together and all be happy.
He figures that the fairest way to split up the booty is to say, well everyone gets to ‘own’ the land they work. So you mix you labour with ‘raw’ land and its yours. And this also means that you can only ‘own’ so much land as you can work. This is a neat way of limiting how much land men can ‘own’.
This all sounds rather fair to me, assuming you modernize it a little and throw in the rights of women and children and brown people and wild plants and animals (perhaps these latter two, first and foremost). And if Johnny had stopped there we almost certainly never would of heard of him. He would have been silenced, killed, burned at the stake for heracy or whatever because had this revelelation been widespread all the rich, royal folk who publish and financially support rich philosophers like Mr. Locke would have themselves been burned for being such greedy little pricks. Perhaps this is as true today as I think it would have been back then.
J.Locke didn’t stop there, however. He added two main clauses. Firstly, he described the introduction of money in the history of man, land and equality. Money in use meant that you could ‘work’ a virtually unlimited amount of land by buying labour from others. And this also meant that you didn’t have to own land for sustenance and happiness because you could buy them (and you’d have to). It was still considered mixing your labour with the land if you had hired help because by buying that labour, it became yours.
His second clause was that our greed would overwhelm our ‘inherent rationality’ that previously kept order. And we would then need an all-powerful government to oversee transaction and punish transgressors of the law, especially those who question the limitless ownership of land by a few. Of course this government would be democratic, with elected representatives. Unfortunately, it was a given for Locke that only those with land would be allowed to vote. I guess if they had let the others vote, they might have had something to say about the concentration of land and power.
Locke wrote in the 1700s or so, and after ‘punishing transgresors’ for long enough, the landless seem to have forgotten that private property as it is currently defined and shared was a completely arbitrary and illogical manifestation benefitting those already rich. Then when you allow nearly everyone to vote, there is no longer any questioning of how things should work. Some of us have not forgotten.
So now, I have two legal choices, work most of my finest hours of life at a job I don’t like (or all of those hours at a job I do like), and trade that for ’sustenance and happiness’ or get a mortgage and still work most of my finest hours at a job I don’t like (or all of them at something I do like, like farming).
Fortunately, there are innumerable illegal option still at my disposal. And the one that has most recently caught my sparkle is squatting on some land, finding and growing food and building a floating shack to live in. Should be pretty exciting.
And I would love some help. So if anyone out there would like to come and take back a slice of the pie that was ‘legally’ stolen from us. We can all float on, happily and sustained ever after. C’mon, I’ve got just the spot.
Love,
Max.
Posts
I too have always been puzzled by private property. Who were the people who sold it in the first place? The first settlers came over from Europe and owned property. But who did they buy it from? The royalty back in Europe? They certainly had no right to sell it, especially since they had never laid a foot on it. The entire province of B.C. legally belongs to the natives, yet we still buy and sell property as if it belongs to us exclusively.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago I went on a trip to Mexico and visited a Mayan community. In their village when someone wants to have their own house, they just find a place where there is room, go into the jungle and get some wood and build a house. I am very jealous of their lifestyle. I have always wanted to live like that but I don't know how. I am frustrated by my need for money.
I read a book a while ago called "The Right to Useful Unemployment" by Ivan Illich. The book itself is poorly written but the idea behind it I found very inspiring. It talks a lot about how government regulations take away our freedom to do things for ourselves and force us to work, to pay money to have other people (well trained professionals) do that work for us. I also feel that we have lost a lot of the knowledge of how to do a lot of things for ourselves and I am very sad about that. I wish that my parents had taught me more.
Jen