Selected Citations on Peer Property and Common(s) Ownership

For the sources of the citations, see here.

“The commons breaks with the individualistic vision as conceived by the capitalist tradition, a vision that has progressively transferred the idea of rights to individual people. The commons take inclusion and everyone’s equal right to access as its starting point, while property and the idea of the state that upholds it is based on a rivalry of goods, and thus on exclusion and concentration of power in institutions that insure and protect it. The commons try to situate themselves outside the subject-object reductionism that would lead to their commodification. The commons cannot be commodified (because they cannot be transferred, or alienated), and they cannot be the object of individualised possession. And so they express a qualitative logic, not a quantitative one. We do not ‘have’ a common good, we ‘form part of’ the common good, in that we form part of an ecosystem, of a system of relations in an urban or rural environment; the subject is part of the object. Common goods are inseparably united, and they unite people as well as communities and the ecosystem itself.”

– Joan Subirats

Imagine a world where property is owned because it is being well stewarded rather than ownership being a priori to stewardship. Much of the worst behavior we see in the economy would be impossible, because the second any firm stopped stewarding their properties for the benefit of the larger community, they would no longer own their properties (intellectual or otherwise). In this world ownership is derived from good stewardship, rather than the other way around.“- Alan Rosenblith

“Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase “proceeds of labor”, objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. … labor [will] become not only a means of life but life’s prime want

– Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

The difference between open access and defined property rights (private or common property), by contrast, is the difference between an unregulated and a regulated condition. The difference is fundamental. – Achim Lerch

At the center of the digital revolution, with the executable bitstreams that make everything else possible, propertarian regimes not only do not make things better, they can make things radically worse. Property concepts, whatever else may be wrong with them, do not enable and have in fact retarded progress. In the network society, anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable political philosophy … because defection is impossible, free riders are welcome, which resolves one of the central puzzles of collective action in a propertarian social system.

– Eben Moglen, in his essay Anarchism Triumphant

For Stevenson, a “private property, common property, open access trichotomy” ultimately exists. He compares these three forms in terms of group limitation and extraction limitation. Characteristic of the common property form is that both the group and the extent of resource use are limited by the individual members. (Source: STEVENSON, G.G: Common Property Economics.)

“In Roman law, property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing….Human beings can have relations with one another. But what would it mean to have a ‘relation’ with a thing?….[But,] Imagine a man trapped on a desert island. He might develop extremely personal relationships with, say, the palm trees….and, if he’s there too long, he might well end up giving them all names and spending half his time having imaginary conversations with them. Still, does he ‘own’ them? ….Clearly, then, property is not really a relation between a person and a thing. It’s an understanding or arrangement between people concerning things.”

~ David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

As long as we focus on types of ownership, we seem to be leaving out all who are not owners. That is one reason I argue for a civic based economy rather than a property-based economy. I am certainly for employee ownership and worker co-ops. One needs to remember, however, that property and ownership are legal concepts, or civic concepts. In “Civilizing the Economy I tried to develop a civic view of ownership and of property. The civic is about membership and the rights of members to control their lives, rather than have their lives control by owners. Ownership, in my view, should rest on a civic foundation.”

– Marvin Brown (email, August 2013)

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