Interesting thoughcapsule by Dave Pollard:

“Pre-civilization and gatherer-hunter cultures have operated successfully for millennia without the concept of property — or what the Bushies hawked for the past eight years as “The Ownership Society”. The objective of such a society is to give you the feeling that you have been given something by the government/powers that be, namely land that belongs to all creatures of the planet, and that you should therefore be grateful, put your nose to the grindstone, and do what the government and your employer tell you.

This is an enormous fraud. As all non-civilization cultures will tell you, we belong to the land, it does not belong to us. We have no “property rights” except to the extent we all agree (brainwashed idiots that we are) that we will accept this fraud as legitimate.

Why and how did we get here? Partly because it was/is expedient for governments and the rich and powerful: If they throw us an ownership bone, then we forfeit the ability to criticize their theft of most of the Earth’s land and resources for their private use. It’s their means of co-opting us. Once we buy the basic fraud, then we also buy the nonsense that we should slave away all our lives to buy enough ‘property’ to be secure and happy, that everyone has the ‘right’ to do what they want with ‘their’ property (pollute it, sell it for speculative gain, acquire more of it cheap through bribery of politicians or extortion of the poor, weak and ignorant, and then flip it for an obscene profit, etc.), and that an economic system that is based on stealing property from others, from nature and from future generations, and ‘developing it’ (while externalizing all of the related costs), is somehow a ‘productive’ economy. The consequence has been the exhausted and unsustainable way of living depicted in the lower of the two charts above.

If we had a world without property, it would work something like this:

1. Land would only be ‘borrowed’ from future generations and from nature, not bought or sold.

2. Any use of land (including gardening and building) would only be done by collective agreement of the community, for the community’s interest. No one outside the community would be able to touch the land in any way, other than visiting it.

3. Use of the land would be zero net footprint — no use would be permitted that lessened the utility of the land for other creatures or for future generations. You could only take out what you replenished. All use would have to be sustainable and be such that, if abandoned, the land would quickly return to its pre-use state. There would therefore be no ‘permanent’ structures, and only local natural materials would be permitted in gardening, building or other uses.

4. Land that could not comfortably and naturally sustain human beings on this basis would not be inhabited by human beings. Most of Canada, ‘my’ country, for example, would be very sparsely inhabited by gatherer-hunter cultures, with the possible exception of the West Coast, which because of its climate and growing season could support a somewhat higher human population density.

Such a world would, of necessity, have a lot fewer people than our world. It would have a steady-state economy — zero growth. It would not have to worry about war, the End of Oil, the End of Water, or climate change, because resource use would be low and population self-limited to the carrying capacity of the land (so there would be no need to go to war for more land or resources). While there might well be short, violent inter-tribal skirmishes over the territory each ‘tribe’ belongs to, these would be brief and limited. Many of the modern problems that are related to over-population (epidemic diseases, chronic diseases, poverty, desertification and soil impoverishment, food insecurity and famine etc. etc.) would not occur. We would live long, healthy, peaceful, joyful lives, sustainably, following the natural process depicted in the top chart above.

The problem, now, is that we can’t get there from here. Too much of our culture — our political, social, economic, health and educational systems for a start — are built on the rocky, crumbling foundation of human entitlement to unlimited population growth and unlimited use of and despoilment of the Earth’s resources. We can’t ‘go back’ from the new man-made systems depicted in the lower chart above, to the natural systems, depicted in the upper chart, that prevailed for virtually all of the millions of years of life on Earth prior to our modern civilization.

Some neo-survivalists I know are hoping that our civilization culture collapses soon and fast, on the assumption that a better world would rise from its ashes. In the first place, that’s a dubious assumption. Many human civilizations have been built on the same faulty basis, and there is no evidence that we would learn from our mistakes and create a new civilization any better than the one that is killing us, and our planet, today. And the collapse will be truly ghastly, and will take decades if not centuries of enormous suffering and misery before it ends. Civilizational collapses have always been like that — the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Anyone wishing for an end of our civilization soon is ignorant of history, and willing to condemn future generations to horrors — horrors that our generation set in motion — with a barbaric ‘ends justify the means’ rationale (the kind of thinking that neocons use). Allowing our civilization to collapse, without doing anything, is unthinkable and cruel.”