A meditation on the nature of property by Andrew Robinson:

“The reason there is resistance to ending property is that property has become connected to existential territory. This is also what is meant by “owning” something in Stirner. I suspect that people will always have existential territories, though they may be more mobile and open-ended that they are today. In mass societies, people use the “private” sphere as a way to construct existential territories outside/against or niched out from the mainstream – the way in which sentimental possessions or personally arranged homes become focuses of attachment for example (this is not restricted to the rich either – homeless people have their “turf” and their few items in a bag or their personal box or blanket, shanty-town dwellers have lovingly constructed shacks, and so on). Taking away someone’s existential territory is experienced by the recipient as extremely violent – indeed, it is a central aspect of practices of psychological torture (depriving of, or violently relocating, familiar meanings).

But the mapping of property rights with existential territory is incomplete at best, absurd at worst. Property is by definition alienable, whereas existential territory is inalienable. The risk of losing one’s home, treasured possessions, the ability to keep up a standard of living, and the broader existential context (community, public space, etc) is essential to the regime of statist capitalism. Sometimes it is mapped in anti-proprietary ways which right-libertarians can make sense of – eminent domain, land grabs and suchlike. At other times though, it is built into property relations – foreclosures, accumulation-by-dispossession, unemployment, “creative destruction” of “failing” businesses and life-models, taking property to meet debts, not to mention punitive regimes. The spectre of libertarianism is a kind of authoritarian collectivism in which personal or small-group existential territories are radically denied in the interests of overall justice or of common ownership. This is certainly a frightening prospect, but far closer to the capitalist model than is admitted. There are ways to posit a right to existential territory, or a maximising-equalising of existential territory, without linking it to alienable property. These can be found for instance in urban practices such as squatting and tagging, in theorists such as Stirner, Proudhon and Guattari, and in customary and indigenous distributive systems.

Also, a lot of what is deemed “property” in property-systems is only pseudo-private, and is in fact used collectively, as a public service or good – and in fact could not exist without public use (stores, clubs, cinemas, malls, pubs, etc; and more abstractly, sites such as factories, schools, etc). These kinds of sites are imagined to be equivalent in legal terms to private homes. Often, freedom would be enhanced and existential territory rendered safer by treating these as public rather than private spaces (for instance, against arbitrary exclusions).

I would extend the idea of scarcity in viewing it as a psychological-existential aspect of a dominant regime, not simply a fact which is wrongly stated. Property is connected to the ideology of scarcity. If something is seen as scarce then individuals or groups will seek to control or exclusively “own” it. Systems of property often create “materially” the kind of scarcity they posit ideologically – for instance, by making things scarce by hoarding or overusing them or by restricting their use. Indigenous epistemologies are already “beyond” scarcity, in the idea of “primitive abundance” (Sahlins). Scarcity is an invention of systems of control. I suspect that abundance as an existential condition is possible at virtually any technological level (in the sense of what types of tools exist); it has to do with the ways in which spaces and ecologies are arranged. In a situation of ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ or expanded indigenous epistemology, complexity is constructed by addition – the new is embraced by being articulated onto the already-existing, by bricolage, and in this way the network or web of connections is expanded, intensified and enriched. This contrasts with capitalist accumulation in which something has to be represented (reduced) to be added, and in which addition is in tension with subtraction – destroying what is unproductive or stands in the way.”