Justin S. turns my rhetorical take on property rights into a
syllogism which he then argues is false. This is a little unfair
though certainly not completely out of bounds as itself a rhetorical
strategy. The tradition of private property which descends to those
of us in the West begins with the Roman ius civile. De Ste. Croix
describes this as one of the two areas in which the Roman genius was
superior to the Greek. Locke et al. certainly contribute to that
tradition. That private property may have developed
earlier elsewhere, I would have to concede. Ellen Woods argument
about the importance of the free peasant-citizen in Athenian
civilization is probably correct though it does not obviate de Ste.
Croix's larger argument that the more democratic ('free') the polis,
the more reliant it was on slavery as a labour system. My contention
is that in the the tradition of Western 'civilization' private
property rights in and of themselves both as a concept and as
concrete institution were not inconsistent ab initio with the most
gross and systematic denials of freedom. While it is unlikely that
private property rights had nothing to do with freedom at any time
anywhere, Marx's argument about the dual character of 'free' labour
as being free of both feudal obligation and means of subsistence is
sufficient to emphasize the perhaps universal ambiguity in practice of the
relationship of freedom and property rights. Closer to home the
existence of individual rights forced the ideology of slavery to deny
the humanity of the African, thus leading to a harsher form of
African slavery in Anglophone areas of the New World, than in the
more feudal traditions of Latin America.
In watching the results of recent elections in the West I become more
than ever convinced that while socialism without some form of
democratic control of the state is at the very least unstable, the
converse is at least as true. Democracy without the absence of
exploitation rapidly collapses into meaningless formalities. To
emphasize Justin's original point about the labour theory of
property, there are much more powerful objections to capitalism than
the theft of the rightful property of the working class.
Terry McDonough
