Property vs. possession (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: Value of software)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:10:45 +0200
Hi Graham and list!
3 weeks (27 days) ago Graham Seaman wrote:
On Sun, 9 Jun 2002, Stefan Merten wrote:
That's an interesting thread. Thanks for your thoughtful post :-) .
And thank you for your kind reply :-)
Ain't that civilized ... ;-)
Yes :-) .
Because we're both using a rather relating kind of replying style -
which I like most :-) - I keep most of the history so people can get a
clue of what we are talking about.
I've left it in too, but I haven't added very much this time :-(
I snipped a lot to focus on the point with property / possession.
6 days ago Graham Seaman wrote:
On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Stefan Merten wrote:
My ground is also social. If something takes very little work to copy, it
is impossible to make it into a real commodity. It is possible to pretend
it is a commodity (put a CD in a big empty box), but it is still not
really a commodity, since commodities are based on work to produce things
for exchange in a market. This is a social fact, not a natural one.
Well, I'd question that this is much more social than other sort of
property. Property is something formal which always explicitly needs
to be enforced - so it's not natural in any case.
Ahm - I think I should have written "natural" instead of plain natural
everywhere. Of course there is little / no such thing like nature in
human culture / society.
You can see that
well in South America where landless farm workers occupy private
property not used by their owners. There are of course countless
examples.
The ideology of this society says that you go to work to make money, to
buy goods made by other people who have also worked to make them. Land
doesn't really fit into this well - land ownership is something older than
capitalism, even if it has adapted to it. That 'form of property' was
originally justified by tradition - my ancestors owned this land, so I do
too.
I'm very keen to clarify this point. Indeed I think there is some kind
of "natural" property.
Ah, here I did :-) .
There is even a word for it: possession. In
German it is called "besitzen" which includes "sitzen" which means to
sit and the "be" prefix adds "on something". I guess the English word
has the same roots.
As far as I know, 'possession' comes from Latin 'posse', to 'be able',
or 'to control'. It has the same root as 'potestas', power.
The English word "possibility" contains this root, too. You may be
right.
I don't
think this is any more natural than any other definition of property
(if I remember correctly, late feudal law of ownership was based on
the idea of possession; and one of the innovations of John Locke and
18th century theories of ownership was to replace this idea with one
of ownership based on work.
Yes, I learned that in Oekonux :-) .
The old idea was 'I have a right to this
land because my ancestors seized it 500 years ago';
Well, I don't know whether in the culture of this time made sense.
Today it won't of course. But it's not the possession I meant.
the replacement
idea was 'I have a right to this land because I (and my farmworkers,
but we won't mention them...) have cultivated it so it is now fertile'.)
It seems you're arguing for some kind of natural law, which I don't think
I believe in.
No, not a natural law. However, I'm trying to find out a notion which
carries the parts of the notion of property which are useful in an
emancipatory sense and to separate them from the parts of the notion
of property which are bad for emancipation.
At the moment my central idea is to look at a *social* practice where
in most cases you can pretty clearly identify the possession. Just by
looking at a social situation - may be for some time. Then you'll
recognize that individuals or groups of people are using identifiable
objects. That's what I mean by possession.
I'm arguing, that this possession is more "natural" in the sense you
don't need any formal description of it but you can see it by watching
a social system. I think this is easier to grasp than any formal
contract. That's what I wanted to express by this example...
This type of possession comes from the visible fact that someone is
using something regularly - be it land, a flat or a laptop. There was
one scene in "Dances with Wolf" (I guess this was the English title)
where one of the Red Indians "stole" the cap of the US soldier. He
found it after the soldier has lost it while hunting IIRC. The
community made it clear, that the cap is the possession of the soldier
and so the finder had to give it back to the soldier - which he did
IIRC.
This is a type of property which needs no enforcement by formalized
powers (aka states) as property in general does. Sure there may be
force - like in the example - but it's of another nature I think. May
be it all depends whether a society / group of people is anonymous or
people are in contact with each other?
The possession you mentioned above (my family seized this - so I
posses it) has connections to this concept, but in the end it sounds
more like an abuse of it.
There are plenty of cases where someone uses something regularly but does
not own it.
Of course! I'm not saying this doesn't exist today. It's all around
us. I'm saying that we should think about these simple facts in
another way. Give it more value (not exchange value of course ;-) ).
I don't think the Red Indians owned the land they used.
No. They did not have a contract about it. That is why the Europeans
were able to displace them. Had they had a contract with their kind
Europeans at least had some ideological difficulties.
But for sure they possessed it in the way I tried to point out.
In the early Soviet Union the land was nationalised, but families had a
right to use it, and the right could pass to children, without the family
ever 'owning' it (I think that was the theory, at any rate).
Yes. You are constantly saying what I'd like to focus on: There is
formal thing (ownership, property) and a social fact (possession).
This is a rather old question to me, and I'd really like to see some
progress here.
Maybe you could say more about how the question relates to free software?
Actually I didn't think about it so much in terms of Free Software but
in terms of GPL society. If you like I'm looking for a emancipatory
concept to replace ownership / property with. I thought starting with
the social facts would be a good start.
For most things now, the form of property is justified by work - I worked
to buy this, so I own it. If you have a washing machine and a disk with
Microsoft Word in your house, and I take either, then you will see me as a
thief; the property laws in this case have some social validity. The law
which stops me taking your property limits my freedom, but enhances yours;
and in the end most people accept it as a reasonable compromise. This
is a form of property we are all used to ('unnatural' or not).
But here possession as described above shines through. If you take my
washing machine I can't use it any longer. This is different for trash
like a Word disk ;-) . People rarely care whether their trash is
stolen - because they don't want to use it any longer.
Of course this does not hold very well for means of production owned
by a capitalist. The capitalist him-/herself doesn't use the means of
production directly - so in the sense above s/he doesn't possess them.
Indeed I think this is where people start to question whether this is
legitimate or not.
In my experience, this isn't true - most people don't question the right
of individual capitalists (or more likely shareholders etc) to own the
means of production.
Actually I thought of the times when workers movement has been worth
its name...
This is partly because they accept the idea of 'I
worked to get to where I am today (or my father or grandfather did)'
presented by the owners as being valid, and because they believe that one
day they too could be in the same position. But it's also partly because
of the physical nature of production - if I see a large chemical plant,
I never think 'I could own that instead' - it doesn't interest me at all,
and it won't fit in my house ;-).
But the situation would change if you would be a chemist who would
really like to use that chemical plant to produce some product s/he is
keen to have. Just because it's part of his/her self-unfolding. And
even more when s/he is member of a group of chemists who would like to
materialize their ideas to give them to the world.
Sure, I can argue 'we should all own
that intead of it belonging to a few people', but the jump from the
current situation to one where we all own the means of production is too
great - it needs a revolution first, and everyone knows how wrong
revolutions can go...
Why being so negative ;-) ? This is of course very much GPL society
thinking but I think this is how you need to think of it. The people
using a chemical plant possess it just the way you are possessing the
computer you read this mail on.
And thus this is the point where you "need" some
formal enforcement - laws, police, states, all that.
I don't think so - generally, you can't steal the means of production,
they tend to be too big... :-)
But if I copy your disk, leaving the original, you won't see me as a
thief, because I have not deprived you of anything.
Yes. With digital copy the notion of theft in the sense of possession
becomes meaningless because I can still use my possession.
So for Microsoft to
have me treated as a thief requires a new ideology ('copying is theft')
and new laws which restrict both our freedoms. This is a different form of
property from the old one; not more or less natural - they're all social -
but different, worse, and easier to fight, since it conflicts with the
old one that people are used to.
In a way it's similar to the property rights on means of production.
Their only sense is to reserve the capitalist the exclusive right to
make money with it. This is similar how M$ argues.
I don't think it is similar to property rights on means of production.
Means of production don't make money on their own;
So don't do intellectual property rights.
they are part of a
whole system which employs people. People work with the means of
production to make products; they are paid for their work and so can live.
You may think this system is wrong, but people do survive in it, they
do buy houses, bring up children, etc.
I'm not neglecting that - though for a considerable number of people
this is not valid any more. However, they can use Free Software, too.
So they have a working example right at hand.
May be I could my point a bit clearer now.
An oekonux argument might be: 'They have value, so it's normal to produce
them as commodities. Unless there are groups of chemists designing new
medicines without pay, there is no non-commodity alternative to the
current system'. Maybe that's unfair to oekonux, but it sounds a logical
consequence to me - oder nicht?
May be that's the practical basis of all steps towards a GPL society:
That knowledge workers of all disciplines in their Free time start to
develop Free goods.
I'm starting to feel that this emphasis is wrong; it depends too much on
generalising from what happened with software to other industries.
Seems you're starting a *very* interesting thought here! I already
wondered sometimes where we have to leave the example of Free Software
and may be you found (one of) the points.
My
feeling is that, for example, the right to produce generic medicines and
defense of free software against patent law are two sides of the same
thing; and that the success of either (preferably both) makes the
gpl-society a little more possible - even if there has been no 'hobbyist'
type development on the medical side.
Yes. May be I have to drop the thought that it always needs to be that
type of hobbyist approach we see in Free Software. Of course then
things start to get difficult again because then we don't have a
shining example we just need to look at ;-( . Perhaps this is the
point where Oekonux *really* has to work.
Maybe 'selbstentfaltung' is not the only thing to look for.
Selbstentfaltung is related to freedom, but not identical with it. If we
look for people trying to increase our freedom in an area (eg. freedom
to manufacture/use generic drugs), then it is likely that there will be
some kind of connection with free software.
At least Free Software seems to be inspiring :-) .
The fact that RMS was in
the Brazil conference this year really surprised me; but I think it's a
sign that this kind of link will grow.
Today I define freedom as the possibilities to act
("Handlungsmöglichkeiten") you have. I understand this as a direct
result of the Holzkamp'sch(?) definition of humans having a
possibility relation to the world ("Möglichkeitsbeziehung"). Free
Software raises the possibilities to act in a number of ways. So does
learning. So does adequate medical care.
And so does property. However, the main point about property is to
deprives others from their possibilities to act (with your property).
Possession is better insofar it is clear by a social fact that this is
necessary to guarantee the use of something for the possessor.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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http://www.oekonux.org/