The Elimination of the Lockean Provisos for Just Private Property

John McMurtry

An excerpt from John McMurtry's book Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 66-69

"The regulating idea of capitalist private property was first philosophically explained by John Locke in a treatise which was published the year after the English bourgeois revolution deposing James II in 1688. What Locke argued in The Second Treatise of Government was that all right and legitimacy whatever was the right and legitimacy of private property. Even 'life' was and remains for this mind-set another form of private property: hence payment for its loss was and remains an exchangeable asset, worth only the sum of money it can be marketed for if still alive.

The public good in this system is also  conceived in private property terms. It is the property security of property-holders erecting government as their legislative and executive 'deputy'. No other right or obligation exists. 'Political power', Locke asserts (emphases added), 'is the right of making laws with penalties of death and all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property.'

Reason is defined in this world view as the capacity to obey these laws of private property. If someone does not obey these laws of 'right reason', then he is judged to have 'put himself into a state of war' (section 18) with the one whose property he transgresses, or the state representing him.

To understand another as 'putting himself into a state of war' with society by transgressing an individuals' property right is an extreme position. Its fix on exclusionary possession, which may itself have no ground in work or just desert, is also blind to the needs of life, e.g., the needs of the poor. Consider, in contrast, the redistribution of unneeded property for life need—as Jesus, Robin Hood and progressive tax systems have in part stood for. Or consider the first peoples who had their lands seized from them by Europeans. For them, the privatisation of nature into exclusionary private property was understood as a violent offence against the earth and fellow members of the community. The price that indigenous peoples' paid for these private property rights was centuries-long genocide—a genocide that persists at lower intensity today across the world, and is symbolised by large populations of native people behind bars.

The primitive accumulation of private property in Europe over much the same period was in some ways similar. Violent invasions and enclosures of common and fief lands drove millions of people off their traditional lands by legal enactments of an absolutist state. After these enclosures, the state punished the tens of thousands who did not work for employing 'masters' by such methods of punishment as public mutilation and hanging.

Such examples have never much disturbed the value-set of the money-property party because the facts are selected out of view. This repression of fact deepens as corporate privatisation of native lands and resources still advances in core regions of Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia.

Locke, who was a lawyer, first systemically expressed the proprietary mind-set that eventually developed into the corporate privatisation of the world; but Locke, like Milton Friedman and many others since, had to conceal the regulating principles of this system under pretenses of constructive individual freedom. By a theoretical shell-game that has been ideologically overlooked since, every one of the property principles he declares as justifications are surreptitiously transformed into their opposite meaning without notice.

Locke begins his treatise on property and punishment by putting three sensible limits to private property possession first, which—once reasoned through to win the readers acceptance—are all reversed by 'the introduction of money'.

1. Private property must be the outcome of 'mixing one's labour' with what's is 'appropriated from nature' (section 26).

2. Private property must always leave 'enough and good in common for others' to do likewise (section 27).

3. Private property must not 'be allowed to spoil' (section 31).

Locke then abolishes these reasonable limits on private property by a simple device, the substitution of money-demand possession for real property. He says or implies (from section 37 on) that the introduction of money nullifies all three of these provisos of lawful property.

According to Locke and the ruling system his treatise speaks for, money's use expresses the 'tacit agreement' and 'consent' of men to distribute wealth by the possession of money-demand rather than labour contribution. Since money can buy others' living labour, the owner's labour mixed with the property is no longer required. The absolute right of the non-producer of property against everyone else, including the actual producer, is thereafter presupposed as absolute. Money possession rather than work contribution now rules the social order, and is subsequently sanctified as 'the cornerstone of human society and civilization.'

Punishment of all who transgress this unqualified money right remains, however, fully intact. Anyone who infringes its claims—even if these are unearned, financially levered and in absentee demand—is still read as 'putting himself into a state of war' with the property owner and the state.

Since money-property does not 'spoil', its possessors also have the right to unlimited amounts, even if most others have none. As for 'enough and good left over' for these others, this third proviso of private property right also disappears from view. It is submerged in an argument (section 50) that all inequality of money possession, however many may have none or have more than they need, is rightful since (emphasis added) 'it is plain that men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth' by their 'tacit and voluntary consent to the use of money'.

This inequality has no bound in theory or law. It is perfectly consistent with it, for example, that a few have exclusive title to dispose of all that exists 'of the earth', while the rest all owe them more money to compound this inequality further. Such a condition is not far off realisation today.

Accordingly, punishment of all those who transgress this doctrine's absolute right to accumulate limitless money-demand property is imposed on more and more people, who are left with insufficient property to enable them to live. This 'free market', as it is called in the psych ops of the doctrine, has in fact become the opposite of the justifications made for it. Far from protecting the realm of life security for all, it has become a reign of terror over increasing numbers of poor people. The 2 million people we now see in American prisons, the many millions more who are on parole from it or in danger of it, the exponential increase in prisoner numbers since 1975, and intensification of people's anxiety about their economic future, are downstream effects of this property-and-punishment doctrine in the world's leading market order.... Locke and his successors... hide the fact that consent to money or anything else requires an option before it is 'voluntary consent'. Neither do they acknowledge that what is justified here means that ever fewer people can have ever more property, and ever more people can have little or none.... The concept of 'property' with which the doctrine began—a sphere of personal right to enjoy a domain of earth unmolested by all others including the king—becomes in this way completely decoupled from its traditional normative meaning, and indeed turned into its opposite. The right to enjoy private property free from the interference of others becomes the right to expropriate and harm others' property by the force of money right. Yet this mutant right of money property is viewed as absolute, and with no limit to its demand by self-multiplication...."