Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (10 page)
Read Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition Online
Authors: Charles Eisenstein
It is often argued that land ownership is a natural consequence of agriculture. While the hunter-gatherer has made little investment in her land, the farmer has put labor into making it more productive (of food for humans, that is). It would be patently unjust for the farmer to labor all year only to have “gatherers” come in at harvest time and live off the harvest. Private property is supposed to give people an incentive to make improvements upon the land. But wouldn’t it be more just if there were some way to own the improvements, and not the land itself?
Originally, land rights were almost always held in common, accruing to the village or tribe, and not the individual. In the great agrarian
civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Zhou Dynasty China, there was little concept of private land ownership. All land was the property of the king, and because the king was the representative of the divine on earth, all land was the property of God.
There is a vast conceptual gulf between having a right to the fruits of one’s labor as applied to land and owning the land itself. In the West, the absolute concept of land ownership seems to have originated in Rome, fertilized, perhaps, by the Greek conception of the individual. It was in Rome that land first came under what they called
dominium
, “the ultimate right, the right which had no right behind it, the right which legitimated all others, while itself having no need of legitimation … the right ‘of using, enjoying, and abusing’—
ius utendi, fruendi, abutendi.”
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In the East, explicit land ownership began somewhat earlier, at least in concept. In China it dates back at least to the reign of Shang Yang in the fourth century BCE and perhaps before, though even then a time prior to land ownership was still a matter of historical memory, as evidenced by Confucian statements that it was improper to sell land in “ancient times.”
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India as well probably knew private ownership of land by the sixth century BCE, though the evidence is somewhat contradictory.
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In any event, the vast majority of land in India was communally owned up until the time of British rule.
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In Medieval Europe, the bulk of the land was owned either in common or by feudal lords who did not “own” the land in the full modern sense, as an alienable commodity to freely buy and sell. They had certain rights to the land, which could be transferred to vassals in exchange for various services, shares of crops, and eventually for money. In England, free alienation of land was generally not possible until the fifteenth century.
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Thereafter, the vast communal lands of England rapidly came under private ownership thanks to the Enclosure Acts, a process paralleled across the continent, for example through the “emancipation” of the serfs. Lewis Hyde writes,
Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be the owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. The medieval serf had been almost the opposite of a property owner: the land had owned
him
. He could not move freely from place to place, and yet he had inalienable rights to the piece of land to which he was attached. Now men claimed to own the land and offered to rent it out at a fee. While a serf could not be removed from his land, a tenant could be evicted not only through failure to pay the rent but merely at the whim of the landlord.
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As with so many social reforms, the freeing of the serfs was another step in the consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of the already powerful. By one means or another, people who had for generations freely grazed their herds, collected firewood,
and hunted on the lands around them could no longer do so.
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These lands had been a
commons
, the property of all and of none. Forever after, they became property.
If property is robbery, then a legal system dedicated to the protection of private property rights is a system that perpetuates a crime. By making property sacrosanct we validate the original theft. This should not be too surprising if the laws were made by the thieves themselves to legitimize their ill-gotten gains. Such was indeed the case: in Rome and elsewhere, it was the rich and powerful who both seized the land and made the laws.
Lest the reader think I am launching a Marxist diatribe, let me hasten to add that I am not advocating the abolition of private property. For one thing, the whole mentality of
abolition
involves a fervid, abrupt, jarring change imposed forcefully on the unwilling. Secondly, private property is but a symptom of a deeper malady (Separation), and if we address that symptom from the mind-set of Separation, of conquest, of overcoming evil, we will end up with the same iniquities in different forms. Finally, even on the economic level, the problem is not private property per se, but the unfair advantages of owning it. Even though it is wrong for someone to benefit from mere ownership of what was once common, everyone benefits when resources go toward those who will use them the best. These include the land, soil, minerals, aquifers, and capacity of the atmosphere to absorb waste. We need an economic system that disallows profit-by-owning yet rewards the entrepreneur’s spirit
that says, “I know a way to use it better,” and allows that spirit free rein. Marxist systems not only eliminate profit from exclusive
control
of scarce capital resources; they also eliminate profit from their efficacious
use
. The result is inefficiency and stagnation. Can we reward those who put resources to best use without rewarding the mere fact of ownership? This book describes a money system that preserves the freedom of private property without allowing its owners to accrue unfair advantages.
Wherever and whenever it happened, the privatization of land soon brought with it a concentration of ownership. In the early days of ancient Rome, land was common (not personal) property, except for a small homestead plot: “The corn land was of public right.”
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As Rome expanded through conquest, the new lands did not stay “public” very long but soon migrated into the hands of the wealthiest families—the patrician class—setting the norm for many centuries to come. Their estates also grew at the expense of the original plebeian freeholds, whose owners were frequently called away to serve in the legions, and which in any case could not compete economically with the cheap slave labor of the patrician estates. They accumulated insurmountable debts and, because land had become an alienable commodity, were forced off their homesteads and into beggary, banditry, or, if they were fortunate, the urban craft professions.
When the fortunes of the Empire turned and the supply of slaves dried up, many large landholders turned to tenant farmers, the
coloni
, to farm their fields. Bound by debt, these tenants eventually became the Medieval serfs. Think of it this way: if you owe
me an insurmountable debt, then you are obliged to pay at least as much of it as you can. The proceeds of your labor, forever after, belong to me. How similar this is to the United States bankruptcy laws as promulgated in the Bankruptcy “Reform” Act of 2005, which compel the person declaring bankruptcy to commit a portion of future wages to creditors.
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How similar as well to the plight of Third World countries, who are compelled to restructure their economies and devote their entire economic surplus toward the perpetual servicing of debt. These are the modern counterparts of the serfs, bound to work for the owners of money just as the serfs worked for the owners of land. Their condition is known as “debt peonage.”
The parallel between ancient Rome and the present day is striking. Now as then, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Now as then, people must go into lifelong debt that they can never pay off just to have access to the necessities of life. Then it was through access to land; today it is through access to money. The slaves, serfs, and tenants gave a lifetime of labor to the enrichment of the landowners; today the proceeds of our labor go to the owners of money.
In the history of radical thought, the realization that property is theft usually accompanies a rage and desire for vengeance against the thieves. Matters are not so simple, though. The owners of wealth, whether inherited or not, are born into a role that is created and necessitated by the great invisible stories of our civilization that compel us to turn the world into property and money whether we are aware of doing so or not.
Let us not waste our psychic energy hating the rich, or even the original plunderers. Cast in their station, we would have enacted the same role. Indeed, most of us participate, in one way or another, in the ongoing theft of the commons. Let us not hate, lest we prolong the Age of Separation even further and lest we, like the Bolsheviks, perpetrate a revolution that is insufficiently deep, and so re-create the old order in a different, distorted form. Still, let us not lose sight of the nature and effects of the unconscious crime of property, so that we may return our world to its original and still-latent abundance.
The transformation from a right to benefit into outright ownership of land was a gradual one, whose terminus is the practice of selling land for money. Let’s keep in mind that this was a conceptual transformation (the land doesn’t admit to being owned), a human projection onto reality. Land ownership (and indeed all forms of ownership) says more about our perception of the world than about the nature of the thing owned. The transition from the early days, when ownership of land was as unthinkable as ownership of the sky, sun, and moon, to the present day, when nearly every square foot of the earth is subject to ownership of one sort or another, is really just the story of our changing view of ourselves in relation to the universe.
The distinction between the right to use and outright ownership echoes the primitive distinction between that which is produced through human effort and that which is there already; it persists today in the distinction between “real” and “personal” property, and it is a basis for thousands of years of reformist thought.
Since the Roman Empire developed the legal basis of property rights as we know them today, it is unsurprising that it also produced some of the earliest critics of property. In the third and fourth centuries, the early leaders of the Christian church were especially clear that the things of the earth were for all to share. Ambrose wrote, “Rich and poor alike enjoy the splendid ornaments of the universe … The house of God is common to rich and poor,” and “The Lord our God has willed this earth to be the common possession of all and its fruit to support all.”
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Elsewhere he writes that private property
is not according to nature, for nature has brought forth all things for all in common. Thus God has created everything in such a way that all things be possessed in common. Nature therefore is the mother of common right, usurpation of private right.
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Others of the Christian Fathers, notably John Chrysostom, Augustine, Basil the Great, and Clement, weighed in with similar views, encouraging followers to follow Jesus’s teachings quite literally and give all their possessions to the poor. Theirs was not a detached philosophy: many of these leaders did exactly that. Ambrose, Basil, and Augustine had been men of considerable wealth before entering the clergy, and they gave it all away.
The teachings of its founders notwithstanding, eventually the Church itself acquired considerable property and allied itself with imperial power. The teachings of Jesus became otherworldly ideals that were not seriously recommended to anyone, and the Kingdom of God was transported from earth to Heaven. This was a
major step in the conceptual separation of spirit and matter that has contributed to making materiality, and especially money, profane today. Even more ironically, most people today who profess to follow Christian teachings have turned everything inside out and associate socialism with atheism and private wealth with God’s favor.
The early Church fathers made frequent reference to the distinction between what people produce through their own effort and what was given to humanity by God for all to use in common. Many social and economic critics of the last several centuries echoed this early indignation at the appropriation of the commons and developed creative proposals to remedy it. One such early critic, Thomas Paine, wrote,
And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.… Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds.
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The first economist to develop this idea fully was Henry George, in his eloquent 1879 classic
Progress and Poverty
. He started with essentially the same premise as Paine and the early Christians:
But who made the earth that any man can claim such ownership of it, or any part of it, or the right to give, sell or bequeath it? Since the earth was not made by us, but is only a temporary
dwelling place on which one generation of men follow another; since we find ourselves here, are manifestly here with equal permission of the Creator, it is manifest that no one can have any exclusive right of ownership in land, and that the rights of all men to land must be equal and inalienable. There must be exclusive right of possession of land, for the man who uses it must have secure possession of land in order to reap the products of his labor. But his right of possession must be limited by the equal right of all, and should therefore be conditioned upon the payment to the community by the possessor of an equivalent for any special valuable privilege thus accorded him.
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