Property is neither theft nor a "right"

I remember a short trip I made to the Soviet Union when I was a younger man. What I saw astonished me and left a lasting impression on my memory. There were things, buildings, and stuff. However, everything appeared devoid of purpose, orphaned, and abandoned.I asked myself why. After pondering it, my conclusion was this: the government owns everything, which essentially means that nobody truly owns anything, resulting in a state where everything lacks an owner.

Now I am thinking back, and I can cook up a more convincing idea of property based on that youthful observation and Stirner’s brilliant ideas.

We are going to talk about “property”.

Classical liberal idea of property as put forward by John Locke is as follows: self-ownership allows a person the freedom to mix his or her labor with natural resources, converting common property into private property. Locke concludes that people need to be able to protect the resources they are using to live on their property and that this is a natural right (Lockean proviso). More recently Robert Nozick used this idea to form his Lockean proviso which governs the initial acquisition of property in a society. His proviso says that although every appropriation of property is a diminution of another's rights to it, it is acceptable as long as it does not make anyone worse off than they would have been without any private property….whew… do not you get a over-digestion from all these “rights” given to you? (I am of course joking).This implies placing one's trust in the concept of "property" or one's possessions being governed by the notion of imaginary "natural rights." These rights are something that people possess, although it remains unclear how, why, and for how long they exist. What's even more challenging in Nozick's case is his belief in a moral obligation on the part of the property owner towards other imaginary proprietors, some of whom may not even have been born yet.

This property thing gets even funnier when you approach it from the left. Prince Proudhon, from some rather peculiar moral standpoint, asserts: "Property is theft”."He believes that he is making the most condemning statement about property by calling it theft, however, is the concept of 'theft' even conceivable unless one acknowledges the concept of 'property'? How can theft occur if there is no notion of property in the first place?" (Max Stirner). This idea of denigrating property (presumably private property) from a leftist point of view which Stirner so elegantly destroyed, by moralistic/christian language of “theft” has its roots in the spook of society or commons. The idea that there actually is a sacred property and that sacred property belongs to some even more sacred cow, that nobody knows, or feels but has to believe in, namely commons or society.

There is of course a more mundane and vapid idea of property, namely the state ideology of property. The state is created by citizens to (among other things) protect property. Well, in state, you never own anything. The state (whatever type or name or color it has), has just permitted you to use stuff, land and even your body as long as the state deems it right and permitted. The state can seize your land, gold, or even your life at its discretion. It is both a theoretical conclusion of the state’s nature and empirical evidence of our eyes. It matters nothing if you are Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, Russian oligarch Khodorkovsky or world’s richest man Elon Musk, step out of the allowed lines too far, and you are done for.

I think a discerning reader sees through the spooks and inherent contradictions of these poor tries on constructing a tight edifice which could be called property, and from the right hedging it to some Godly natural rights, and from left, gifting it to some imaginary new God (call it whatever, call it society, nature, sustainable future, or the slogan de jour of the newspapers). Objective reality and our intuitions both refute these endeavors, and deep down, we all know that it's merely empty rhetoric. What we all know, deep inside is that property does not really exist in any meaningful sense but in possession. If you have power over and mastery of a thing, an idea, a land, or yourself, you are the owner, you are the proprietor and you are that as long as and as far as your power permits. Property in other words is only the act of owning. This in the end produces a useful conclusion as well, that there is no such thing as public property, because the public is just a spook or a fixed idea, it cannot own things and it has no power of its own. The power of spooks is always a negative power, it is the powerlessness of those captured by the spook. If you reject this spook, and free yourself from it, it loses all its powers and loses all its “property”. All owned by the “public”, the fixed idea that wants to enslave you, is indeed yours, as soon as you decide it. Your volition is the end of the spook.

Unowned property has no value, there is no value for you (the unique) if you do not own it, but when you go ahead and take it, then it becomes of value.

Property is neither theft nor a "right." It is not merely a stamped piece of paper; rather, it is the outcome of one's power and one’s act of ownership.