How Do We Justify Private Property?

Private property is often used to justify capitalism—but what if capitalism is actually its enemy? We trace the philosophical history of property from Erasmus and Locke to Marx and Proudhon, then offer a radical reinterpretation: that property is justified not by labor alone, but in concert with exclusive use. This episode presents a libertarian socialist argument that defends personal ownership while condemning capitalist accumulation.

Keywords: private property vs capitalism, John Locke property theory, libertarian socialism, Marx on property, anti-capitalist property rights, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Jeremy Waldron, personal ownership explained

Transcript

What if everything you own is something you stole? It's a hell of a claim, right? It certainly sounds like a stretch, but it's one of the oldest and most radical critiques of our economic system. You may have even heard the line before, Property is theft. That's what the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudon said in 1840. People laughed, they shouted, they threatened him back then. And today we hear it and think, oh, come on, that's ridiculous. What does that even mean? Because, let's be honest, most of us think property is actually freedom. I've got my house, my truck, my phone. This is my stuff. That's what keeps me from having to ask permission to do anything. It's mine. It belongs to me. It's mine to do with as I please. That's how I I take care of my family. It's how I stay safe. It's what makes me free. So, how could owning something never be theft? We have to sit with that discourse comfort for a moment, because this episode isn't going to give you an easy answer. It's going to give you a new way of looking at property. You're about to hear a critique of property and then a surprise defense of it, but not the kind that you're probably used to, not some billionaire bootstraps fantasy about merit and markets. Nope, I'm going to defend private property from the left. Yep, you heard that right. This is a story of how philosophers tried to justify the right to own something in a world that supposedly belongs to everybody and how, when you really think it through, capitalism might be the biggest betrayal of private property rights we've ever seen. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Let's begin with the radical critics of private property. Property is theft, according to Promme. What does he really mean by that? What is he really saying here? He wasn't talking about you owning your shirt or a garden or your dog. He wasn't against your use of or your possession of certain materials. He was talking about something a little bigger than that, about owning the means by which people come to survive. If I own a loaf of bread, that's one thing. That's food that I need to live. But if I own the only bakery and town and I don't bake the bread, I just own the bakery, I own the building, I own the ovens, I own the payroll of the people who do bake the bread, then I'm not living off of my work. I'm not feeding people. I'm living off of their work. They're the ones out there making the bread. They're the ones feeding people. I'm just using my ownership rights to take a chunk of the money that other people are generating. Purdon saw this as a kind of legalized robbery. You do the work, I collect the money. It's an extraction. It's not a contribution, which is the way the rich often tell us, you know, they own it and they are providing people with jobs. Prudon's turning that on its head here, right? He's saying, no, no, no, no, no. They're doing the work. They're providing the rich with money, which they then use to buy more property, which allows them to exploit even more people. So it's made possible by one idea that I have the right to control something that other people need. Carl Marx is going to pick up that ball and run with it. For Marx, private property is the engine of class society. It divides people into two camps. Those who own the means of production, like the land, the factories, the machines, and the capital. These are the people that I generally call the owning class. He calls them the bourgeoisie. And then there are those who don't own the means of production. They have to sell their labor to the owning class in order to be allowed to survive, in order to make money to buy a home or rent a home, to feed themselves, to clothe themselves, to exist at all. I call them the working class. Marx calls them the proletariat. You wake up in the morning, and you find out you don't own a factory, you don't own farmland, you don't own rental properties. So you're only choice is to rent yourself, your time, your energy, your body, and to get that wage. Your wage is less than the value that you create, he says. It has to be. Are there be nothing left in profit for the owner to take? That's the point. The system doesn't work if you get paid for everything that you've generated. As Marx said, is the real trick of private property under capitalism. It makes inequality seem natural. It turns domination into a voluntary contract. It turns exploitation into a wage, living or not living. Now, to be clear, neither Marx nor Proudhon wanted total chaos. They weren't calling for a world where no one owns anything, you know, a form of communism here. You're allowed to own your toothbrush. That version of total Communism was rejected by both of them, these guys. They wanted a different idea of ownership, one based on use, on cooperation, and on community control. It was not supposed to be based on private wealth, not absentee landlords, not corporate accumulation. And so if we take their critique seriously, we're left with the haunting court question. And that is, is there any way to justify private property without sliding into this domination by the rich? This idea of private property didn't always exist. Under feudalism, all property was the monarch's by divine right. It was parcelled out to various lords and aristocrats for them to manage, but it always really belonged to the king, who was said to manage it in the person of the sovereign, in other words, for the people. Incidentally, a tyrant was considered a king who managed it not for the people, but for themselves and their friends and, you know, the people who were loyal to them. This effectively got humanity out of the problem of communism, which is, when we all own things in common, it's hard to say who gets to use what at any given time. If we all own a lawnmower together, who gets to mow their lawn today at 12, we would have to negotiate then with everybody else on the planet in order to figure out who gets to use what. And that's kind of unfeasible. So, under feudalism, the king, or his representative, just got to make that decision for us. The king said, This belongs to me. It all belongs to me. I'm telling you, you get to do this. And that's what you've got to do. That's when you got to use the land. That's how much of the land you got to use, so on. One of the earliest thinkers to actually wrestle with this problem of communism and think about it without a monarch was Erasmus of Rotterdam, a 16th-century Dutch humanist and moralist. Erasmus wasn't a revolutionary. He was a Christian ethicist, trying to make sense of how property could be moral in a world where, by default, everything was supposedly belonged to everyone else because it was given to us in common by God. His conclusion was that you can only truly justify private property if everyone in the world agrees to let you have it. It did belong to everyone. So with everyone's permission, it could be exclusively yours. So his answer is a kind of expressed and universal consent. You don't get to fence off a stretch of land and call it yours, or claim a tool or take an apple from a tree, unless every other human being on earth gave you permission first. Well, yeah, that's a beautiful, ideal solution, but it's also, frankly, unworkable. It's hard to get eight people to agree on anything. Now imagine trying to get 8 billion people to agree to let you and have exclusive ownership rights of a world that's constantly shifting and changing. Even back then, Erasmus's standard was more like a moral compass than a workable political blueprint. Still, the point stands, if we're all born into a shared world, whether we believe that's because, you, we're animals that evolved a certain way and there was no private property, and then we had to invent it, or whether you believe that God gave the world to mankind in common, and therefore we have to divide it up and share it somehow. This is really true.. Taking a piece of it as mine has to require some kind of permission. But how do you get consent from everyone? And that's the puzzle that John Locke is going to set himself to solve in the fifth chapter of the Second Treatise on Government. So Erasmus thought private property could only be justified by the explicit consent of everyone else in the world, and that's clearly not possible. But writing in the 17th century, just as capitalism was beginning to take shape in England, John Locke offered what has become the most influential defense of private property in modern political thought. If you've ever heard the phrase life, liberty and property as a kind of sacred trio, well, Locke is where it that idea gets its philosophical muscle. Locke's big question was this: If the world is given to everyone in common, how can any one person come to own a part of it without first asking the permission of everybody else? And his answer is actually pretty simple that we could all agree to a principle of ownership by some means. And then, as long as the principle applies in a given situation, we have given consent to those ownership rights. At first glance, this is very convincing, but we actually need the details here. What exactly is this principle going to be? Well, Locke spells it right out. He says, you own yourself by nature. So by extension, then, you must own whatever your labor produces. So when you mix your labor with the world, you ought to own whatever the result of that is. Let's break that down. Imagine there's a forest, and nobody owns it. It's a complete public land. Nobody is said to possess this land. It's part of the commons of our naturally communistic world, our original world. Everyone has the same right to walk through that forest, to pick fruit or nuts from their trees, to sit under its shade, etc. Now imagine that you decided to cut down a few of the trees, and you use that wood to build yourself a shelter. Locke says, the tree used to belong to everyone, but through your labor that you put into it, all that effort, that was really just yours. And so by joining your labor to the trees, you've transformed them. It's no longer just raw nature out there on its own. It's something that expresses a part of you now. And so it ought to become your property. We should all recognize that the shelter that you built for yourself really belongs to you. Here's another example. You find a patch of open land, no one has claimed it. You plow it, you plant some corn, you harvest those crops. Well, Locke's going to say, that land should be yours, not because you got permission from everyone, but because you're the one who worked it. You applied the principle. labor, being the principal. Labor, in his words, then, puts a distinction between what is mine and what is yours. In short, it's labor that does the work of justifying property. But there's a second layer to Locke's argument that people often miss, and this is really key. Locke is not saying that any labor creates a right to anything. He builds in two major conditions. If those conditions aren't met, then the property claim is not legitimate. Let's walk through them real quick here. The first condition is the "enough and as good" rule. Locke says you can take from the commons only if you leave enough and is good for others. This isn't just about generosity. It's about a sense of fairness. Property is only justified if you're taking, it doesn't actually harm everyone else's equal opportunity to survive and flourish. Like, if you were to say, claim the entire continental United States for yourself, like, that's not going to work. You're not going to be able to claim all of that because you're not leaving enough for other people. Let's say you find a lake that no one owns and you take some water to drink. That's fine. But if you wall off the entire lake, you post guards around it, you start charging people for access, you're not mixing your labor here. You're just claiming domination. Others are now going to suffer, because you took more than your share. So Locke's going to say that your property claim is not valid. The same goes for land, food, tools, whatever. Property must leave others no worse off. And this rule sounds pretty radical today, but it implies that there are natural limits to how much one person can own. Locke did try to soften this principle. He argued that money, because it doesn't spoil and that people voluntarily accept it, makes large accumulations somehow okay. We'll come back to that way. That's a problem and I'll admit it. The second condition I want to mention is the no-spoilage rule. Locke also insists that you can only appropriate from nature that which you would use before it spoils. So if you gather fruit from the tree, but you let it rot in your hut, you've taken more than you need and you've violated the trust of the commons. You haven't made it yours through your labor. You wasted something that should never have been yours and should have remained available to all. This rule ties property directly to use. That's going to be the important part for us. If you're not actively using something, your claim is weak compared to when you need to use something. The point isn't to own, just to own. It's to own for some other purpose that benefits life or survival or improvement or flourishing or something. This sets the groundwork for a different kind of ownership ethic, one based on responsibility, rather than on entitlement. Now, Locke's theory has been challenged in important ways, and I think we should turn and examine those for a second before we move on here. Okay, according to Locke, you own your labor, and you mix that with nature, and you make something new, that becomes yours. You can only claim as much as you use. You're not allowed to dominate others by simply hoarding up all the resources. But in the real world, something's gone terribly wrong, because instead of limiting private property, Locke's theory has become a weapon to justify massive inequalities, colonialism, and capitalistic accumulation. I want to walk through three major critiques of Locke's view. Each one, I hope, will peel back a different layer of this contradiction. The first one comes from Jeremy Waldron, who asks, What counts as labor? We've got a problem with the very idea of mixing labor. Waldron asks, what does that even mean? What is getting mixed here, exactly? What is labor and what counts as mixing it? Let's go back to that unknown forest, for example. Suppose you carve your name into a tree. Did you mix your labor in that case? Does that give you a claim to the whole forest, the whole tree? Just the part where you carved your name? What if you put a fence around a meadow? Is that labor? Or is that just some kind of threat? Locke never clearly defines where labor stops. And Waldron wonders if this creates some kind of loophole. If any touch of effort lets you claim property, then property rights become kind of arbitrary and limitless. In practice, this idea often benefits people who do the least amount of real work. And we've seen it. A slumlord claims rent from an apartment that they'd never built. They've never cleaned, and they didn't even maintain. A hedge fund buys a company. It fires the workers, it sells it off for parts, and then it walks away richer. A colonizer steps off a boat, plants their flag, and says, hey, all this land belongs to me now. Is that labor? Or is that some kind of legal magic that's used to turn power into property? Walk's not very clear on that point. Next up is Ellen Meiksins Wood, a brilliant Marxist historian who studied how Locke's theory was used to justify empire. Remember, Locke's labor makes it yours principle in In theory, it sounds kind of egalitarian, but in practice, it became a tool for declaring that people who live differently from ourselves, like they didn't farm the land in the way that Europeans would have farmed the land. Well, then we could say they weren't really using it. And so it was all commons from the point of view of Europeans. I don't play golf. I can imagine then a golf course is just an open field of unclaimed property that I can go set up a house on. And so when English settlers came to say North America and they saw how the indigenous people were hunting and fishing and moving around with the seasons, they said to themselves, see, these people don't do any labor. This land is completely unused and unclaimed. I can take all of it that I want. That was the excuse, because they didn't see labor that looked like their kind of labor, and so they called the land empty, and they claimed it by right. Wood calls this a weaponization of Locke's theory, using labor as a cover story to legitimize expropriation and conquest. This isn't just about the past, either. That logic still operates the day, whenever corporations buy up water, farmland, housing, and then sit on it, or jack up the prices and call it investment. Finally, I also want to look at Judith Jarvis Thompson, one of the most respected moral philosophers of the 20th century. She asks a deeper, almost unsettling question, even if I labor on something, why would would that mean that I get to own it? Let's say I paint a beautiful mural on the side of your house. It took days. It's gorgeous. Do I now get to own the wall of your house? Of course not. Because labor isn't usually enough. Just because I've added some value to something doesn't mean that I now have a claim to its ownership. Thompson points out, Labor might justify compensation, or praise, but not necessarily ownership. Ownership requires more than effort. It requires some connection to need or permission or mutual respect. It's a social construct of sorts, and as such, it is inherently risky. And once you start asking those questions, like, who needs this, who benefits, who loses, you begin to see that labor by itself can't carry the full moral weight of property rights. These three critiques, then, give us kind of a fuller picture of what I want to to look at. Waldron shows us that labor is kind of vague and easy to manipulate. Wood shows how the theory has been used to justify colonial domination and classic exploitation. And Thompson shows us that even sincere labor doesn't always justify owning the thing that you labored on. So what does that leave us with? Well, some people throw out Locke's theory entirely at this point. They call it a story made to protect power. But if private property can't be justified, or even personal property can't be justified, we're back to fighting over the commons. We're back to the problem of communism. But I want to do something different. Let's take Locke very seriously and read him a little more deeply and more morally than all these others. We might consider Locke's principle to be deeper than just labor. Buried inside chapter 5 of the second treatise on Government, the part where Locke lays out his theories on property, there's a subtle but critical detail that's almost always ignored. It's not just that labor justifies ownership. It's labor plus use, and more precisely exclusive use. So let me pause right there. Locke doesn't say, okay, you labored on this, so now it belongs to you. That's a misreading of Locke. He says, you labor on something that you need to use. And then no one else gets to use it at the same time as you without your permission. So only when we meet both conditions, does private property make moral sense? This part is often glossed over by liberal defenders of capitalism, but it's right there in the text. Locke writes, as much as anyone can make use of, to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property yet. Whatever is beyond this, more than his share belongsongs to others. So let me give you an example. You dig a well. You intend to use the water from this well to drink and cook, to water your garden, to bathe, whatever. No problem. That's legitimate property. But if you fence off 10 wells, claiming that they are all yours, and anyone who wishes to use them has to pay you rent for the right to use your water. Well, that's not property. That is theft. Even if you labored to dig all those wells yourself, even if you paid someone else to do it, it's still not your property because you can't claim a need to exclusive use. You're just blocking access in order to claim a rent. And that's not not use any more than robbery could be considered a legitimate form of labor. Locke's deeper condition, then, is that ownership must be justified by real and ongoing exclusive use. You need this thing. This is your house because you need to live there. It's not your house because you want to give it to somebody else to live and then rent it to them for money. So it's not just effort. It's not just investment. It's not even scarcity, but use. And this changes everything. Use can be used to limit a labor claim. That resolves Waldron's problem. It can be used against would be colonizers who merely fail to recognize use for their own gain. And it shows the clear distinction between when labor justifies ownership and when it does not, as in Thompson's case. Think about the modern housing market. A hedge fund buys up thousands of homes. It renovates a few, it leaves some empty, it rents some out at jacked up prices. And all the while, that's called private property. But who's using those homes? Certainly not the hedge fund, not a family, not anyone, in some cases. Lock would look at that and say, that's not legitimate property. That's enclosure, that's why hoarding, and it violates the use condition and so has no moral standing. That property is eligible for seizure. Or take the case of Jeff Bezos. Did he labor? Yes, Especially in the early days. But does he use the warehouses? Does he use all those delivery vans? The hundreds of thousands of people who work for him. Does he own them? No, he doesn't. He's not mixing his labor or meeting his needs. He's really just sitting at the top and extracting value from employees who do the labor and do use the tools. He's in a sense, renting the means of production to them so that they can have a job and then takes takes that rent as his own income. That's not Locke's labor theory of property. That's another version of feudalism. This one revision, by adding the explusive use condition, completely reshapes the way we might want to think about private property, because it reveals a stunning possibility that capitalism itself is a violation of private property., not in theory, but actually in practice. Capitalism lets people claim ownership over what they neither labored for nor use. It allows accumulation, then, without any kind of engagement, without truly ownership. Profit, then, without presence, control, without connection. In other words, capitalism turns lock inside inside out. If you take Locke seriously, and not just as a slogan, but as a full moral argument, then you can defend private property and reject capitalism. And that's where this vision will start to emerge. You don't need to choose between an anarchist chaos and a corporate monopoly. There's a third option. It's a system where ownership is rooted in laboror and use, where no one is exploited because no one can use anything they don't themselves own. And here, power doesn't concentrate in the hands of absentee elites. In short, this is a sort of libertarian socialism that honors the dignity of work and the justice of shared survival. So here's what Locke's theory gives us then. You can own something if you transform it through your labor. Your ownership, however, is only valid if it doesn't harm others' ability to do the same. And you must make personal use of what you claim or you don't get to keep it. This is a far cry then from the capitalist version of property, where people claim ownership of land, homes, money, and factories that they've never touched, they've never worked at, just a profit from the exclusion of other people. Locke is often painted as the father of capitalist property rights, but the deeper you read him, the more radical his implications actually become. We started this episode with a challenge. Can we justify private property? To answer, not as it's given to us, not as some sort of sacred right, but as something that we should believe in, something that holds up to moral scrutiny. We saw how thinkers like Proudon and Marx exposed property as a tool of domination. We saw how Locke tried to build a moral foundation under it using labor, fairness, and use. We saw how modern critics revealed the cracks in that foundation. And then we saw a deeper reading of Locke. It's my reading, actually, that may give us a tool to reject capitalism while also defending ownership. So where does that leave us? With the vision of society where people own what they use, where ownership is earned through effort, through care, and through need, and not through inheritance, through hoarding, or through manipulation. This is not utopian. It's not chaos either. It's a world where the worker owns their own tools, where they farmers own their own fields, where the tenant owns their own homes, or at the very least, shares that power over it. It's a world without landlords who've never seen the roof that they collect rent from, without billionaires who own warehouses they've never worked in, without absentee tech lords who extract value from cliques while living in a bunker on the side of the volcano. In other words, it's a world where private property is restored to its moral roots, and capitalism is exposed as the betrayal of that. That's the dream of libertarian socialism. It's not state domination. It's not market anarchy either, but shared power, grounded in use and effort, a world where we build the together, and no one profits from excluding others. So the next time someone says to you, but you can't get rid of private property, you can say, I'm not really trying to. I'm trying to save private property from capitalists. And before you go, I want you to ask yourself this. What do you own? Because you use it, because you care for it, because you need it in your life. And what do others claim to own without touching it, without working for it, or without really needing it at all, except as something to extract rent from? If the line between freedom and domination runs through property, then it's time we ask, who's really free here? I think you should share this episode with someone who still thinks cat capitalism and private property are simply the same thing. And if you're ready to imagine what comes next, stick with me. This season, we're not just tearing down myths. We're going to build a new ground to stand on. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit AmericanSocrates.buzzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.