What Is Property?

Anarchists have a well-earned reputation when
it comes to property.

“Oh they’re smashing the Starbucks!”

“Oh my Go-”

“Gangster.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhh!”

Acts of targeted vandalism and sabotage are
often used by liberals, politicians and corporate

media outfits to paint a picture of anarchism
as nothing more than mindless hooliganism.

But these small-scale acts of property destruction
represent more than just surface-level outbursts

of misdirected rage, or a ritualistic rivalry
with Starbucks windows.

They gesture towards a broader assault on
the philosophical and legal underpinnings

of the state and capitalism itself.

Early anarchist forebearer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
summed up this tension more than 175 years

ago, when he penned the phrase ‘property
is theft’.

All power structures are rooted in ideology.

A shared belief in this ideology is what keeps
the structures of power in place.

Under capitalism, the edifice of social control
is built on the collective illusion of private

property, and the sanctity of the so-called
‘free market’.

Any moves taken to challenge this logic will
therefore provoke pushback from the system’s

indoctrinated cheerleaders, and will certainly
catch the attention of the repressive and

recuperative functions of the state.

But as the saying goes... you can’t make
an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

And you definitely can’t overthrow capitalism
without messing with people’s stuff.

So.... what is property, anyway?

And what do anarchists have against it?

Property is a legal concept, used as a means
of delineating ownership and control.

It’s rules are so ingrained into the fabric
of our daily lives that it’s easy to forget

that they are fluid, changeable, and that
they have assumed many different forms throughout

human history.

From the stateless Anishinaabe peoples of
the Three Fires Confederacy, to the vast state-managed

enterprises of the Soviet Union, differences
in baseline conceptions of property have fundamentally

shaped the specific character of social relationships,
the development of culture and the operation

of power and authority in their respective
societies.

In most parts of the world today, national
and cultural distinctions exist mainly as

localized variations of a single, global capitalist
economy.

The dominant ideology of this empire is a
consumer-fuelled individualism – a worldview

that sees a corporate-dominated system of
private property as synonymous with freedom

of choice... or even liberty itself.

Of course, things haven’t always been this
way.

Capitalism first emerged in Europe, where
the growing wealth and power of rich landowners,

merchants and financiers gradually began to
unravel and displace the existing system of

feudal social relations.

Before this, much of the
lands and natural resources needed for human

survival were considered a commons, meaning
that they weren’t actually owned by anyone.

Even in the Christian agrarian societies where capitalism first took root, it
was widely understood that the earth and the

entire bounty of nature belonged to God, and
were merely administered by his representatives

on earth, the Church and the monarchy.

The shift to capitalism was made possible
through large scale commodification.

This process, also known by Marxists as primitive
accumulation, essentially amounts to state-sanctioned

theft.

In a cruel parlour trick, things without monetary
value are legally transformed into commodities

that can be owned and traded.

Yellowknives Dene anti-colonial theorist,
Glen Coulthard describes it as “the violent

transformation of non-capitalist forms of
life into capitalist ones.”

The great enclosure began in earnest at the
end of the 15th century, as acre upon acre

of the British Commons was broken up and commodified
into individual parcels of land.

This was, incidentally, around the same time
that Spanish and Portuguese merchants began

their invasion and pillage of the new world.

As part of their genocidal colonization of
the so-called Americas, European settlers

imposed this new system of private land ownership
onto Indigenous nations with a very different

conception of property – one in which people
belonged to the land, not the other way around.

The same colonial process of commodification
was then applied to fellow human beings.

Over the following centuries, European slave
traders kidnapped millions of Africans, reduced

them to the legal status of chattel property
and sold them to the owners of massive agricultural

plantations.

The massive volume of wealth extracted from
this stolen land and labour cemented the power

of the emergent capitalist class, and was
used as a springboard for subsequent wars

of conquest.

And with these new waves of Euro-American
expansion came the enclosure of new lands,

the creation of new markets, and the spread
of capitalist social relations all across

the globe.

Conceptions of property and ownership have
evolved over the years.

In its hardwired pursuit of constant growth,
capitalism has been forced to constantly adapt,

contort and reinvent itself.

Technological advances have revolutionized
the manufacture and transportation of commodities,

while property relations have become muddied
through the rise of publicly owned corporations,

investment vehicles and financial debt
instruments.

And the logic of the commodity form has continued
to colonize new frontiers, from intellectual

property, to genetic blueprints, to information
itself.

This has resulted in a world where nearly
everything imaginable has been transformed

into property, and its ownership increasingly
concentrated in the hands of a shrinking pool

of unimaginably wealthy individuals.

This hoarding of resources by a small minority
finds its natural reflection in the explosive

growth of abject poverty among the world’s
majority.

In the Global South, oil and mining companies
hire paramilitary death squads to displace

entire villages, swelling the populations
of favelas, shantytowns and mega-slums well

beyond their natural limits.

Meanwhile, in the so-called ‘developed world’,
millions of people are homeless, while ten

times that number of homes sit vacant, silently
accruing value for real estate speculators

and investment trusts owned by the managers
of public sector pension funds.

These levels of entrenched inequality are
backed up by the massive application of state

violence, and the internalized sense of collective
helplessness that this violence has produced.

But this fatalism has limits, and many see
the regime of property for what it is – a

social war – and act accordingly.

Around the world, anarchists have been at
the forefront of urban squatting movements,

breaking into empty buildings and transforming
them into social centres and collective housing

projects.

In more rural areas, communities of displaced
peasants have occupied private or state-owned

lands and defended one another against the
threat of eviction, while Indigenous groups

have taken up arms, halted development projects,
and forced colonizers off their territory.

Anarchists have honed their
forgery skills, creating counterfeit government

IDs, state currency and travellers cheques
for armed resistance movements around the

world.

While other anarchists, like the Greek comrades
of Revolutionary Struggle, have carried out

armed expropriations, robbing banks to fund
their attacks on the state.

Crews of anarchists have bloc’ed up and
swarmed grocery stores, liberating enough

food to feed their entire block, while others
have broken into fenced off lots to build

community gardens and autonomous parks.

The struggle for anarchism is above all a
struggle to replace the alienated and exploitative

social relations of capitalism with new relationships
based in solidarity and mutual aid.

This means de-commodifying our lives, and
all of the things that we need to live well.

It means seizing back the commons... and everything
that they’ve stolen from us.