the implications of property

I have been toying with this topic for quite some time…
what follows is nothing more then working out some idea’s…

Property…an idee fixe for many, many people…

Locke for example, ties property with freedom…
this tying of property with political ideas is common…

Locke suggests that property as well as government came about
from a common consent from early man…but it is far more likely
that the concept of property and government came about a different way…

early humans more likely grabbed or stole or confiscated the prime
land from other, weaker humans… the land with tree’s and water and was
defensible… the weaker humans got the land without tree’s and water and
was less defensible…in order to protect their ill gotten gains, the stronger
humans created a defense system, which we now call government…

read history and one see’s that the government, every government… everywhere
has gone out of its way to protect the wealthy and powerful properties…
as it is true today…Locke tries to pretend that property was a function
of making free choices, but the reality is, property is theft and always has been…
with the government aiding and abetting this theft of property by the
wealthy and powerful…but leaving aside this theft… is our notion
of property viable going into the future? I don’t think so and here is why…
our idea of every man having a castle is more viable when there aren’t that many
people… when the population isn’t that great, we can have every man having a
castle, but now, now when there are billions of people inhabiting the earth
and the number of people rising toward billions more… we simply cannot
afford this concept of private property…we don’t have the land, the resources,
the energy to maintain private property as we have known it…
private property is simply a luxury we cannot afford any more…

the future is and must be, condo’s and the like…
private land and structures like private property and houses on
that land is not a choice we can make anymore…

let us take freedom and land that Locke tied together…
freedom is not unlimited, we have conditional freedom,
we cannot shout fire in a theater and we have other constraints
on freedom that makes our freedom, conditional…changeable…flexible…

to say we are free to buy land and the houses on that land is to note
that freedom is limited and thus the freedom to buy land and houses is
limited… now we just have to understand the limits on buying property…

here on the San Francisco Peninsula, where I live, the price of
housing is outrageous because of the limit on the amount of land
we can build on and the desire of people to live here…
in my city, the average price of a house is 1.2 million and that
is often a tear down house…the very cost of property limits
people ability to purchase property… limits once again…

we must reevaluate property in terms of limits and
in terms of going forward into the future…
because if only the wealthy can afford property, then
that very fact, the limit of property, that damages society
in a profound way…haves have and have not’s have not…
and this changes the basic structure of our democratic,
majority driven society… our society basic idea is of equality
and if property is not equal, not a question of freedom, then
we must reevaluate our notion of society…

Kropotkin

Ugly communism. Very ugly indeed. Sickening actually.

[b]

[/b]

That’s easy to imagine. Just imagine being a slave.

No need to imagine being a slave … almost all people are slaves … to their possessions.

As long as possessions are “the” metric for success almost all people will pant after them relentlessly.

The good news is almost all of humanity seeks individual success … change the metric … change humanity.

T: No need to imagine being a slave … almost all people are slaves … to their possessions.

As long as possessions are “the” metric for success almost all people will pant after them relentlessly.

The good news is almost all of humanity seeks individual success … change the metric … change humanity.
[/quote]
K: tom gets it… =D>

K: so urgod, in your mind, not having possessions makes one a slave,
and having all kinds of possessions makes one a “master”…

and so in your mind, the good person is one with lots of possessions
and the “bad” person is one with no possessions…

billions of people revere Jesus who had no possessions, why would
anyone do such a thing to a “slave”…Socrates had no possessions
and yet he is also proclaimed as the father of Philosophy…possessions in your
mind makes one a better human beings and yet these two for example, had
no possessions…defend, and I doubt you can, defend your belief that
possessions are a key to creating better, master, human beings…

Kropotkin

I am not owned by my possessions, I own them. I determine their use. They serve me and my life. That is what it means to possess something.

Possession and property are inevitable, they will always be the case. Look at communist societies: they are not defined by a lack of property/possession but by the fact that the citizens are stripped of property/possession because something else assumes possession of it, namely the State. The state and the leaders of it are the ones who own everything in communist societies. Marx tried to disguise this with the idea of communal ownership, which is a lie. You cannot “determine the use” of something by vote, a single mind must make such determinations or else the single mind (you, and every other individual person) is not actually owning it. You do not take a vote when you decide to buy or use something, you make that choice yourself for your own life. Imagine if you had to take a vote every time you wanted to buy, use or dispose of something. How do you think that would work? Most of the time the vote would go against your wishes, since there are so many people voting who are not you. Every person has their own individual needs, goods, desires, values.

Communism makes the individual subservient to the group, at first, and ultimately subservient to the State (which just means to whoever is leading the State at the moment). It is pure slavery. Slaves do not own anything, they do not have the ability to determine the use or disposal of anything; likewise with babies, they do not make such determinations either. Communism turns human beings into slaves and babies.

Anyone who is owned by their possessions is a retard incapable of even the most basic self-valuing. Such a person would certainly desire communism as a bandaid and justification for their own personal inadequacy.

Yet you do give the impression that you are possessed by your pride/ego.

Nice try.

I am not concerned with whatever mere impression you receive. That is on you.

Not entirely a sign of wisdom, but a corroborating reply to the prior.

Carry on.

Pride is a two edged sword. It can both create and destroy both poverty and affluence.

K: so many misconceptions about communism and so little time…
ok, in random order…

Have you ever read Marx? Because if you had, you would know that Marxism and
Leninism/Stalinism are two completely different things… Leninism/Stalinism is
about power and dictatorship and has nothing to do with the original vision of Marx…
so first of all, you must be clear about what you are talking about, Marxism or
the later Leninism/Stalinism…

the version you are talking about is the Lenin/Stalin idea of communism…
which has little to do with Marx… In fact, Marxism as thought of by Marx,
hasn’t even been tried yet…and the real problem with Leninism/Stalinism is
the attempt to make an economic system into a political system, it confused the
matter by trying to make a purely economic system fit into a political system,
communism is not a political system… Marx understood that his system was
economic in nature, he wrote that he believed that economics is the, as he called it,
the “substructure” of human existence…at the bottom of everything, he thought
that our economic lives dominated who we are… we are economic beings,
thought Marx, not political beings…read Lenin and Stalin, what little Stalin wrote,
and one sees quickly that they thought in terms of the political, not the economic…
and this made all the difference in the world…BTW, Trotsky also thought politically,
not economically…and they took what they found of Marx economics and stretched it
into a political theory, thus failure…you can have communism, as a economic theory
with a political theory, democracy… basically, you can mix and match any
economic theory with any political theory and they will work…some economics
works better with some political theories, but you can make any economic theory
work with any political theory… but you can’t stretch an economic theory to
be a political theory…as Lenin/Stalin did…

now you say, that “property and possessions are inevitable”
well that is simply untrue… many cultures existed without either
property or possessions and some of them lasted a long time…
especially some native American cultures…In Greece, Sparta for example,
the men who fought from age 7 to 40, didn’t have any property or possessions…
they lived in quite “communistic” conditions…

to make such blanket statements is not to be historically aware…

for example, in the longest lasting economic system the world has ever
seen, hunter/gatherer, which lasted for a million years, human beings
had no concept of private property or of personal property…
everything was shared equally and land was something you walked on,
not owned…it wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, within the
last 10 or 12 thousand years ago, with the arrival of the city,
that people thought in terms of property as we do…

the fact that England didn’t begin its “Enclosure” of public land
until the Tudor period, 1485-1603… until then a great deal of
England was public lands, communal land for everyone to use…

it is in history that tells us you are not god, it tells us you are wrong…

Kropotkin

There is virtually no difference in the application of property between capitalism and communism where the end result is a majority of people becoming propertyless serfs.

You seem not to know what capitalism is and means. Ok then.

Communism- The state controls all property and you merely rent from the state. There is no actual ownership as it is an illusion.

Capitalism- Individuals that have the most money or property control everything including the state itself to which you rent through them. There is no actual ownership as it an illusion.

lol
or a socialist.
But socialists are far lower than slaves.
In any case Kropotkin should put actions to words, sell his modest possessions for a plane ticket, and then sell himself in the slave market his spiritual mother created.
Since slaves cant have money he will be dispossessed of whatever price (if above 0) he will be fond to be worth by his spiritual brothers.