3.

The end of
property

Communism is the end of property. It’s a well-known affair, and one that arouses a great many anxieties. Some are entirely warranted. Owners of grand estates, numerous luxury residences—they’ll be made to moderate their lifestyles. Industrial and commercial fortunes will disappear. Those who are going to be expropriated make up a narrow and well-defined caste, even if they do hold a large portion of society’s resources today. Incidentally, as general rule, we won’t be attacking individuals; we’ll behave according to the nature of the goods in question. We’ll seize the castles and leave the cottages alone, whether they belong to the poor or the rich! But the anxieties that have crept into the minds of proletarians, and especially peasants, are unwarranted. Communism is not about taking from the oppressed what little they have left.

What is property?

The question isn’t so simple to settle. Witness the polemic that pitted Marx against Proudhon. The latter had posited that “property is theft.” Proudhon knew full well that the origin of property wasn’t natural. It’s the product of a society ruled by power relations, violence, and the appropriation of the labors of the other. Only, if we say that property is theft, whereas theft is defined only in relation to property, we’re going around in circles.

The problem grows murkier still when it turns from property to the abolition of property. Should all property be abolished, whether the means of production or personal possessions? Should it proceed on a selective basis? Is it a matter of replacing private property with collective or state property? Is it a matter of radically forgoing all property and what that might look like?

Communism opts for the latter proposal. This isn’t about the transfer of property titles but rather the disappearance of property, full stop. In the revolutionary society, people won’t be allowed to “use and abuse” a possession just because they own it. This rule will know no exceptions. Buildings, and hairpins, and plots of land will no longer belong to anybody—or if you prefer, they’ll belong to everybody. Before long, the very idea of property will be considered an absurdity.

So will everything belong equally to everyone? Will the first person who comes along be allowed to evict me, to strip me, to snatch the bread from my mouth because I’ll no longer own either my house, or my clothes, or my food? Certainly not; on the contrary, the material and emotional security of each person will be better protected. Simply put, it will no longer be property rights that are invoked for protection but the direct interests of the people concerned. Each and every person must be able to be sheltered and clothed, to eat their fill of what they like. Each and every person must be able to live peacefully. Some ideologues would prefer to see property as nothing more than the human extension of animal territoriality. Property is thus rendered a phenomenon, not of a given era or even of a particular species, but of an entire branch of zoology. But no one’s ever seen a fox or a bear lease out a territory that it owns, or live in a burrow where it’s only a humble tenant! But it’s a regular thing in our society. It’s precisely property that allows for the dissociation of usage and possession.

That a good would no longer be property indicates nothing of the use to be made of it. Use will be reverted, precisely, to use. A bicycle will be used for getting around, and not just for Dupont, its legitimate owner, to get around. The question of whether human beings, or certain human beings, need a fixed territory and objects to which they can grow attached, for reasons sentimental or affective—this falls outside the purview of property. And to reassure the dental hygienists: we aren’t proposing to communalize toothbrushes.

Pitting individualism against collectivism, personal against social usage, to make it a matter of a “societal choice”­—this is complete bourgeois cretinism. From that perspective, it’d be absolutely necessary to take sides with rail transport against the personal vehicle. Communists would be in favor of orgies, and the bourgeois in favor of masturbation! We couldn’t care less about those kinds of debate; they can only be settled in light of their practical circumstances. In any case, we aren’t the ones hoarding and alienating.

In present circumstances, property rights constitute a safeguard against the destruction of private life. They’re a very paltry safeguard. They don’t prevent noise from passing through the walls of poorly insulated tenements. They can’t do much against an expropriation. The peasant might be the owner of his land; this hasn’t kept the countryside from emptying out.

Today, lands lie fallow, houses uninhabited, resources of all kinds fallen by the wayside. All of these could be very vital. Unfortunately, their owners are unwilling or, worse, unable to use or sell them.

The notion of property encompasses a reality; it is also, however, a mystification. You can own something without being able to really control it. The lie is twofold. It’s social and economic. It also concerns the relations between men and nature.

Property rights are necessary to capitalism. Trade requires that things be clear-cut. When doing business, it’s necessary to know who actually owns the merchandise and who doesn’t. Local custom can settle questions of how to arrange matters and use things, but as soon those things acquire a degree of independence from men, passing from hand to hand, custom is no longer enough. Only faint traces of it remain in the countryside: rights of way, of water supply, of gleaning… But commodity and capital need a universally applicable body of rules, independent of the particular nature of any situation.

Land ownership, in the modern sense, didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. On any given estate could be exerted the rights of the serfs, of the lord, of his overlord, of the church… Up to the 19th century, some number of rules continued to limit the power of the landowner, who was allowed no more than the first cutting of a meadow, had no right to enclose it, and had to allow gleaning and common grazing.

In the world of bourgeois equality, everyone’s a free proprietor—the Eastern European peasant of his fields, the boss of his factory, the worker of his labor power. There is no theft, and yet you can enrich yourself and hoard resources beyond all proportion to what your own labor should make possible. Property conceals the relations of exploitation.

If the peasant-cum-”farm operator” owns the plot of land he cultivates, he nevertheless remains at the mercy of costs whose formation are beyond his control. Working nonstop, he still never manages to get rich.

Property does not explain the power of capitalist business. The business owns fixed capital: buildings, machinery. This doesn’t account for the scale of the resources that pass through its hands and constitute its turnover.

The interpenetration of the economy requires the limitation of property rights. As a matter of fact, what you do at your house risks having negative repercussions on your neighbors’ houses. You can’t get away with dumping your waste in the river just because you own part of the riverbank.

The absolute character of property rights, which according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man are “inviolable and sacred,”1 doesn’t take into account the might and the whims of nature. The most dogged of property owners would be powerless in the face of a volcano cracking open in his house. He could call the police for help, but that wouldn’t scare off the intruder. Generally speaking, inanimate objects and natural phenomena don’t serve at our beck and call.

As remarked by Niño Cochise, grandson of the great Cochise, white men spend their lives fighting over land.2 Yet it isn’t men who can hold the land, but the land, on the contrary, that can hold and nurture men. It ends up burying us all, sooner or later.

The agrarian question

The agrarian question is closely bound to the problem of property and its solution. It’s a vital question for the revolution. In the past, armies of peasants have fought against workers’ insurrections. The opposite has also happened, as in Mexico, but the little peasant’s always been easily mobilized by the counter-revolution in the name of defending his sacred right to property.

In industrialized countries, capital has done the very work that it accuses “the reds” of trying to do: it’s driven the majority of peasants from their lands. Therefore, it can no longer count on their frightened masses to constitute the counter-revolutionary army. However, cities continue to rely on the countryside for their supply of subsistence goods. The party of law and order will always be happy to weaponize this situation against the revolution.

Agricultural workers who don’t own the soil they cultivate, who are either simple farmers or the employees of big operations, will organize themselves to carry on production. They’ll no longer need to answer to their former bosses. The land will go to those who tend it! If their former bosses or landlords want to join them so as to contribute knowledge and resources, all the better. They’ll only be allowed to do so as equals.

Where the ownership and the cultivation of the soil coincide, where the peasant employs very few wage laborers or none at all, the problem needs to be considered in a different way—for the good of society as a whole, which couldn’t easily do without some discontented farmers, and for the good of the peasant, whose condition has proletarianized, who depends on a capitalized system for his supplies and his sales, and who has to understand that he’s got everything to gain from the communist revolution.

Capital has developed at the expense of agriculture. It has siphoned agriculture’s labor force and resources into industry. Communism will turn this tide. Agriculture is the darling of communism because it directly concerns the production of foodstuffs and the preservation of a livable environment—two things that capital has particularly neglected.

Property, hereditary or not, will disappear alongside the state and the legal system that once safeguarded it. The custom and practice of cultivating a given parcel will remain, and must even be safeguarded by revolutionary authorities. It’s on this basis that peasants will be able to band together, or, if they prefer, continue to look after their plots in isolation. It’s likely that they’ll mingle the two courses of action at least for a while, each remaining attached to their lands but helping each other to perform certain tasks and sell their products. Inheritance, in the strict sense, will disappear—but who’s more likely to be qualified and motivated to take over from a farmer than his own son?

The general rule will be to allow peasants to organize agricultural production as they see fit. Coercion would be the worst and most costly solution.

The agrarian collectivization implemented by Eastern European capitalism has nothing to do with communism. Their reasons for collectivizing had less to do with ideology than with class and the economy. It was necessary to combat the spontaneous resurgence of the countryside bourgeoisie. Rich peasants further enriched themselves on the backs of poor peasants by making usurious loans. This is how a hub of usurious capital accumulation came to be, rivaling the hub of industry on which the bureaucracy relied. It’s why it was necessary to impose, and pay the cost of, agrarian collectivization.

It was a heavy cost. Peasants in the Soviet Union initially resisted, going so far as to slaughter their livestock. The long-term consequence was a stagnation in agricultural productivity due to the kolkhozniks’3 lack of interest, hence the fluctuating policy regarding family-owned plots of land. Collectivization shielded the peasants from direct economic pressures and thereby helped to keep them in the countryside. This brought about reduced pressure and competition in the labor market. The USSR preserved a body of peasants that’s exceptionally large, in relation to its level of industrialization. It drags them around like a ball and chain.

In renouncing collectivization, are you renouncing the revolutionizing and communizing of the countryside? Absolutely not! Quite the contrary! The communist revolution is the liquidation of the market economy. This affects the countryside, too.

The farmer will no longer make money in exchange for his efforts, if he’s a wage laborer, or for his goods, if he’s an independent producer. He’ll supply society with his surplus production, free of charge. In return, he’ll owe nothing for the goods necessary to his subsistence and his work. He’ll no longer be driven by the appetite or need for money. His motivation will be rooted directly in his interest in the work, his love of his way of life, or his desire to be useful.

The peasant will see his labors ease. He’ll be able to call on an outside workforce for help. This will be made possible by the closure of a whole host of more or less parasitic businesses, and a reduction in the workforces of industry and the service sector. It will be possible, during major agricultural efforts, to temporarily halt certain industrial productions in order to free up hands. This is unimaginable today.

It’s not only production but distribution that will be transformed. The route leading from farmer to consumer will be shortened as much as possible. Products can be transported directly from any given farm to any given city, and managed by the interested parties themselves. When people see the difference between the costs of production and the costs paid by consumers, they’ll appreciate the benefits of such simplification.

Peasants, alone or with help, will perform the labor of cultivating land and livestock. They won’t do so autonomous of the rest of society. We aren’t promising them absolute freedom. Agriculture currently depends on, and will continue depending on, other sectors of the economy. It has its upstream suppliers of fertilizers and agricultural equipment. Its independence is therefore already restricted in this respect. Besides, it plays too important a role for everyone who depends on it to refrain from ever even sneaking a peek.

To take an extreme scenario: it’s naive to imagine that if some farmers were to abandon their land and their livestock, no longer needing to make money, everyone else would happily agree to die of hunger. In this kind of situation, it’d be feasible to pay the freeloaders back by cutting off their supplies. Farmers must be allowed to keep hold of their lands and to live there as they see fit, but they can’t be allowed to become parasites or, above all, to stockpile resources that others could use in their place.

It’s on the agenda of the revolution to overcome the divide between city and country. This can only be achieved very gradually, because that separation is written in stone and concrete. You can’t wave a magic wand and transport skyscrapers here and forests there. It’ll be possible, however, to rapidly implement measures in this direction. For example, the temporary or permanent resettlement of urban populations to the countryside, where small industrial centers could be established to complement, and if possible partner with, agricultural efforts. Many people who left the countryside only reluctantly­—or who dislike the city—will be happy to go back. Individual and collective gardens will proliferate and brighten up the suburbs, and even the urban centers. To this end, we can tear up the pavements of streets made obsolete by reduced traffic. It’ll facilitate the process of recycling certain household wastes; reduce transportation expenses; and supply the population with fresh vegetables. One of the shortcomings of capitalist agriculture is that, having distanced itself from its consumers and their waste, it needs to make up the imbalance through constantly intensifying chemical and biological interventions. In the new gardens, those who are presently refused roles in production and often doomed to boredom—the children, the elderly, the sick—will be able to occupy themselves and feel useful. These will be fertile educational grounds for the de-schooled youth. Finally, something to renew our polluted atmosphere!

From scarcity to abundance

The right to and sentiment for property will die out in communist society because scarcity will have become a thing of the past. It’ll no longer be necessary to cling to an object for fear that, should you loosen your grip on it for even a moment, you’ll never be able to enjoy it again.

What spells will you cast, to materialize this fantastic epoch of abundance?, the bourgeois will taunt. There is no magic to it. We’ll be able to summon abundance because it’s already there, right beneath our feet. This isn’t a question of generating abundance but of liberating it. Capital, having bent man and nature beneath its yoke for centuries, is what will actually make it possible. It’s not that communism will produce abundance but that capitalism maintains scarcity artificially.

The astounding rise in labor productivity hasn’t done much, so far, to change the lot of the proletariat. It’s even had detrimental effects. The power of capital destroyed the Third World’s traditional societies without allowing their populations access to the industrialized world. This, combined with monstrous population growth, plunged the better part of humanity into utter destitution. The position of the wage slave would come to be a veritable promotion, in relation to that of the vagrant.

Nuclear and electronic technologies first exerted their influence as weapons. Happily, scientific progress has delivered us from those barbarous times, back when you were forced to look at those you killed, sometimes even spattering yourself with their blood. Yuck!!!

Even the inhabitants of “rich” countries, who benefit from this increase in productivity, are being cheated. Growing wages and escalating consumption only serve to compensate for deteriorating living conditions. People owning better objects or more of them, as compared to some previous era, doesn’t signify that they live better lives. The workman has a car that his father didn’t—but his workplace has moved far from the countryside where he spends his weekends. He loses again in traffic jams what was gained in working hours, and gains in nervous fatigue what was reduced in physical effort. What industry grants with one hand, it’s already taken back with the other; the conditions of its development make it so. Industry extols the excellence of its remedies but neglects to mention that it’s the one incubating the disease. This is no accident. The logic of commodity production presumes that the conditions of dissatisfaction be maintained. Medicine needs disease. As was remarked by C. Fourier: in civilization, scarcity is born of abundance itself, and society moves in a vicious cycle.4

Human beings have seen themselves more and more reduced to the passive role of consumers. Their state of undeath is enlivened by the artificial life of commodities. Their misery becomes a rainbow reflection of pleasures, displayed in every shop window and offered at unbeatable prices.

In communist society, goods will be free and freely available. The foundations of social organization will be rid of money.

How do you prevent resources from being hoarded by some at the expense of others? After a momentary euphoria when people help themselves to existing reserves, won’t our society be in danger of sliding into waste and inequality and succumbing, finally, to chaos and terror?

These concerns aren’t exclusive to a privileged few with a direct interest in maintaining the system. They also represent the perspective of the oppressed, wound up in the fear that an upheaval could worsen their circumstances. In a storm, aren’t the mighty better equipped to survive than the small?

Within a developed communist society, the productive forces will be able to meet all needs. The frantic, neurotic desire to consume and to hoard will disappear. It’ll be absurd to want to accumulate; there won’t be any more money to pocket or wage workers to take on. Why accumulate dentures or cans of beans that you won’t need? If any form of constraint persists at that stage, it won’t be in the distribution of products but in their very nature—in the obligation imposed by specific use values. At the manufacturing level, there will inevitably be options to choose and others to reject.

When revolutionary society has first emerged from the edges of the old world, the situation will be different. The revolutionary authorities, the workers’ councils, will have to establish and enforce some number of rules to prevent the return of mercantile habits and mechanisms. It might be necessary, then, to limit the cans of beans or pounds of sugar that each person can keep at home. No one can say precisely how long this phase will last. It’ll vary according to the greater or lesser poverty of each region. It’ll depend on the power and resolve of the revolutionary party. A war provoked by the capitalist party, which would wreak havoc on production and transportation, could only prolong this transitional phase. But if you base your estimate solely on the time required for the communist reconversion of productive forces, it could be very brief. Consider how quickly the American economy was able to transform itself, during the Second World War, into a war economy!

With communism, the character of all production and the nature of the objects produced undergo a radical transformation. The disappearance of exchange value has repercussions on use value.

The transformation of products

The commodities offered up by the market form an extremely hierarchized ensemble. For any given need, there isn’t one commodity, or even a handful; there are multitudes from the same brand and its competitors. The aim, of course, is to satisfy the public and respond to the variety of its needs. The customer must have a choice! In reality, he has only the choices permitted him by his financial means and social position. Many commodities fulfill the same function but are distinguished by quality and exclusivity. This is the case, for example, with saucepans. Different products can also correspond to different uses—only, these differing uses aren’t accessible to the same individuals. It isn’t the same people who go about their business by supersonic plane as by bicycle.

This hierarchization and differentiation of commodities reflects the capitalist world’s intergroup competition and its extreme inequality in wages and living conditions. They leave their mark on industrial development, where the needs of the wealthy play a guiding role. Some goods, like the automobile, lose much of their utility when they become widely available, ceasing to be the privilege of a minority.

Communism doesn’t propose to dress everyone in the same uniform and feed them the same gruel, but it will put an end to this noxious diversification and hierarchization of products.

New goods that are still scarce will at first be used collectively, or on a first-come-first-served basis.

In the realm of clothing, you can suppose on the one hand that a reduced number of quality garments will be produced, though enough to serve all sizes and all typical uses. They’ll be produced on a massive scale, and by the most automated means possible. On the other hand, workshops could be opened wherein machines and fabrics would be available for anyone who wanted to craft other kinds of garments for themselves or their friends.

The much-vaunted freedom of the consumer runs into limitations beyond the weight of the doubloons in his pocket. You can pay a fortune and still be swindled on quality. When you don’t have a lot of money, you’re practically guaranteed to be palmed off with junk. Trickery and the commodity go hand in hand; it’s not a long way from salesperson to thief. It matters that the selling points be apparent, and it matters little that they’re all appearance. What was once dependent on the malice of merchants, capital practically enshrines as law. It produces the commodity itself. It can therefore act to emphasize its image, rather than its actual quality. We’ve arrived at a point where engineers calculate and determine the necessary deterioration of objects. It wouldn’t do to encumber the market with products that last too long!

Plus, the faster that capital runs, the faster it retakes the form of money—only to lose it all over again by reforming as concrete commodity—the more it rakes in. It reinvests itself, with value added. This tendency leads it to condemn unproductive reserves of resources. Everything needs circulate, fast. Even its investments in buildings or machines need to be amortized as fast as possible; they represent money that’s tied up. The capitalist sacrifices technology’s possibilities on the altar of finance. He invests in the short term instead of the long term. Quality is cut back and the cost of products raised because investment in the means of production was already cut back. Rapid turnover and superficial variation in product lines are preferable to in-depth technological changes in productive machinery. As testified by the history of capitalism, technological progress does get realized, but it’s done by way of economic upheaval and enormous waste.

When the products of human activity no longer take the form of capital, there will be no reason not to build up reserves. They’ll assure our security and, acting as a buffer, ease the demands on production and transportation. The need for constant haste, unless necessitated by the actual nature of certain products, will disappear. It’ll be possible to make long-term plans and muster the strength for large, protracted investments. Technology will be guided so as to enable the manufacturing of durable objects.

Today, the costs of commodity circulation have grown higher and higher, often outstripping the costs of actual production. “Costs of circulation” doesn’t only mean the expense of transport but also that of packaging, marketing, advertising… A significant portion of these costs have little to do with the nature of the products or where they’ll be used. It’s promotion of the commodity qua commodity. It’ll disappear.

Even in the actual costs of transportation, serious savings will be possible. The increasingly marked separation between places of production and places of consumption isn’t alien to the capitalist nature of the system. The transport of goods will be simplified. The profusion of enterprises and intermediaries will disappear.

The costs arising from the need to control and monitor things that can be stolen—all matters relating to payment—will no longer have any reason to exist.

In this new world, man won’t have to constantly pay for and justify his own nourishment, transport, entertainment. He’ll quickly get out of the habit. From this will arise the feeling that he is truly free. He’ll feel at home everywhere. No longer under constant surveillance, he won’t be tempted to take advantage. Why try to lie or build secret stockpiles when you’re sure you’ll be able to meet your needs?

Little by little, the sense of property will cease to exist. In retrospect, it’ll seem somewhat bizarre and petty. Why cling to an object or a person when the whole universe is yours?

The new man will grow closer to his hunter-gatherer ancestors, who trusted in a natural world that would provide life’s necessities freely and often abundantly, who didn’t preoccupy themselves with a tomorrow they had no control over anyway. By way of nature, the man of tomorrow will have a world he’s molded; abundance will be born of his own hands. He’ll be sure of himself because he’ll have confidence in his strength and knowledge of his limits. He’ll be carefree, because he’ll know that tomorrow is his. Death? It exists. But it isn’t worthwhile to cry over what’s inevitable. What matters is being able to savor the moment.