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“What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of almost all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights related to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights, this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal #property then, is that one has the option not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.”
― David #Graeber and David #Wengrow, in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" #slavery #family #familia #sociology #anthropology #law #patriarchy #bioPower #reputation #honor

“Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love… It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps confusion – between #care and #domination is utterly critical to the larger questions of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relationships with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.”
― David #Graeber and David #Wengrow, in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" #history #learning #learn #property #family #sociology #anthropology #law #patriarchy #bioPower #reputation #honour

"The #law is the most powerful engine through which ideologies can become self-replicating engines. John Locke’s theory of property as the endowed right of white men to use and to produce worked like witchcraft—the natural world, which had sustained societies for thousands of years, could suddenly be taken by force, enclosed, and tilled for the sole profit of one man, with trespassers punished. The conversion of land into one person’s permanent property was not permissible under the indigenous populations who had long occupied it, nor was such a thing permissible anywhere in the world except Europe—and even there, only after the enclosure movements of the 1600s."

Mehrsa #Baradaran in her book: "The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America"

@economics

"Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century
[…]
• Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
• The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
• In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered."

Sullivan, Hickel, 2022 : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169

@histodons

@estelle @economics

Your mention of the enclosure is spot on. You have encapsulated not only the genesis (Enclosure in western Europe) and the usurpation, but also the solution to that usurpation. That is communal capitalism. As whimsical as this may sound, one only needs to examine Ixtlán, a modern town in Mexico to see this vibrant concept in action.

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@estelle @economics

Ixtlán uses organizational principles predating the rise of traditional capitalism, operates based on the concept of the commons, and has developed an innovative model of community (communal) capitalism as opposed to traditional capitalism. Bray, David Barton. The Community as Entrepreneurial Firm: Common Property Capitalism in Mexican Forest Communities Creates Jobs, Competes in Global Markets, and Conserves Biodiversity. Americas Quarterly. (cont.)

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@estelle @economics

See:

February 15, 2010, https://www.ccmss.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/The-community-as-Entrepreneurial-firm.pdf

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@estelle @economics

The rest of the solution can be found at:

https://awscommunity.social/@Cirdan/112509414520700948

The solution, in a nutshell, is to reduce and stop private property from accumulating in the hands of individuals. While communal capitalism can do that on the community level, commons capitalism can do that on a national level. WHATEVER THE MEANS, lawfully take income producing property out of the hands of individuals.

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@estelle @economics

Commons capitalism as propounded is postulated for helping workers. However, the concept should help people understand that there is another way to promote capitalism other than having the ownership of the means of production vested in the wealthy. The property can be held without state action for a myriad of uses and without private, individual ownership. Economists and social scientists should explore those alternatives created by commons capitalism.

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