Both John Locke and Henry George agree that labor is the essential ingredient in ownership. Locke describes the process of coming to own property as taking, “something from the state that nature has provided and left it in” and mixing his labor with it, “thus joining it to something that is his own; and in that way he makes it his property” (Locke 11). George’s opinion is similar in that “as nature gives only to labor, the exertion of labor in production is the only title to exclusive possession” (The Injustice of Private Property in Land). However, Locke and George disagree about the validity of owning land. Whereas George believes that the idea of private property in the land is “wrong” because humans cannot produce land, Locke contends, “A man owns whatever land he tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the products of. By his labor he as it were fences off that land from all that is held in common” (Locke 12). Central to this disagreement is George’s opinion that “the essential characteristic of the land is that it does not embody labor” (The Injustice of Private Property in Land). This is where I’d like to intervene.
I would like to question if, in fact, land does not embody labor and if it exists “irrespective of human exertion,” as George argues. Both authors are products of their time, therefore unable to foresee the kind of globalized world we live in, which displays such vast inequality between industrialized and undeveloped areas. From a 21st century lens, it is almost harder to extract labor from land to imagine it without than to conceptualize how we could, as George may try, to envision humans producing land, implying a kind of unnatural labor. Today, land is nearly unrecognizable without thinking about our relation to it. Patrick Wolfe, author of “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” posits that “land is life.” In other words, we cannot exist without it, and as Locke notes, “when God gave the world in common to all mankind, he commanded man to work and man needed to work in order to survive” (Locke 13). Thus, obeying God, man’s relationship to land became the very basis of his own life, which he owns according to both Locke and George. The key here is making the jump from being entitled to hold land in common to privately owning it.
Locke argues that, “No man’s labour could tame or appropriate all the land; no man’s enjoyment could consume more than a small part; so that is was impossible for any man in this way to infringe on the right of another; or acquire a property to the disadvantage of his neighbor” (Locke 14). What Locke is saying is that so long as everyone can acquire only so much property as they have the capacity to use for themselves, privately owned land is not in itself a bad thing. In this scenario, “fencing off” land for oneself is not a detriment to the community because everybody has the opportunity to do so and thrive from it. Here, Locke’s argument connects to George’s assertion that, “All people exist in nature on equal footing and have equal rights,” in that so long as this natural right of equality lends itself to equal opportunity, there is no room for co-opting the commonality of land in a harmful way. I see two snags here. First is that making an argument about “natural rights” becomes moot in a society which has written and unwritten social contracts that have worked and continue to privilege certain identities in socioeconomic life. Second, and interrelated, is Locke’s argument that money, fiat currency, has created lots of problems.
The invention of money, gold as a fiat currency namely, created a system that would take man, “beyond the bounds of his rightful property” because with money, the basis of accumulation was no longer necessarily for use and thus goods could spoil, creating a waste (Locke 17). Money was “a durable thing that men could keep without it spoiling;” men could take more than what was needed to support life and manipulate trade for more than sustenance (Locke 18). It was no longer a mixing of rights and convenience which curbed man’s temptation to labour for than what he could use, but rather a creation of artificial value (Locke 18).
These ideas bring up some final, half-baked, thoughts and questions for me: Was private property a valid concept before the invention and widespread use of money? Will it ever be valid, according to Locke, for as long as money is a dominant tool in trade? What about the role of overpopulation and overdevelopment? Are we far past any redemption of private property in the land given that theoretically there may no longer be enough space for everyone to use only what they would need? Have we “improved” land too much for it to be of use?
These are excellent half-baked questions to ask! If I may bake them a bit more, I’d perhaps re-emphasize your point that these ideas are of their time, place, and epistemological frame. Locke is writing at a time when land appears limitless and the use of it is also still fairly limited. What’s more, he has reasoned out a justification for colonizing land that is already occupied by both naturalizing/decivilizing Native Americans and others and defining what kind of labor counts as a prerequisite for ownership. So Locke can perceive of few reasons why every civilized citizen shouldn’t be able to own land. The only source of inequality might be differences in ability to labor, such that a weaker person would not cultivate as much as a stronger person and trade might be necessary to equalize access to the goods of the earth. Money follows as a proxy for land, as he explains. But Locke doesn’t go too far down the road of money being a proxy for labor. And that’s sort of where George comes in because ownership of property and (slyly quoting Marx) “the means of production” through a monetary purchase or inheritance means that ownership can be removed from labor and labor removed from the land. Disassociating land from labor through the privatization and accumulation of land — particularly in an urbanizing and industrializing late-19th century world — is tantamount to stripping laborers of the natural right to survive upon the fruits of the earth. For George, land is not infinite and each and every person can no longer — maybe never could — tend to his/her own plot of land and live off it. And we see that in stark relief today too, as you note, as arable land disappears and borders are militarized. Considering these two historical contexts, then, do you think either a Lockean or Georgeian prescription could work in todays’ world?