Author: aha350

Thomas Paine’s fifteen-page pamphlet “Agrarian Justice” (1795), put forth the first realistic proposition to put an end to systemic poverty. Paine’s solution manifested in a universal social insurance system consisting of pensions for the elderly, support for the handicapped/disabled, and a lump sum one-time payment to all members of society upon reaching the age of twenty-one. This insurance system would be funded by the “National Fund”, financed by the 10% inheritance tax focused on land. Yet, while this system may sound fanciful and unpractical, Paine goes to great lengths to demonstrate, with calculations based on census, living expense, and property data, that his social insurance/stakeholder plan could end most poverty in England.

Foundational to Paine’s pamphlet was the firmly held belief that poverty can be prevented. Even further, individuals are entitled to not only a relief from poverty, but a right against even being impoverished in and of itself.

“Agrarian Justice” holds relevance to our class in that Paine puts forth an interesting and unique understanding of private property. The English philosopher defended the private property system, while also asserting that universal entitlements must be put in place to limit poverty caused by property-holding inequality.

Paine begins his reasoning with premises that parallel many of the theorists we’ve read this semester: that in the state of nature or anarchy, before positive laws are instituted, everyone is free and equal, no one is subject to anyone else’s authority, and the earth is held in common by everyone. He then goes on to articulate that people will unite in a legal regime only if it promotes their interests more than the state of nature alone. Similar to John Locke, Paine claimed that in the state of nature, every man has a property right to whatsoever he removes from nature through the mixing with his own labor. This act not only establishes the man as its just owner, but also excludes the common right of other men. Both agree that as much land/property can be acquired in this manner, as long as they left “enough and as good” for others, and nothing rotted or went to waste.

Paine deviates from Locke in disputing his claim that the private property regime left everyone with a higher standard of living than what people enjoyed before. In “Of Property”, Locke compares a hundred acres of uncultivated land with ten acres of cultivated, fertile land, concluding, “[Man’s] labour now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres that would have needed a hundred ·uncultivated· acres lying in common. I have here greatly understated the productivity of improved land, setting it at ten to one when really it is much nearer a hundred to one”. Paine stands in stark opposition, deeming that in the original state of nature, no one was poor. Poverty arises only upon the institution of private property in land, which creates two unequal classes, the rich propertied class and the poor working class. Since the poor were worse off under the current system of property laws than people were in the state of nature, they had a just complaint against those laws.

Despite the above, Paine was no enemy of private property. By his examination, the problem lied not in the existence of private property, but rather that the existing property regime repealed a rightful property claim in the state of nature. Those who toiled the land were entitled only to the marginal value added by their labor, not to the land itself. As a result, land had been unjustly taken from everyone else. The solution was not communism, nor was it possible to return the land to its original state in nature, as the population had grown too large compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Instead, Paine proposed to compensate all those excluded from privately appropriated land. Landowners would pay a tax to society (10% of total worth), and this subsequently developed “National Fund” would be the harbinger of the end of poverty. As such, the balance would be restored, and land-less individuals would be once again “better off than in the state of nature”.

At the time, the pamphlet largely fell on deaf ears, considered both overly idealistic and foolishly impractical. Yet today, several developed countries like France and the Netherlands have managed to reduce the number of elderly in poverty to negligible rates due to their comprehensive social insurance system. Perhaps the principles put forth in Thomas Paine’s “Agrarian Justice” could alleviate some of the modern injustices/imbalances that plague private property ownership?

A Community land trust is a model with the foundational purpose of creating affordable housing for low to moderate income people through community ownership of the land. It was a concept that I was entirely unfamiliar with prior to this week’s readings, and one that is of particular relevance to people in NYC’s Lower East Side and San Francisco Bay Area, where prices of homes and rents have exponentially increased in the last few years, leaving many unable to afford housing in the area. Yet aside from these two notorious locations, a similar scenario is also increasingly playing out across the country, leaving many people priced out of the housing market where they live.  The Community Land Trust is a vehicle created to address this imbalance, and will play an ever-increasing role in the years to come. As Karen Gray made clear in her piece, Community Land Trusts in the United States, “nearly half of the current CLTs started in this century… [and] the number of CLTs has grown most rapidly in the last decade.”

Community Land Trusts are a manifestation of a mindset that stands in stark opposition to the unquenchable thirst for money & profit that dictate the lives of many in our current capitalistic economy. CLT’s place limits on people greed and ability to achieve colossal profits, in favor of the welfare of the people in the community and the environment. This innovative land ownership model replaces greed, corruption, and selfishness, with compassion, equality, and security.

The now fabled American founding father Thomas Paine, in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, asserted that the land itself belongs to everyone, that it is the common property of the human race. The Earth, Paine argued, “in its natural uncultivated state…was the common property of the human race”. Yet, the notion of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, which made it impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. To this Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax land owners once per generation to pay for the needs of those who have no land. The resulting “National Fund” would fund universal old-age and disability pensions, as well as provide a fixed sum to all citizens upon reaching the age of 21. To Paine, private property was necessary, yet he also acknowledged that at the same time that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their “payment” to non-property holders for the right to hold private property.

Thomas Paine’s late 18^th century Agrarian Justice underlines many of the modern discussions in countries around the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). The UBI is the idea that the government would provide every citizen regular payments in order to cover their basic needs, such as food, water, and shelter. The call for such a movement has emerged in response to the growing notion that “work” has monopolized so many aspects of human existence, the inability of many to acquire employment and/or physically perform labor, ever-rising rents, and the overarching threat of automation.  

Concepts such as Community Land Trusts and the Universal Basic Income are ideas that seemingly hold a much more permanent place in the horizon of humankind, promising to change the how society as we know it functions. With compassion at the center, these movements have the opportunity to bring about unparalleled positive change for both the Earth and humanity.

 

In “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West”, author Neil Smith discusses the concept of gentrification and how certain neighborhoods have developed over time. He describes how certain areas have evolved from run down and low income neighborhoods, occupied by working-class residents to affluent communities, dominated by high end fashion boutiques and upper-class citizens. Throughout the text, Smith parallels the gentrification of New York City to the “Frontier Myth” or the “Taming the Wild West” in order to represent the attitudes of the residents of New York City, as well as the “pioneers” who claim to have been the first settlers who started the transformation of these neighborhoods. The frontier myth is so powerful in that it, “makes the new city explicable in terms of old ideologies”, and even more goes as far as to, “rationalizes social differentiation and exclusion as natural and inevitable”. Smith puts forth that two industries defined the new urban frontier of the 1980s: the real-estate industry, and the “culture ” industry (art dealers, patrons, gallery owners, artists, designers, critics, writers and performers who “converted urban destruction into ultra chic.”). As a three-year resident of the Lower East Side, it is so odd grappling with the notion that not so long ago there were a sizable group of people the saw it as an undiscovered territory marked by danger and the unknown.

In reading Smith’s composition, I was taken aback by the notion that, “there was a strong ideological objection to the concept of relief itself and a belief that the rigors of unemployment were a necessary and salutary discipline for the working class” (67). With such societal dispositions amongst those of privilege & in power, it is no surprise that poverty was an inescapable condition. These attitudes reminded me of Barbara Ehrenreichs efforts in her book Nickel and Dimed, in which she sets out to examine the fundamental misunderstanding of American poverty, namely, that it is curable by employment, and the complexities of low-wage labor. Ehrenreich leaves her home, takes the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepts whatever jobs she was offered moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota. While one might think someone who has a Ph.D. like Ehrenreich could easily hold down a low-wage job, this quickly proves not to be the case, as no job is “unskilled,” and each required concentration and learning new terms, tools, and skills. Ultimately, Ehrenreich does not manage to find stability and longevity in any of the locations, despite pushing herself to borderline dangerous/unhealthy limits.

The complicated truth Ehrenreich investigation reveals is that many of the nation’s poorest citizens remain poor no matter how hard they work, no matter how many jobs they hold. They sweat, labor and toil, running on little sleep, eating mostly junk food, living in overcrowded conditions, and having to support young children just to survive day by day. This state is further exacerbated die to ever-rising rents at seemingly unpredictable times. Although Ehrenreich trials take place between 1998-2000, there is still significant overlap in mentality between upper echelons of society described in Neil Smiths, “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West”.

Amy Starecheski “Who Deserves Housing? The Battle for East Thirteenth Street” opens with the first-person voices of squatters in the six squatted buildings on East 13th Street. This diverse bunch of people moved into left-behind spaces in the Lower East Side. They fashioned a community, built of their own imagination, connecting green space, community gardens, and the buildings they rehabilitated. These squatters sought legal title by virtue of their ten years of labor and occupation of the buildings, arguing that their history constituted them as a legitimate group that could claim urban space and collectively own inalienable property. Yet, despite their ardent efforts in court, ultimately their case was lost. An interesting dynamic arises in that the squatters were challenging private property, yet “some were dreaming of homeownership”. Therefore, similarities arise between the argument of some of the squatters and John Locke.  In “Of Property”, Locke asserts that “Labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to”. Likewise, it was the improvements and overall labor the squatters put into these East 13th Street building for so long that they felt legitimized their clam. 

“I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better.”

-Louis C.K

Cheryl Harris’s composition “Whiteness as Property” puts forth an understanding of property starkly different from many of the readings we have done thus far in the semester. Harris elicits both a traditional and more intangible value of “whiteness”.  Historically, whiteness has contributed to a racialized conception of ownership. Property ownership was contingent on racial identity, as for many years only white people (men) could own property. Moreover, some racialized bodies were even considered property, most obvious being the enslaved African Americans in the US. As such, whiteness allowed both ownership of property and protected those considered white from becoming the property of others.

Harris also argues that the law has been a crucial tool in upholding and protecting the wealth of privileges associated with whiteness in the United States: “Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law” (Harris 1713). To elucidate this point Harris provides the example of the court case Plessy v. Ferguson. One of Plessy’s attorneys argued that by consigning him to the “colored” car even though he was seven-eighths white, the state law mandating this separation deprived him of the “most valuable sort of property . . . the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity.” (Harris 1748). Therefore, whiteness was also a reputational interest that bestowed owners with certain privileges founded on a public conception of their identity and personhood. The access to such entitlements was itself valuable property.

Whiteness also functioned as traditional property by conferring “the right to exclude others” (Harris, 1731). This exclusionism is foundational to making whiteness what Harris describes as, “an exclusive club whose membership was closely and grudgingly guarded” (Harris, 1737). A destructive cycle has emerged in which those in power then, almost exclusively white Americans, have perpetuated this phenomenon up to the present. Although education is thought to break the bonds of race and class, biases in the culture of schooling itself and the rising cos of private education often run counter to these efforts.

I have worked in the corporate world the last three summer at a consulting firm, a big pharma company, and most recently at an investment bank. It is only after reading Harris’s composition that I look back and realize just how little diversity existed in the office. While it widely known that the majority of corporate executives are white males, it is odd to see (at least in my limited experience) that this also appears to be the case for interns and entry-level positions. This pattern appears to subsist, despite apparent efforts and initiatives to increase diversity in the corporate world. Even more, there is a growing, falsely-founded belief that our society is almost post-racial. Harris’s article is needed today just as much as it was back in the early 1990’s. The power of whiteness lies in its invisibility, and that fuels the perpetuation of systemic racism. It is that quality that often allows the issues described in “Whiteness as Property” to subside to the periphery of people’s mind.

 

John Locke begins his argument in “Of Property” with the idea that God gave the Earth and its fruits in common to men for their use. No one man has a right that excludes or limits the rest of mankind. Yet, before the gifts on nature can be useful or beneficial, there must be a particular man to appropriate them. This “appropriation” occurs when something from the state of nature is mixed with the labor of man. Locke makes clear that one’s labor, and the “works of his hands are strictly his”. The labor removes the land or object from the common state, and establishes the man as its owner. Private property acquired in this manner is not only moral but useful. Therefore, Locke’s premise in this section is quite simple: people have the right to appropriate goods by adding their labor to that good, thus making it their own.

While Locke argues that men have a right to create and enjoy their property, he also argues that there are limits to that right in the state of nature. The first limit is alluded to when he describes how property is created. He says, “Labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.” The implication is that one’s right to property is only clear and exclusive so long as it doesn’t jeopardize anyone else’s ability to create equivalent kinds of property for himself. Secondly, and the subject of a good deal of the chapter, Locke stresses the force of the limitation on property. Man should only obtain as much property “as [he] can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils…Whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others.” The reason for this limit is that “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy.”

Perhaps most similar to the notion of ownership put forth by Locke can be found in Andro Linklater’s presentation of Reverend John Winthrop’s sermon in “Owning the Earth”. Winthrop put foreword that private ownership of the Earth did not depend upon the law, but was created only through human toil of the land. Moreover, every man had the natural right to occupy empty land, and ultimately grew from God’s injunction in the Book of Genesis to, “Increase & multiply, replenish the Earth & subdue.” Both Locke and Winthrop’s positions stand in stark opposition to the idea of the divine right of kings, and address the then divisive question of did authority lie with the people or with the crown?

The main issue I have with John Locke’s “On Property” is that he is unclear regarding what type of labor is needed to obtain private property. Some kinds of labor are obvious, such as planting crops, but suppose I am raising sheep and need a certain amount of land to feed those sheep. May I claim as my private property all land that I deem necessary for pasturage? Or even today what if I am an environmentalist and want to preserve the environment as is? Can I fence off the area I want to protect? Such questions are difficult to deduce from Locke’s premise (at least in “On Property” alone), and would be addressed by social conventions and governmental rules. These conventions and standards may vary significantly among different cultures, traditions, and societies.

Barely three centuries ago, the the majority of the worlds productive land belonged either communally to traditional societies, or to the higher power of the monarchy or the church.  Yet that pattern, and the way of life that accompanied it, had largely disappeared by the start of the nineteenth century.

In “Owning the Earth”, Andrew Linklater undertakes an examination of how the revolutionary idea, “that one person could own part of the Earth exclusively” (Page 11), developed, and the drastic reverberations felt by society at large.

Before the development of the idea of private property, English social structure had been organized around the notions of “mutual obligation” and feudalism since the early Middle Ages. In practice this dynamic meant that the country was not governed by the monarch, but by individual lords who “leased” land from the king and oversaw their own manors or estates. In exchange for the land, these lords would provide military and other services to the King when he requested. Under the same reasoning, in exchange for housing, land and protection, serfs had to perform tasks to maintain and cultivate the estate, as well as to pay several different kinds of taxes. The serf was neither a slave nor property, but was considered to be a fixture of the land. As such, a serf’s children were also tied to the land.

A similar sentiment in present in St. Augustine, Excerpt from Tractate 6 (John 1:32-33), in that, “God has distributed to mankind these very human rights [of having property] through the emperors and kings of this world”. It is up to their discretion to determine how land is divided, and which territories lords are given.

Linklater makes clear that the idea that these rights (to raise cattle and crops, construct buildings, rent land) could be owned individually promoted a, “sense of greed and selfishness in stark opposition to the previous belief that people help about property” (13).

Several events lead to this transformation. The first was the exponential growth of the wool market due Europe’s rapidly rising population. Driven by the prospect of wool profits, landowners competed to take exclusive control of the ground, and proceeded to move as many families as possible out, “whole villages and townships were soon emptied” (Page 17). The manipulation and displacement of tenants was so widespread that the church of England even found it necessary to implement a special prayer, “we heartily pray [O Lord] to send thy Holy Spirit into the heart of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwellings…may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands…[nor create] unreasonable fines” (Page 17).

Another major development was the seizure and subsequent redistribution of the Church’s land by King Henry VIII. Over the course of four centuries, England’s monasteries had acquired over 2 million acres of farmland, more than 20% of all the cultivated land in England at the time. Moreover, the Church’s land included some of the most fertile and valuable in the kingdom. Yet by 1540 Henry VIII had confiscated much of this estate, and subsequently sold it off over the course of seven years to pay for his seemingly unquenchable thirst for war. Aristocrats with influence were at the top of the queue to purchase this monastic land, but when the wool market collapse for the first time in a century, they were forced put it up for sale once again. This time, London merchants, careful farmers, government officials, and even tenants on fixed rents, purchased the land. Essentially, anyone who had the cash was a viable and considered buyer. This large scale redistribution of land laid waste to traditional communal civilizations, displaced entire peoples from their homelands, and for the first time made it possible fro a commoner to hold considerable territory.

Lastly, I found most fascinating the new ideas of property ownership that arose from some of the settlers in the New World. Prior to the arrival of the Puritans, possession of the Earth in both America and the Caribbean was deemed to be derived from the royal charter backed by “divine grace”, given to a particular people or company. John Winthrop however put foreword the idea that ownership of the Earth did not depend on the law, but was created by human toil. Even more, since the Native Americans did not, “inclose no land neither have any settled habitation, nor any cattle to improve the land” (Page 28). This line of reasoning was in complete opposition to the beliefs the Lenape had concerning their relationship to the Earth. While the Lenape saw themselves as part of nature (no more important than trees, animals, or the rivers), the Puritan settlers perceived nature as something to be conquered and possessed if certain criteria were met.