Property is Power

To own is to govern. In Freedom, Democracy, and Economic Rights, S. M. Love writes “If I have a property right regarding an object, I have the right to govern the use of that object” (63). The key word here is govern. Property is not merely control over things; it is authority over how others may act with respect to them.

Once this is clear, the three views of property are no longer merely technical distinctions. They differ in how determinate property comes prior to political institutions. (1) On the conventional view, property has no determinate content outside public law. There are no pre-political ownership claims that fix who controls what. (2) On the semi-determinate view, individuals can form provisional claims in a state of nature, but those claims lack full legitimacy until they are incorporated into a civil condition. (3) On the robust natural rights view, property rights are largely fixed prior to political institutions. The state’s role is primarily to secure preexisting entitlements.

But when we recognize that rights are “relationships between people, not between people and objects” (Love 63), property cannot be treated as a purely private matter. It allocates authority, and authority that binds everyone requires collective justification which cannot be fixed unilaterally. As Love states, “In unilaterally structuring the rights of others, I unilaterally bind their wills, making myself the master of others” (Love 57). Property regimes, then, are not neutral. They are governance regimes.

If property is structured authority, then a “mode of production” is not simply a way of organizing labor and capital but rather a a large-scale arrangement of ownership that determines who has power and who must work within it. As such, feudalism, capitalism, socialism are not neutral economic frameworks but institutionalized distributions of authority.

Under capitalism, ownership of productive assets confers the authority to determine the conditions of labor, access to resources, and participation in social cooperation. Workers may formally enter contracts voluntarily, but the background distribution of property determines who must seek permission and who may grant it.

The debate, then, is not primarily about efficiency or redistribution. It is about who governs. Property determines whose will structures our shared world and whose will must adapt. When ownership is understood as power, economic life is no longer separate from politics but actually becomes the main domain of politics.

The three views of property ultimately converge on this point: property cannot be apolitical. It defines how we stand in relation to one another. And once that is acknowledged, the minimal state—and the attempt to treat economic structure as beyond democratic concern—becomes far more difficult to defend.

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