¶ … justification of private property and also compares and contrasts the role that private property plays in the theories of Locke and in his "Second Treatise" and Marx in his "Communist Manifesto." It asks whether individuals have a right to private property, or (which I think is the same thing) whether there are any good right-based arguments for private property. A right-based argument is an argument showing that an individual interest considered in itself; is sufficiently important from a moral point-of-view to justify holding people to be under a duty to promote it. So my question can be rephrased as follows. What individual interests are served by the existence of private property as opposed to some other sort of property regime (such as communism)? Are any of these interests so important from a moral point-of-view that they justify holding governments to be under a duty to promote, uphold, and protect property-owning? Or is it rather the case that, taken one by one, the interests which individuals have in the matter do not have this level of importance, and that these interests should be dealt with in the aggregate, in the form of utilitarian arguments about property institutions, rather than treated as the basis of rights?
Marx argued in The Communist Manifesto there cannot be private property for anyone at all unless nine-tenths of the population is property less -- then the possibility of a GR-based argument for private property, along the lines of the one we have attributed, is in danger. Any thesis about the inevitability of widespread propertylessness threatens the collapse of the sort of argument that Locke wants to put forward in favor of private property. It is the challenge laid down by Karl Marx in a furious response to bourgeois critics of the socialist programme outlined in The Communist Manifesto:
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its nonexistence in the hands of these nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property the necessary condition for whose existence is the nonexistence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us for intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
Both lines of argument hold that individuals have an interest in owning things which is important enough to command respect and to constrain political action. This is a basic human interest which everyone has: owning property contributes immensely to the ethical development of the individual person. On the Locke an approach, the interest which commands respect is one which people have only on account of what they happen to have done or what has happened to them. A man who has mixed his labor with a piece of land, or acquired it legitimately from someone else, has an interest in ownership which the government must respect; but a man who has done neither of these things, but would simply rather like to own something, has no such constraining interest. The Lockean right to property, in other words, is a special right.
Locke's argument about mixing one's labor is incoherent, and does provide a good argument for a general right of a rather different sort: a general right to subsistence which imposes welfarist constraints on whatever property system there may be. But no such general right is recognized in Nozick's theory. I maintain that this is a fatal flaw: no theory of the kind that could possibly be made acceptable in the absence of a background general right to subsistence.
Throughout his work, Marx is adamant that the indictment against capitalism is not merely the fact that private property happens to be distributed unequally or in a way that leaves millions without any guaranteed access to the means of production; the problem is that private ownership is a form of property that has this characteristic necessarily. No matter how noble your egalitarian intentions, the existence of any distribution of private property rights in the means of production will lead quickly to their concentration in the hands of a few. Thus egalitarian intentions, so far as private property is concerned are hopelessly utopian, for they underestimate...
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