Why Property Matters

The predominant cause of social inequality, to Karl Marx, is bourgeois morality: the systemic commitment to the recognition of property rights as a natural law. Whatever one thinks of Marx at large, this claim about property’s direct influence on the creation of social problems is difficult to refute. That some can afford gold-plated Lamborghinis and others cannot is a right permitted and embraced by modern freedom; disparities in wealth are permissible. For this reason, property rights perpetuate shallow desires, facilitate jealousy among others, and directly produce generations of resentful ‘have nots’ or ‘rabbles’.

Such consequences arise through what is perceived as the systemic denial of standards of living that all people, in the eyes of socialists, are entitled to by right. There is, of course, a conservative angle to this claim too. For as long as Hollywood continues to be a safe haven for liberal bohemianism (or just outright ‘Epsteinism’) and consumers continue to buy its products, wealth accumulation—the extension of the natural right to own property—serves an intrinsically morally subversive function.

However, despite the long list of historical proofs which support the idea that the concepts of justice and morality have a price, it is insufficient to justify the claim that the right to call something yours should be given up on. In fact, the counterargument can be made that rational beings inherit a moral duty to be suspicious of anyone who suggests such ideas without giving grounds as to why they know better. Recall Ida Auken’s statement, released on Twitter in 2016 when addressing her cohort at the World Economic Forum: 

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

Auken’s words are repugnant for several reasons. First, perhaps most obviously, is the implicit arrogance in her—and the WEF’s—assumption of themselves as an international managerial class in waiting. Second is their seeming passion to involve all persons into what sounds like a pornographic livestream that no one can opt out of. But more disturbingly than this, if that is even possible, is the complete lack of concern, or outright obliviousness, to the extensive resistance that awaits them should they attempt their explicit intention to commit what would in effect be the largest robbery and transfer of wealth in history. Such people are either mad, or cynical enough to make themselves look mad for their own reasons. 

Regrettably, the latter seems more plausible. If Schwab’s declaration of the “new world” and “the Great Reset of capitalism” is anything to go by, the Forum plans to purposely base themselves on an Illuminati caricature to make their ‘conspiracy theory’ inclined accusers easy to publicly castigate as ‘crackpots’. It is, yet more distressingly, hard to imagine why else they would choose to schedule meetings in Davos’ picturesque InterContinental Hotel, or place their headquarters in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva. These decisions are indeed strange, that is unless they are made specifically to transmit the impression to the speculating masses beneath that they are role-playing as the conspirators with an Illuminatus master plot. Illuminatus, after all, literally translates as ‘Enlightenment’.  

Such strategies can be observed to have secure residence in Vladislav Surkov’s playbook:

“[On those] who cry about Russian meddling in elections… things are much more serious: we meddle with your brains, we change your conscience - and you have no clue what to do about it.”

This statement is the highest point of postmodern electioneering. It consists of knowingly creating a political state of indeterminate suspension by stating an intention with a high enough dose of irony that the masses can neither properly believe nor disbelieve the assertions. The WEF’s totalising choice of words, abysmal attempts to cover its tracks and mysterious alignment with Bond villain stereotypes is characteristically ‘meta’ in leaving the obvious both unstated and yet undeniable. It is an effective way of keeping the ‘plebs’ in a permanent state of suspension, so that the monolith in waiting can advance unchallenged and unnoticed. 

Yes, the World Economic Forum Sounds Like Communism…

Marxist conspiracy theories are easily refuted whenever they emerge. But on this occasion, given what the end goal of International Socialism has always been, the conspiracy theorists actually have a point about the WEF: 

“[T]he theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” (Marx & Engles, 2015).

Marx’s argument for the abolition of property is well known: property is theft. The right for someone to call something theirs, and to fall back on a legal system committed to the protection of this right by force should anyone violate it, is a historical fact about the nature of the ruling class, the enterprising bourgeoisie, whose entire system of ethics collapses into wealth accumulation and expansion. 

The bourgeoisie, to Marx, do not recognise the natural right of the human race to attain the most basic means of subsistence. The right for the individual to accumulate wealth, no matter how much, is more important than a fellow impoverished nation’s right to avoid starvation. The land of which the farmer owns the deeds, the water that constitutes Nestle’s ‘Pure Life’, and the medical supplies that ‘big pharma’ sells at prices that most cannot afford, are all resources taken to the direct detriment of man’s right to fulfil his own material needs in virtue of the false consciousness involved in accepting property as an inalienable right.

One cannot deny that such moralising is persuasive. But if Robespierre and France’s subsequent treatment at the Congress of Vienna is anything to go by, it is that history doesn’t flatter those who make political decisions from moral agency alone. The moralistic position Angela Markel adopted in 2015, following a direct encounter with a Palestinian refugee on live television, was of course what inspired her to enact a complete open door policy as a response to the 2015 migrant crisis. A decision which led to the rape of over a thousand German women by Arabic and North African men on New Years’ Eve 2016, even in the aftermath, Merkel opted to draw more attention to the “hate in [Pegida’s] hearts” than to the rapists. In any case, the moral lesson to take from this is an ironic one: that the act of unconditionally defending the integrity of an antecedent moral principle is itself immoral. 

This much should be obvious given that morality exists in the real world, and not in a transcendent, Platonic universe. But to those with strong internationalist allegiances like Merkel and the WEF’s founder, the consequentialist dimension to morality doesn’t seem quite so obvious. To those citizens who don’t have the security offered by ivory towers, knowingly overlooking the obvious potential consequences of acting unconditionally on the antecedent principle that ‘no refugee should go without’ qualifies a conscious act of ignorance and thus a moral vice. In the same way that Merkel’s unapologetic non consequentialism led to the assault of over a thousand women across Germany, the Forum’s insistence on the abolition of property is rooted in Marx’s blase rejection of any transcendent, social value that can be attributed to property. 

The Thought Experiment of ‘Gifting’

Imagine, for example, a gift that you receive from your grandmother for Christmas. What is it that makes it a gift directed to you? Her intention was for it to be yours. What is it that gives you the natural right to keep it, irrespective of whoever in the world may need it more? Again, her intention for it to be yours, but also for it to stay yours. The gesture of the gift loses its meaning when the connection between the giver and the receiver, commemorated in the gifted object, is broken. What this shows is that the integrity of the ‘gift’ is one part of what the institution of property preserves. 

A ‘gift’ is not a structural expression of the bourgeoisie’s justification of theft, as Marx would likely put it. It is an intrinsic social good that emerges from a bespoke gesture of goodwill from one person to another. When your grandmother spends time choosing a gift for you, she is not merely preparing for a commodity exchange: in thinking of you in the various ways that grandmothers do, she is directly engaged in making the gift untransferable to anyone else. That gift, whatever form it assumes, therefore has value that transgresses the material one Marx gives to objects as mere commodities for subsistence. 

The legal recognition of property as a natural right is constituted on this basic moral position which Marx sees to stand in the way of the ‘true’ freedom that would be created from common ownership through the distribution of resources in accordance with ‘ability’ and ‘need’. Granted, in a communist society, you would be theoretically permitted to receive the gift, and keep it insofar as the state acknowledges that you genuinely need it. But a political system comprised upon materialism can never recognise an object that obtains its value from social sentiment. For this reason, despite receiving it as a ‘gift’, that object is never, at any point, your property. The second the state judges that this bespoke gift no longer deserves to be in your hands is the second that this immaterial social relation between yourself and your grandmother is cruelly severed, as with the memories attached to it.  

Despite not being recognised in a political constitution based on common ownership, ‘gifts’ will never simply cease to exist. People will want to keep giving them, and coercion will not drive this out. If the WEF were to succeed in abolishing property, they would have to completely reconfigure human nature from scratch, or at least tyrannise it into submission with their Brave New World. The intention to use objects in this way will always remain because it is an essential feature of how humans socialise. One can, of course, imitate the process of giving and receiving in any social structure. But the impermanence of one’s access to a particular object denies the very possibility for objects to have the deeply sentimental, fundamentally immaterial values that they proceed to have through time or perhaps even have from the start.

You Will Own Nothing, and You Will Hate It.

Owning nothing is never going to make anyone happy other than the WEF’s deranged fantasists. It is the case, and it will always be the case, that property directly engenders poverty insofar as the ‘haves’ will always be on the receiving end of the jealousy of the ‘have nots’. This is, however, only since those on the street are denied the most important social good of all: something to call ‘theirs’, not least a home of their own (which coincidentally exposes the extent of the millennial generation’s blight). 

It is not sufficient to say, as many socialists contend, that the blights of the homeless man end the moment he receives the warmth, shelter, and material resources that they didn’t have on the streets. Being respected in the true sense of ‘respect’ entails also being recognised as someone of value to the world outside, of which all other rational beings are a part. The homeless man’s greatest humiliation is caused by the system effectively putting him on display for owning nothing, and it is this which the WEF ultimately wants for every person. Of course, warmth, shelter, and resources will always alleviate the homeless man’s physical discomfort. But the greatest injustice is that in being systematically denied property, the right to call something his, the homeless man is denied the right to participate as a social being. It is this realisation, if anything, that should persuade anyone to feel slightly less bad about being a member of the bourgeoisie.