OccupySF: Locke vs. Marx

It didn’t take more than a few nights at OccupySF to realize that the core group of Occupiers were deeply committed young socialists, communists and social anarchsts, even more so at Occupy Oakland. In fact the magazine that started this whole Occupy Movement, AdBusters, is arguably an anarcho-communist rag. Now, I have a lot of love for that crowd because to some degree this is my background and I understand that they are coming from a well meaning place. Dyed hair, dreadlocks, facial piercings and tattoos are all common. We used to call it “gutter punk.” I’m not sure if that’s a pejorative term now. If so I apologize. I certainly don’t mean it that way. They are homeless young adults who are voluntarily unemployed as an act of rebellion against capitalism.

What’s interesting about that is it potentially means the Occupation could go on for a long long time. They are accustomed to life on the streets. During the day the Occupation swells to over triple the population and more mainstream political perspectives prevail, but at night the crowd goes home and it’s the anarchists that hold the ground, moderate the general assemblies and ultimately decide how to spend the donations. Why would they ever leave? This is the lifestyle they have chosen.

One night I stayed up until dawn talking with a young Marxist. We distilled all our political and economic disagreements down to one philosophical split that we couldn’t resolve. I believe in property and he doesn’t.

I generally take something like the Lockean view. In John Locke’s Second Treatise he argues that the individual ownership of property derives from the mixing of labor with nature to produce goods. The Marxist argued that because goods were originally part of the commons to claim individual ownership in anything was to steal from everyone else, echoing that famous social anarchist cry, “property is theft.” So, all goods must always be owned in common. We discussed a number of thought experiments to see if we could parse out the disagreement.

Scenario One:
Two men come upon an uninhabited valley and each developed separate plots into farmland. One man grows apples and the other grows oranges. Do the men own what they produce individually or in common? A Lockean would say each farmer owns the fruits of his own labor. He may trade his produce, or give it away, but the decision is his how to allocate his own produce. But the Marxist says that both farmers own all the fruit. From my perspective, if someone else has an ownership claim on the fruits of my labor that’s akin to owning my labor, which is akin to owning my body, which is akin to slavery. We could not reach an agreement in this scenario, so we changed the parameters.

Scenario Two:
Two men come upon a valley where they discover a plot of farmland where someone has already grown a crop of tomatoes. Do the two men own the tomatoes in common? In other words, is it appropriate for the two men to eat the tomatoes without asking? Initially the Marxist said no, that they should respect the farmer by finding him and asking permission. So I pointed out that that was respecting the farmer’s property rights. It didn’t make any sense unless the farmer has more authority to grant permission to eat the tomatoes than the two men. Then the Marxist changed his answer and said yes, they have a right to eat the tomatoes without asking. So I pointed out that they may be eating food that was intended for the farmer’s children.

This flustered the Marxist who then protested that hypothetical scenarios are irrelevant because there is no pure justly acquired property in the real world. All land has been stolen and all goods are made with exploited labor. So we dropped the hypothetical scenarios.

Scenario Three:
I carry a buck knife in my pocket. It doesn’t fit the definition of justly acquired property for the Marxist. It was probably assembled by child labor in China. Yet I have a subjective sense that I own it because that’s not what the concept of ownership requires. It only requires that I have a stronger claim on the knife than the Marxist does. If I hand the knife over to the Marxist that doesn’t resolve whatever injustice occurred in its manufacturing. So, I asked him if he felt that he had as strong a claim on the knife as I did. In other words, is it appropriate for him to take it from me, or to use it without permission.

At first he tried to tell me that I only felt I owned the knife because we were in a capitalist system, and in a communist system there would be such an abundance of knives I would feel no need to assert any ownership of it. But that’s not true. Even if there was a communist knife shop someplace giving away free knives that’s still further away than my own pocket, and I would still feel some claim on the knife that I retrieved because I wouldn’t want to walk back to the shop over and over. But we also agreed, no more hypotheticals.

The Marxist reluctantly agreed that I owned my knife, and he had no right to take it from me. The ironic thing about the gutter punks that preach against the concept of ownership is that they all behave as if they believe in ownership in the real world. They get upset when their things go missing. They ask permission when they want to use other people’s things, and they return things when they are finished.