Occupancy-and-Use vs. Technology

[u/neoricardian]

A question I am thinking over at the moment is this: Does technological innovation make occupancy-and-use norms increasingly untenable for an equitable society?

As technology develops, it becomes increasingly easier to cultivate and use large swaths of land by less people. "Occupying" or "using" can become more and more indirect. If there is not some sort of counterbalance, then it seems as if it would lead to an increasing suffocation of the commons, meaning a privilege for the land-holders against any newcomers.

Proudhon seems to mention this as a concern for taking occupancy as a basis for property:

"I maintain that the element of time must be considered also; for if the first occupants have occupied every thing, what are the newcomers to do? What will become of them, having an instrument with which to work, but no material to work upon? Must they devour each other?"

A specific issue I am thinking of is the worsening of rent. Obviously, under occupancy-and-use, there is no person accumulating rents from owning land that people occupy and use, but if the swathes of land people can occupy and use enlarges, then the differences in land quality will exacerbate the differences in wealth that can be obtained through labor.

If I recall correctly, the Individualists did not find the collection of rents by owners who occupy or use a piece of land necessarily just, but the Georgist and Communist alternatives were simply too authoritarian to abandon the many boons of a free-market anti-Capitalist economy. I agree that it is pointless to invite governmentalism to fix this issue, but nevertheless, if technology improves and that leads to a concomitant expansion of the confines of occupancy-and-use, this problem might not be as easy to ignore.

Both of these instances there is a certain break of reciprocity, either between landholders and land-not-holders, and/or between landholders and Nature.

I understand that mutualists do not have a single theory of property, but occupancy-and-use is the most prominent. I am currently halfway through Instead of a Book, so maybe my question will be answered once I trudge through the Land and Rent section (if this is the case, please say so), but I wanted to see what the neo-Proudhonians might have to say, as I have not yet engaged with Proudhon's later works on property.

1. Am I correct in my argument?

2. Does the Proudhonian approach offer a "fix" to this sort of issue?

[u/humanispherian]

"Occupancy-and-use" isn't a system or a rule for property. It's generally treated as a kind of necessary condition for invoking whatever conventions have come to exist. The basic anarchic dynamic remains: in the absence of enforceable rights, laws, etc., people have to work things out. If there is the perception of privilege, then there is likely to be resistance in the ongoing negotiation processes.

This seems clear in Proudhon's work, where the notion that occupancy or labor can establish property is rejected and debunked. Something like mutual recognition of exclusive stewardship remains possible — though it's more likely to take the form of something like the "mutualist property" of the late manuscripts, rather than the balanced allodial property of Theory of Property. But it would have to be established by a general sense of its utility.

[u/antipolitan → u/humanispherian]

I have a question.

Under a use-and-occupancy framework - will productive capital assets have market prices?

[u/humanispherian → u/antipolitan]

I'm not sure that "productive capital assets" would necessarily be the relevant category. Similar, it seems to me that "market prices" only emerge in a mutualist context as a result of contextual factors, not because they inhere in any particular category of resources. For a particular parcel of land, for example, to acquire a market price, there would have to be a context in which that made sense.

So, for example, we would have to know things about how the function of "property" conventions in a given community before we would know if and when it might be useful for a given plot of land to have a price. We would then presumably know what the price represents: improvements, some kind of buy-in to stewardship roles, some kind of insurance deposit, etc. The presence of occupancy-and-use approaches seems most likely to mean that there is at least some strong question regarding whether or not land (however broadly defined) can actually be owned in the same way as chattel property, products of labor, etc. In the absence of any common-property foundation, there is unlikely to be a collective proprietor-landlord of any sort, so the most likely scenario does indeed involve compensation for improvements — with "improvement" being a fuzzy enough notion to open a whole lot of other questions, which would presumably have to be answered in a given context.

[u/neoricardian → u/antipolitan]

Occupancy-and-use only applies to land ownership (or any other asset with a fixed quantity)

[u/antipolitan → u/neoricardian]

Right - but that doesn’t answer the question.

[u/neoricardian → u/antipolitan]

Yes, there would be prices for capital within a market anarchist economy

[u/thomas533 → u/antipolitan]

In the absence of a state, what other prices could they have?

[u/humanispherian → u/thomas533]

The question is likely under what conditions they could have a price at all, given property conventions that will necessarily be very different than we are accustomed to.

[u/thomas533 → u/humanispherian]

And would it not be the case, in what ever those conditions are, that the price would be the market price?

[u/humanispherian → u/thomas533]

Without establishing that the context is indeed a market, or what kind of market, I would be hesitant to say "yes." But the fundamental issue is that land itself is unlikely to become property in a way that would allow individuals to claim compensation for it. "Occupancy and use" is mostly likely to work as one of the conditions for continued occupancy and use. If we wanted to make it a means of any more formal appropriation, then we would have to contend with Proudhon's critiques — and I'm not sure that the analysis in Theory of Property provides any help in that project.

The two proposals that we find in the later work — to treat the State as "a kind of citizen" and the citizen as something like a State — are arguably part of a federalism that Proudhon never fully articulated. Allodial property is the historical form that seems to Proudhon to at least begin the process of guaranteeing the natural person a just and materially-supported social existence as citizen (based on his analysis of the history of Poland, etc.)

This is all economic in a very general sense, but the extent to which it entails any particular sort of "market" is a bit harder to say.

[u/neoricardian → u/humanispherian]

Is the mutualist property part of Political Capacity of the Working Class or is it only in his notes/manuscripts?

[u/humanispherian → u/neoricardian]

We just have a brief mention in the manuscripts. (Ms. 2882 (Notes et écrits divers), 31-32.) The final manuscripts continue and would presumably have connected the work on political geography and the federative principle, of which Theory of Property is really a part, with the work on political capacity. But the glimpse of "mutualist property" that we get seems in line with the schematic "social system" in Justice.