Civic
backSketch Quick Notes on Private Property, the Commons, Oligarchy, Democracy, Republic, Communism, et cetera
This essay started in the proverbially negative sense of disputing an idea; an idea worth challenging for its properties of causing confusion. The main body of the essay is constructive of a broader vision of the general situation, positively and constructively.
The notion challenged: Private-property leads invariably to oligarchy — tyranny of accumulated capital, financialism, et cetera.
In terms of this parasitic structure of hyper-financialism, perhaps backed up religiously by 'free-masonry', I don't think the institution of private-property was sufficient condition for its manifestation.
As a counterpoint, one can most easily look to the elimination of the Commons, the Enclosures, as important measures to corral and herd man into labor prostitution in massive factories, et cetera.
This is interesting because obviously, private-property and a commons are polar opposites, in the complementary cosmic sense, as yin and yang, as cathode and anode.
Quickly intuit that our civilizational health requires these domains to balance each other.
They've totalized private property, turned it into a grotesque totem, with foreign grafted on abominations such as "intellectual property", abominations such as single families buying up all the resources, all of what should be commons. This isn't a healthy institution of private-property, it's been totemized, fetishized, totalized, and mutated out of all common sense.
However, if you eliminate private-property entirely, and try to totalize the commons, this will just initiate the mirror image symmetric form of tyranny, loosely labeled "communism."
Also, so much of what is today nominally 'private-property' is actually joint stock mega-conglomerate — a very Babylonian kind of 'private-property', not an English / Jeffersonian kind of real proper private. This joint stock pit of vipers in cannibalistic orgy (financialism) is really a distorted Commons, a babellonian commons. An abomination by any name. Not private property in the Jeffersonian sense.
That's basically the gist of the argument. It's more holistically minded than the pseudo-rigorous (pseudo, that is, stylistically rigorous, studiously reductive) analysis you'll get in the contemporary mainstream, academic or popular. Conceptual rather than functional maybe. Anyways I think the point is sufficiently made.
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