Born in 1923, William
Ryan is currently a professor of psychology at
How do you get to own something? Well, you usually buy it. But how did the fellow you bought it from get to own it? Where did the idea of owning come from? Or was it always there, perhaps in the mind of God?
No one really knows, of course. The idea of owning and property emerged in the mists of unrecorded history. One can try to imagine the scene. Some Cro-Magnon innovator, seized with a fit of entrepreneurial passion, took his club and drew a line in the earth and called out, "Okay, you guys! Everything inside this line is mine. It belongs to me. I own it". Now, ver likely, this first would-be landowner was a skinny, little, near-sighted Cro-Magnon who could not throw a spear straight and was able to drag by the hair only the homeliest girls of the tribe. A couple of his fellow cavemen may have kicked sand in his face, but most of the others probably laughed indulgently, kidding him about his intellectual pretensions, his ways of using big words like "be-long" and "own" that nobody else knew the meaning of. "That Herman! A regular walking dictionary!" And they rubbed out Herman's line on the ground. (I am counting on a fair amount of good humour among the Cro-Magnons; another telling of the story might assume more malevolence and end with their rubbing out Herman himself.)
But, as we all know, a good idea never dies, and sooner or later a hefty, we 12512h712m ll respected caveman who carried a big club picked up Herman's notion, drew his own line in the earth, and made his claim stick. Others drew their lines, taking possession of the land merely by outlining its boundaries, and then talked about what they owned and what belonged to them. The forcible seizure of what had been until then common property, if property at all, led first to emulation, as others also seized portions of land, and ultimately to the development of ideas and relationships that could be thought to coincide with the new reality. Rather than having men who had the muscle power to seize and men who had not, we had landowners and the landless; instead of loot from the seizure, we had "property", then property laws by the chapter, and finally the revelation that the institution of private property had been ordained by God. These concepts - landowner, property, and property rights -- became common currency, unquestioned and unquestionable ideas, as natural and expected as the sunrise or as water flowing downhill, which we take for granted and do not give another thought. And that is the central nature of ideology.
If you do stop and think about it, it is quite remarkable. An individual human being, occupying a blip on the screen of time, has the incredible gall to stand up and say, "I own this land; this land is mine". He's talking about an acre or a hundred acres of the earth, a piece of the planet! And he says it is his! Isn't that really an incredible claim to make?
And he does not just say he owns the earth, he also says that he owns what comes out of it and what is buried beneath it. The owner of the land lays claim to the grain and the grass that spring up from it and to the cattle that feed on the grain and the grass. He lays claim to the oil and the iron that lie beneath the ground and then to the steel made from the iron and to the automobile made from the steel and to the gasoline made from the oil. He counts as his property the tree that grows on the land and the wood of the tree and the buildings on the land made from the wood. He owns those things, he says; they belong to him. And we all act as if it were true, so it must be true. But behind all these claims, supporting and upholding them - and our willingness to believe them - is the big club of the hefty Cro-Magnon who made the first claim and dared his fellows to oppose him. The club is smaller and neater now, hanging from the belt of the policeman, but the principle remains the same.
Is it possible that the ideas we have today about ownership and property rights have been so universal in the human mind that it is truly as if they had sprung from the mind of God? By no means. The ancient Jews, for one, had a very different outlook on property and ownership, viewing it as something much more temporary and tentative than we do. Mosaic law with respect to ownership of land (the only significant productive property of the time) is unambiguous:
And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is Mine; for ye are strangers and settlers with Me. And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land.
The buying and selling of land was based on principles very different from those we know. It was not, in fact, the land itself that changed hands, but rather the right to use the land to cultivate crops. The price of the land was determined by the number of years, and therefore the number of crops, remaining until the next jubilee year, when the land reverted to the family that originally possessed it. Under such a law, buying land is similar to the process we call leasing.
The institution of the jubilee year was a specific mechanism for rectifying the in equities that had accumulated, for simultaneously restoring liberty and equality for all: And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
There is no doubt that these laws were violated. Prophet after prophet condemned as violations efforts to accumulate wealth unjustly: Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!
But that the law was violated and the violation condemned is a demonstration of its existence and applicability. Although the law of jubilee was evaded more and more and ultimately fell into disuse, there can be no doubt that it was adhered to for many generations.
Similarly, the tenure of land in the agrarian feudal ages was hedged all about with restrictions and accompanied by specific obligations that the landowner owed to his tenants. These restrictions and obligations, too, were frequently evaded and violated - perhaps more often than they were honoured - but they were unquestionably part of the structure of law and custom until the dawn of the modern era, when the very idea of land began to change and when land began to be equated with capital, as the new commercial classes began to impose their own view of private property as something with which one could do more or less what one pleased.
A bit later, Europeans invented a new method of earning riches, that of "discovery", and they came to America and claimed the land - on the grounds that they had never seen it before - and then went through the arduous labour of possessing by bounding. To most of the Native American tribes, the land was not subject to "ownership" by individuals. Their thinking was expressed eloquently by a Blackfeet chief: As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to man and animals. We cannot sell the lives of men and animals; therefore we cannot sell this land.
It was put here by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us. The Europeans' peculiar ideas about individuals' claiming exclusive ownership of specific portions of God's earth seemed strange, at first incomprehensible and then irk somely eccentric. The Indians eventually learned to their sorrow that it was no eccentricity, but rather a murderous mania.
In modern times, of course, we have the example of socialist countries where private ownership of any significant amount of property that constitutes "means of production" is prohibited as antisocial and antihuman.
So, the ideas we have in America (and in the majority of the world's nations) about the private ownership of productive property as a natural and universal right of mankind, perhaps of divine origin, are by no means universal and must be viewed as an invention of man rather than a decree of God. Of course, we are completely trained to accept the idea of ownership of the earth and its products, raw and transformed. It seems not at all strange; in fact, it is quite difficult to imagine a society without such arrangements. If someone, some individual, didn't own that plot of land, that house, that factory, that machine, that tower of wheat, how would we function? What would the rules be? How would we know how to act? Whom would we buy from and how would we sell?
It is important to acknowledge a significant difference between achieving ownership simply by taking or claiming property and owning what we tend to call the "fruit of labour". If I, alone or together with my family, work on the land and raise crops, or if I make something useful out of natural material, it seems reasonable and fair to claim that the crops or the objects belong to me or my family, are my property, at least in the sense that I have first claim on them. Hardly anyone would dispute that. In fact, some of the early radical workingmen's movements made [an ownership] claim on those very grounds. As industrial organisation became more complex, however, such issues became vastly more intricate. It must be clear that in modern society the social heritage of knowledge and technology and the social organisation of manufacture and exchange account for far more of the productivity of industry and the value of what is produced than can be accounted for by the labour of any number of individuals. Hardly any person can now point and say, "That - that right there - is the fruit of my labour". We can say, as a society, as a nation - as a world, really - that what is produced is the fruit of our labour, the product of the whole society as a collectivity..
No one man could conceivably build a house with only twelve times the amount of time and effort that twelve men expend in building the same house. Yet we ignore this evident reality. Even the workmen, though their experience makes them aware of it, have no way of thinking and talking about it. So, when the man who bought the land, the lumber, the nails, and the wire comes around at the end and gives them each a check for the "value of their labour" - and then even has the chutzpah to bestow upon himself the title "builder" - no one doubts that he, that individual, now is the rightful owner of that house. It has become his property.
With all of this distortion and overemphasis on individual action, the idea of private property and ownership of pieces of the earth is still pretty much limited to that portion of the earth that is actually land. We cannot readily imagine buying a piece of air or seeking a mortgage on a segment of ocean. The idea of owning the air and the seas seems as incomprehensible to us as the idea of owning his own factory must seem to a Russian (although we are beginning to see a rapidly growing interest in extending the idea of ownership to these elements, particularly as the oceans come to be seen more clearly as a means of production, not only of fish, but of other food, of oil, and perhaps of minerals).
We would have a similar feeling if we watched someone sailing out into the Atlantic and marking out a line of buoys to the north, east, south, and west and then proclaiming to whoever might listen, "These waves are mine. I own this piece of ocean. This water and the fish therein and the plankton and the salt and the seaweed belong to me. The water is mine and the fullness thereof." Hardly anyone would agree with him or honour his claim, no matter how much he might talk about the divine rights of man to own the ocean.
We have to recognise that the right of private individual ownership of property is man-made and constantly dependent on the extent to which those without property believe that the owner can make his claim stick.
One way of making the claim stick is to remove it from the realm of human agreements, to mystify it, to clothe it in myths, of which the most important with respect to the so-called right of private ownership of social product and the things that make this product possible is the myth of the lone "supernormal" individual. It is only by saying - louder and louder, over and over again - "I! I! I!" that we can then get away with saying "my" and "mine".
Questions for Discussion
To what extent does the author's use of the anecdote about cavemen help to illustrate the origin of private property? Is it oversimplification?
According to paragraph 5, upon what does the principle of ownership rest?
How did the Mosaic law treat the ownership of land?
How did ownership of land function during the agrarian feudal ages?
What was the attitude of North American Indian tribes toward land ownership? How did Europeans circumvent the thinking of the Indians?
How does the author differentiate between ownership of property and ownership of the "fruits of labour"?
Ryan says in paragraph 12: "It must be clear that in modern society the social heritage of knowledge and technology and the social organisation of manufacture and exchange account for far more of the productivity of industry and the value of what is produced than can be accounted for by the labour of any number of individuals". Express Ryan's thought in your own words to make the sentence easier to understand.
What is the main means by which modern society supports the concept of private ownership of property? Is it different from concepts in the past?
Exploring Ideas
How do you react to author Ryan's explanations of the concept of ownership of property? What are your own beliefs in this regard?
Discuss what the author says in paragraph 16. Is it a totally true statement?
Optional Activity
Imagine that you have been appointed to design a perfect or utopian society. How
would you deal with the matter of private ownership of property and of the "fruits of
labour"? Write an essay of 300-500 words setting forth your plan or design.
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