Owning land together with someone, or in a group, is fraught with troubles. All around are stories of friends who entered into shared purchases of vacation land when they were younger, for instance, and now their co-owners cannot afford to do any upkeep, and the property values are falling, and no one can buy anyone else out. Or couples, now separated, who own property together, and cannot subdivide, and despite their colossal increase in paper wealth as the property has appreciated, one of them refuses to sell.
We all know examples like this; so it is obvious that shared real property should be entered into only fenced about with complex and unpleasantly litigious agreements, and even then is likely to end in irritation if not tears. So be it.
But there is (perhaps) a reason for this.
I am an anti-capitalist. But I do not believe, as most anti-capitalists do, that the root of all post-colonial evil is the economic exploitation of workers by bosses, the alienation of workers from the surplus produced by their work. I think it is an evil, but not the root. Nor do I believe, as many do, that our problem is money, that we need to find a new means of exchange, or perhaps a gift economy. I agree that this would be a good thing, but I’m not sure it is possible without further change.
Nor do I even feel that the issue is one of private property — that we feel we can own something like a flat-screen television, or a slave. I agree that this is a strange idea. But not the strangest I have heard.
The strangest idea I have heard is the idea that you can own an area of the earth — real property. That, in the words of Chief Joseph, the earth could belong to us, not we to it. Sentimental, perhaps, but after some thought I am sure it is a bizarre and corrosive idea, and until we can erase such a strange idea from our minds our society must inevitably remain violent and unfair. For it is founded on a principle of unparalleled violence and unfairness. The insane idea that the earth itself can be owned, or that one can own some bundle of rights to it.
And, as it happens, the society into which we have been born holds that as a fundamental right — believes, in principle, that not only can the earth be owned but that it is all owned, by someone; that good fences make good neighbors, and any areas not owned by individuals are owned in common.
So as it turns out, communal ownership is not a solution to this problem, though it sometimes seems to be. It is a dysfunctional solution. It leaves unchallenged the underlying assumption — that real property can be owned — while attempting a rearrangement at the level of consequences. This is why utopian gestures — announcing “this bus owns itself, the pink slip is in the glove compartment,” “this house is the peoples’ house, anyone can do what they want here” — almost inevitably devolve into traditional ownership. 3/4 of the time, the original paper owners step back in, assert their rights, and take their responsibilities; 1/4 of the time it is a total trainwreck, the property is taken from its would-be liberators, and, eventually, some dystopian entity assumes traditional ownership.
Better, in my opinion, to use the language of mainstream society to engage its social contract in a way that avoids these outcomes, while remembering, and making space for, the truth that we belong to the earth, not it to us; that, no matter how it appears, we wander free upon its surface; that our lives are short and its is long.