Chapter 11: Ownership

The concept of ownership, as obvious as it may seem, is an arbitrary construct that serves a number of purposes. In the dominant culture in the world today, it is virtually unchallenged. It is a central underpinning of the feudalistic socio-economic power and wealth structure.

This chapter was written when the Transition was imagined as a single, rapid, coordinated event. Passages from that original plan are kept for transparency in marked boxes; the current approach is gradual, voluntary and democratic (how the approach has evolved).

The concept of ownership most likely arose out of instinctive territoriality in our distant past. Members and groups of most species establish territories, which give each group or individual access to roughly enough food, water and other resources to survive. Territories often grow when resources are scarce and shrink when resources are abundant.

In humans, both the individual and the groups we form need a “territory” for the greater and smaller good. In its constructive expressions, ownership, when agreed upon among community members, is one way (but not the only way) to make sure that you can count on having unrestricted personal use of your home, car, tools, clothes and so forth without having to constantly fight or argue to keep it. Without such continuity, life would be absurdly chaotic which would benefit nobody.

The problem arises in the dominant feudalistic socio-economic paradigm because there is virtually no upper limit to how much of resources can be owned by an individual, group or business, and no lower limit to what an individual may own. Thus in the U.S. we have one individual who owns more land than the entire state of Delaware while millions barely own the clothes on their back. This is the essence of feudalism, classical as well as modern.

A microscopic segment of the population, directly and through their corporations, owns and controls the vast majority of land and all other resources, thereby dictating and determining who does or does not have access to a home, food, medical care, or even water, and under what conditions they may have access. These modern feudal lords own not just their own home but most likely yours, mine and many more, as well as running the companies that control access to the jobs that we all need in order to pay that same segment for access to resources. In the United States, for example. the Declaration of Independence proclaims our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the Constitution guarantees other rights, but neither guarantees access to what one needs to fulfill those rights. In the current paradigm, it is functionally illegal to occupy space unless you are paying someone for the privilege, unless you yourself are one of the ultra-wealthy modern feudal lords or one of their vassals, in which case you are the one who must be paid. If you attempt to live without paying someone for permission, even without welfare or causing anybody any inconvenience, there are police with guns who will enforce this requirement.

The current interpretation of ownership is, therefore, seriously flawed and unsustainable if we value a free, democratic society of, by and for the people.

Clearly, the concept, definitions and laws dealing with ownership must be modified and re-cast.

We humans are not rigidly constrained by instinct, which leaves us with the freedom and ability to re-examine and redefine how we define and enact ownership or territorial boundaries into forms that better serve our thriving and well-being.

One practice that’s become increasingly common in the dominant society is “subscription-based” goods and services, in which you must pay every month or lose access. A prime example is in software, in which failure to pay the monthly fee not only causes the app to stop working, but also stops you from editing or saving your own files until you pay, leaving you able only to open and print them (Microsoft Support). This is a direct assault on our ability to own resources that we use. If this is allowed to expand without limit, eventually we could find ourselves having to pay a monthly subscription fee just for the “privilege” of being able to shop at the supermarket. This is already happening among some medical providers, under the name “concierge physicians,” who charge you a non-trivial monthly fee just to keep you as a patient, in addition to whatever they charge you for medical procedures. The same is happening in agriculture, in which companies like Monsanto and others claim “intellectual property” rights not only to their genetically-modified seed stock, but to the crops that farmers grow using their seeds. If farmers keep some of the seed from this year’s crop as is traditional as seed for next year’s crop, the contract forbids it, and the company they bought the seed stock from can sue the farmer and force them to buy seed every year. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that farmers may not replant patented seed without paying. Monsanto alone had filed more than 140 lawsuits against more than 400 farmers and some 50 small businesses in the United States, and some farmers were ruined. In 1998 a patent was even granted for seeds engineered so that the next generation would be sterile, soon nicknamed “Terminator” seeds; a worldwide outcry kept them off the market, but hybrid seeds, which do not breed true, have kept farmers buying new seed every year for nearly a century. Farmers are drawn to these seeds with promises of high yield per acre. The other part is in the contract fine print.

With upcoming genetic therapies in development, one can easily imagine a genetic therapy being developed for, say, spina bifida which is given to the fetus in utero, correcting the issue. Once born, the child could be charged a monthly fee for life by the company that developed the therapy, for the very act of living while using the company’s genetic therapy. This kind of abusive human rights violation will also cease as soon as we mothball the current paradigm and enact the new one.

Under the current paradigm, even the concept of ownership itself is deceptive. If you’re paying a mortgage or car payment, you will tend to think of yourself as the “owner.” On paper, you are: you hold the title. But as long as you owe, the lender holds your home in its hands, because if push comes to shove, it can take it. Even if you’re in the thirtieth year of a thirty-year mortgage when you get laid off and can’t find a new job, the steps follow one another: late fees, a crashed credit score, and after four months, foreclosure (12 CFR 1024.41). The home is sold at a steep forced-sale discount (Campbell, Giglio and Pathak, 2011), the lender and its costs are paid first, and you are left with little or nothing, and without your home. Here, as so often, the law protects the individual on paper, and economic power overrides that protection in practice. The title says the home is yours; the balance of power says it belongs to whoever holds the debt.

The current feudal socio-economic paradigm acts as a society-wide funnel, channeling an ever-growing portion of resources into the hands of a tiny collection of modern feudal elite at the expense of all of the rest of us modern-day serfs, peasants and even artisans. The system functions in such a way that stacks it against the individual serf or peasant. If you pay all of your bills on time for many years, then hit hard times and fall behind for a few months before getting back on your feet, you are punished via a low credit score for many years to come. This can actually block you from getting a job or finding a place to live, since applicants are often discarded because of a low credit score. It’s a vicious cycle. It can take a brief moment for your credit to be crashed, but many years to restore it. Yet if a wealthy feudal lord stiffs a client or supplier, or defaults on a loan, financial institutions most often bend over backwards to accommodate and work with them.

In a society that places prime importance on ownership, access to ownership is severely curtailed or nonexistent for a growing portion of the population. In some cities in the United States, police are allowed to confiscate the coats, blankets, backpacks, and sleeping bags of homeless people (Mother Jones, 2016). A homeless person’s ownership of their sleeping bag is not respected, while a corporation’s ownership of land that they intend to strip-mine is upheld. This modern feudalism is directly incompatible with government of-by-and for the people and with a free and thriving society of free and thriving people.

The concept of “Eminent Domain” exists to allow the government to force the sale of land by owners in order to make way for infrastructure projects meant to benefit the larger community, such as roads, reservoirs libraries, schools and hospitals. Owners are supposed to be paid a fair and equitable price. Yet Eminent Domain has also been used to take land away from homeowners and farmers and give it over to private developers and corporations for for-profit projects like big-box stores (Southeastern Meats of Pelham v. City of Birmingham, Ala. 2004). The Supreme Court allowed this in Kelo v. City of New London (2005); public outrage led dozens of states to pass laws restricting it, though many of those laws proved largely symbolic (Somin, 2007). In the process, the corporations are able to manipulate the laws in order to pay far less in property taxes than the homeowners or farmers had paid, which increases the burden on remaining homeowners (Texas Comptroller, Fiscal Notes, 2017; Badgett, "The State of the Dark Store Theory," Coates’ Canons, UNC School of Government, 2018).

This is utterly identical to the situation under Medieval feudalism. Royals and their vassals were allowed to confiscate whatever they wanted from any peasant of serf – their farm, equipment, harvest, even their daughters or wives. In Medieval times, resistance carried a death sentence. In modern times, one is looking at a prison sentence, fines, or simply being dragged away in handcuffs while watching one’s home being bulldozed.

The current paradigms of ownership don’t even do a particularly good job of safeguarding owners’ claims. Look at all of the forms of theft, identity theft, robbery, fraud, legal loopholes exploited to deprive people of their ownership of something, and even the use of military force between countries, and it’s clear that the paradigm isn’t working. Even without breaking the law, those who already own a disproportional amount of a resource can and do very easily expand their level of ownership, at the expense of the rest of us. The travesty known as “corporate personhood” sets up a situation where it’s very easy for a corporation with billions of dollars of resources and a small army of top-notch attorneys on retainer to wrest ownership rights to just about anything from an individual who can’t afford any attorney without selling their home. With the emergence of the new paradigm, we can expect property crimes as listed above to dwindle quickly to near extinction. When all persons have access to the resources they need, then the motivations and reinforcers for theft, fraud, robbery and the like will evaporate. Why steal a TV if you can just walk into the electronics depot and pick one out? Why steal a car when you can go into the nearest auto depot, pick one of your choice and drive it home? Why rob somebody if money is obsolete and unnecessary?

The favored approach to ownership seen in the United States and similar countries is far from the only possible or existing paradigm. In traditional Kibbutz communities, there is no formal ownership of apartments other resources, yet every resident has their place to live which is more secure than their apartment or house would be in the dominant paradigm. In Cuba, a place to live is a right: a 1960 law turned tenants into owners, and most Cubans own their homes outright, without a mortgage. It is not the laws governing property and ownership that give us safety and personal space. It is a shared agreement in the community, to respect each person’s home, possessions, rights, and sovereignty. The current paradigm creates scarcity of most vital resources in order to drive prices up and consolidate control by the feudal lords at our expense.

Lest we feel aghast at the concept of redefining such a fundamental concept that we’ve held as sacrosanct, let’s revisit how much of the land ownership in the United States (and many other countries) came about. Millions of people were living here in diverse cultures and lifestyles. Other people came from overseas and proceeded to cheat them out of their ancestral homes in the best of cases, and exterminate them in the worst of cases. The murderers then handed out land deeds to homesteaders. That is not the kind of origin that inspires profound respect or unquestioning adherence and perpetuation of a practice. Millions were murdered to bring this paradigm about, and continuing it is harming millions. If England were to do this to France (or vice-versa), the international community would be up in arms and not recognize the legitimacy of the action. It is time for a major, fundamental change based on experience of what does and doesn’t work. We created the existing paradigm. It is imperative that we re-examine it, redesign, and decommission the old, dysfunctional paradigm. It is in our power and it behooves us.