Property is... (for example)
- something people inherit
- something people protect because they believe it is worth protecting
- things a person has produced
- the cultivation of a land
- a relationship between people as mediated by objects
Some recipes for property
John Locke
- property = nature + labour: cultivation, agriculture
- world has limited potential for property claims
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- property = nature + occupancy
- contingency, historical process..
Marx
- property = nature + labour + work + social org (otherwise known as 'relations of production')
- property assessed according to who controls production
- the process by which people lose ownership is inevitable
Proudhon
- property = theft
- items/goods cannot be disassociated from the people the cultivated/created/produced it, no matter how long they have been circulating in the market; thus calling it your own would be theft
Mode of production - Eric Wolf
'A specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labour is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skill, org., and knowledge'
Marxist terminology
- base: how people make their living, the material means by which people produce their livelihood (e.g. selling their labour, hunting and gathering, horticulture..)
- super structure: the social org, ethos, ideology, morals that inform how people think about the base; what makes people want to work
base: hunter-gatherer; superstructure:
- weak social distinctions, somewhat egalitarian
- kinship based
- circulation of goods through sharing (is this different to exchange?)
- small surplus expended at the will of the surplus generator
(property: personal items, cannot own land, but claim territory and rights to certain areas)
base: feudalism (leading to capitalism); superstructure:
- alienation: produce is circulated in the market without any connection to the producer
- strong social distinctions, e.g. class or caste
- individual-based or nuclear family oriented
- large surplus appropriated by dominant roles
Palm for oil
- mono-crop agriculture
- grown all over SE. A.
- cash crop for lowlands
- saps nutrients form soil; so soil would either need to be heavily fertilised or more land made clear to continue growing palm trees
- requires constant care and attention
Two ways of reckoning value
- use value: valuing something by its usefulness, function, purpose (prominent in subsistence economies)
- exchange value: price and cost dependent on market economy (supply and demand) and symbolic associations with other activities; correllates with alienation (the more hands it has to pass through, the greater the cost to allow for profit)
Domestic mode of production
- Marshall Sahlins 1960s Stone Age Economics
- non-market economies seem to under-produce (no surplus means no profit) but they only expend enough labour to meet their subsistence needs and trades to support subsistence activities
- surplus leads to waste
Carrying capacity
- School of Forest Resources and Conservation, Uni of Florida: 'The maximum number of individuals of a given species that a site can support during the most unfavourable time of year, without causing deterioration of the site'
People have unlimited wants
- underlying assumption in classical economics
- capitalism creates scarcity
4 factors in domestic modes of production
- small labour force differentiated primarily by sex
- simple technologies
- finite production objectives
- other activities besides subsistence count as 'work'
in Papua New Guinea
- people working on palm plantations may seem lazy because they only work (piecework) when they want to
- take time off for weddings, funerals etc
- must also spend time working on their gardens to grow food (horticulture)
- work on a plantation is unskilled, brings in money for things that must be bought (cannot be made by themselves), e.g. schooling and clothes
Alexander Chayanov - Russian economist (and sci-fi writer)
- On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic systems (translated into English by Sahlins 1966)
- intensity of labour in a system of domestic production for use varies inversely with the relative working capacity of the producing unit
- the more resources available, the more they would be underused
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