The Abolition of Property – Marie Louise Berneri (1944)

From ‘War Commentary: For Anarchism’, Mid-June 1944, London, UK

In the Mid-March issue of War Commentary one of our readers asked us to explain more fully the views of the Anarchists on property. We answered him by reproducing short extracts from Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy. From all of them it appeared clearly that Anarchists condemn property as being based on injustice and obtained through exploitation, oppression and violence. They condemned it further, as being “at once the consequence and the basis of the State” and having a corrupting influence on the privileged classes while the poor starve and are physically and morally crushed.

According to the Anarchists the first task of the revolution must be the abolition of property. Both the means of production and consumption goods must be expropriated and put at the disposal of the whole community.

How property is going to be abolished does not seem to be clear to many people. Some confusion has arisen in their minds because of the expressions used by revolutionary movements and the Anarchists in particular who advocate the seizure of the land and the factories by the workers. This seems to imply that property instead of being abolished is going to be transferred from one group of people to another.

When the Anarchists advocate the occupation of the factories by the workers and the seizure of the land by the peasants they do not mean that those workers should become the owners instead of the capitalists or the State, but that they should act as agents for the whole of society. After the revolution everything will belong to all — which comes to the same thing as saying that nothing will belong to anyone in particular.

When workers expropriate a factory they will not become a kind of shareholders, each owning 1/100th or 1/1000th part of the factory. The factory will not belong to them any more than to the miners or the agricultural labourers who may be working nearby; they will be merely running it for the whole of the community which meanwhile will provide them with the things they need.

If we said that the factories, and land, etc., should become the property of the workers (using the word in the sense it has been used up to now) we would be creating a new injustice. Property “is the right of using and abusing”; there is nothing which prevents a man from destroying his own house, and for years capitalists have destroyed whole crops of wheat, bananas, oranges, or coffee, or thrown fish back into the sea merely because it belonged to them and they could do what they wanted with it.

Eccentric ladies have their dogs, their personal belongings, their yachts, etc., destroyed after their death. According to the present conception of the word ‘property’, workers owning a factory would be able to destroy it if they wanted to, or destroy its products if they chose. This is a very unlikely hypothesis and there are other reasons for condemning property. Collective property is as illogical and unjust as private property. Everything created in society is the result of common labour. A factory which may have taken hundreds of workers to build, which possesses machines created by the efforts of generations of engineers cannot be said to belong to anyone in particular. If from one owner the property passes to a hundred, the injustice would still be there.

Of course, the abolition of property in factories and land must be followed by its abolition in consumption goods, the abolition of money and the abolition of wages. Men value property today for the privileges it gives. Shareholders value their shares in a factory because of the profits they draw from them which allow them to live on a better scale than ordinary workers and give them a superior position in society. With the abolition of money and wages, and private property in consumers’ goods, “owning” a factory would become a completely meaningless term.

The injustice of private property in the means of production is generally recognised, but many people try to draw a distinction between two kinds of property: the factories, land, etc., which would allow men to exploit other people’s labour on one hand and the personal possessions like a house, cars, books, etc., on the other. Says our critic, “Surely you don’t want a man’s hammer or bicycle to belong to the whole of society?”

The answer is yes and no. There are obviously things which can’t belong to several people; a tooth brush, for example, is rightly considered by people as an instrument they should have an exclusive privilege to use. But supposing hammers and bicycles were in very short supply; then it would be wrong for a man to say: “this hammer or bicycle belongs to me” and thereby deprive other men from using them. The same principle would apply to a house. There is nothing wrong in a family wanting to have a house to themselves; they are obviously entitled to comfort and privacy.

But supposing that after the revolution there were for a time a number of people without shelter, then it would be wrong for a man or a family to have a whole house to themselves and if they refused to share it with other members it would show that the old capitalist mode of thinking is still alive.

We want to abolish property altogether. It might at first seem just that a man should own a house, tools, bicycle or car because it is true that these possessions would not allow him to exploit his fellow workers but it is equally true that by owning these commodities he may be excluding other workers who have an equal claim to them. One cannot share everything and one will still say my bed when sleeping in it, my coat when wearing it but one will realize that one has no exclusive right to the bed or coat as long as other men go without.

During and after the revolution it will be the job of the communes or the distribution syndicates to distribute the food and other commodities amongst the population. They will start by collectivizing food, transport, clothes and other commodities and will distribute them as fairly as possible. But if there were a shortage of goods it should be the duty of each member, of the community to bring to the distribution what “belongs” to him so as to share it with others. If this were not done spontaneously, if a man possessed stores of food while the population starved there is no reason why the commune or the syndicate should not take the goods and distribute them amongst the population. If bicycles or cars were urgently needed they should be equally requisitioned. This is why we cannot accept the view that only the land and the factories should belong to all.

The method of consumption will undergo a change as radical as that of production. Things like cars, tools, books, records, will generally no longer be used by men individually, but will be shared by a group. There is no reason why individuals should accumulate a great number of tools, books, etc., in their own house when they can borrow them from a communal centre. There is no reason why each man should have a car in his garage if he can borrow it, when he needs it, from the communal garage.

The lending library system could be applied to most commodities of life. If a family has guests it should be able to go to the communal centre and get the extra crockery, bedding, beds and chairs necessary to accommodate the guests; when these have left, the articles borrowed could be returned to the centre. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, paint sprayers and a hundred other things could be equally borrowed every time they are needed. In this way even if the production of industrial goods does not expand so as to provide each individual with all the commodities he requires he will be able, nevertheless, to have access to them. The other advantage will be to cut down the amount of furniture and household articles in the house which generally take up a lot of space and complicate housekeeping.

To our minds, influenced by capitalist ideas, the abolition of property may seem rather disturbing. There is in many of us a reluctance to share what we have with others. The isolation of man in present-day society has created in him a strong individualistic feeling. This selfish attitude did not exist amongst savages or in primitive societies where men used to feel part of the community. As Kropotkin has abundantly shown in Mutual Aid, members of the same community shared all they had, food, clothes, houses, implements of work.

There is no doubt that, after the revolution, the work in common for the good of all, the daily contact with neighbours in factories and at home will give birth to a revival of feelings of fraternity amongst men. It is by no means unpleasant and one likes sharing what one has with friends. When friendly relations will exist amongst all men it will seem a natural thing to put everything one has in common.

One may remind sceptics that relations between men have undergone very deep changes through the ages and that there is no reason why the relation between men and things should not undergo equally deep ones. There were times in history when men thought that they had the right to possess slaves and do what they liked with their lives. This would seem repugnant to most men today (capitalists and politicians excepted). Man considered his wife as his personal property which he could treat as he wished. Now he tends to regard her as a companion and admit that she is free to think and act as she chooses. There is no reason to suppose that once capitalism, money and wages have been abolished our attitude towards property will not undergo a similar fundamental change so that the word will be rendered completely meaningless.

M. L. B.