The Ownership Society: Is Marx Relevant?

This post is firstly part of my effort to respond to the rise in currency of terms like ’socialism’ and ‘Marxism’ during the 2008 election season. Secondly, it is also a kind of installment in what may turn out to be an ongoing thread of posts and discussions about the question of whether and how Marxist thought is relevant to serious thinking about the crisis of modern dwelling, which Drinking Upstream is dedicated to.

My own feeling is that to whatever extent Marxist thought involves a critique of private property and the individual in capitalist societies, and argues that they will always be in crisis, then anyone serious about thinking through the crisis of dwelling should feel compelled to study Marx and Marxism.

Where to begin? Well, perhaps with John Locke, who, in many ways, can be seen as Marx’s foil.

Because at least since John Locke, the liberal tradition established an intimate relationship between property and the self. Marx criticized this relationship when he argued in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie’s objection to the abolition of private property (because it would eradicate freedom and the individual) was unfounded, since ownership was already exclusive to one tenth of society.

By ‘freedom’ and ‘the individual’, Marx said, the economists really mean bourgeois freedom and the bourgeois individual.

But it’s still true that in (especially American) liberalism the individual is thought of as something very closely tied to private property. In the history of political thought, this is pretty explicit in Locke’s writings.

Locke’s Second Treatise of Government saw the state’s purpose almost solely in terms of the protection of property, so much so that protection of the individual and protection of property were essentially the same thing for him.

The basis for this kind of blending of the concepts of property and the individual was provided by Locke’s labor theory of property. Locke famously offered a rationale for the notion of private property arising naturally from the mixture of an individual’s labor with the earth; the fruit of that labor, Locke thought, was effectively part of the individual.

Thus the state’s obligation within the social contract was to protect the individual and all that it encompassed.

Today this Lockean rationale reaches its logical conclusion in the notion of an “ownership society”, where individuality and homeownership are linked just as insolubly as they were with Locke (see Naomi Klein’s article in The Nation about the “ownership society”).

In time, this association between property and individuality congealed into the present-day fascination with the single-family home, repeated ad nauseum in tract developments whose promise of freedom and individuality can barely conceal the glaringly mass produced quality of the lives they afford their inhabitants.

Adorno would have said as much.

Still, each home is regarded as a citadel of personal taste and privacy, with architecture playing a role that I’m not sure even Le Corbusier had in mind when he described the houses of the future as machines for living.

Which brings us to today…

Near the end of an American presidency sure that one of its legacies would be the expansion of an ‘ownership society’, we were confronted with a housing catastrophe.

The Marxist lesson? It is that crises like these are not rough patches but symptoms of underlying, persistent contradictions.

The tenacity with which we deny this is most obvious when we are narrating the crisis. The standard debate over what to do and who to blame usually involves questions of individual culpability – deceptive lenders or irresponsible borrowers? Should the government bail out banks or buyers, or is everyone equally accountable for the consequences of their voluntary choices?

This is, of course, a misleading debate, one that contributes to a misleading portrayal of the society of ownership.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht once interrogated similar issues in The Good Woman of Setzuan (don’t know the play and don’t feel like buying it? Check out wiki’s summary). Was the prostitute Shen Teh to blame for her failures and misdeeds, or were the gods to blame for justifying the conditions in which her ‘choices’ were compulsory? Should the gods intervene, or are individuals owners of their own fates?

Brecht’s story condemns the shallow restriction of responses to just these two by illustrating how the predicament runs all the way down to the intersections of gender, culture, and private property.

In order to maintain her tobacco business, Shen Teh’s deception – dressing as a man and pretending to be her fictitious cousin, Shui Ta – was forced, because it was the only way to slip through the logic of sex and capital that structured social relations in Setzuan.

Should the gods intervene? (Can you imagine any better analogy for the current predicament in the American economy?) Yes, of course. But what would constitute an intervention of any significance would not be stipends. It could only be the reconfiguration of the entire social structure, altering the sex/state/culture/capital nexus that doomed Shen Teh’s pursuit from the beginning .

‘No emancipation without that of society’ (Adorno).

Isn’t our so-called housing crisis a contemporary affirmation that the ‘individual’ and ‘freedom’ in liberal society remain unresolved problems?

If so, then yes, a return to Marx’s critique of capital, private property, and the individual is in order.

Stumble It!

~ by Shane Waggoner on January 3, 2009.