Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Collusion of Domain and Property and a Critique of Pruvlic Allocation

What is public? Were the “whites only” and “blacks only” water fountains of the racist USA, respectively, public property? They certainly weren’t private property. Yet, a black person couldn’t drink from a public water fountain. And a white person either, for that matter, if there ever were any whites in want of drink from the “blacks only” fountains. So we must then ask, what is private?

We must eschew the Hegelian duality of these terms in order to properly understand them. Most people will agree that private property is that which is owned by one person. Most people will also agree that public property is that which is owned by all people. So what were the color-specific fountains of old, in reality? They were Pruvlic property. The property of a few. The property of the function f = (2, n - 1), where n is the number of people eligible to possess property in existence. There has been, until this time, no recognition of this state of ownership, with a continual argument taking place from the peaks of the ivory tower to the slums of the cardboard ghetto, with one side arguing that all that is not private must be public, and the other, vice versa.

Whole ideologies and economic systems have been established and destroyed in terms of these two “p” words. Just look at the definitions of Capitalism and Communism. One espouses the immortal divinity of the private, the other, the public. Then examine their realities. Both of their primary incarnations possessed a government. Both of them possessed massive violations of human rights in some form or another. It was Stalin’s regime, after all, that initiated the Great Purge, in aim of silencing dissent by robbing people of the ownership of their bodies, health, and life. And the homeless and starving of the United States remains an uncalculated number, not to mention their government’s conquests outside their territory, which arguably rival their inner crimes.

But wait! What was that we just tripped over? A clue to this unnavigable puzzle, perhaps? The United States territory. Ah. The United States owns something. What does it own? Perhaps it owns it’s citizenry? Well in that case, how can it’s citizenry own anything? Are there differing degrees of own? Whose ownership is final, the government’s, or it’s citizen’s? Well, according to US law, any citizen’s property may be confiscated by the government, aside proper monetary reimbursement, at any time for any “public” project. Well that answers that question.

What say you? The United States owns merely the property of it’s citizens, but not the citizens themselves? Okay. So if I were to abandon my property and travel to Mexico, there would be no one to stop me? What are border guards there for, then? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe it would be easier to say that the US owns the space in which all the collective property of it’s citizenry is owned. So then if all the US citizenry were to move to Mexico with me, what would the US own? How many different types of owning are there? Personal, material, spacial, spiritual? And how is it that under the Patriot Act, I can be detained and even tortured without due process of law? How can I be detained and tortured with due process of law? If that’s not the absence of private ownership of yourself, slavery, I don’t know what is.

But now we know the truth. The designation of a state excludes public. The USSR was living a contradiction, and the USA still is, a lie. You see how much easier the distinction of Pruvlic makes things? It’s quite simple. You are the material property of any government you are living under. If it is a government of one person, like a monarchy or dictatorship, then you are privately owned. If it is a gerontocracy or plutocracy, you are pruvlicly owned. Owned by some. To be owned by all, is a state that requires as a prerequisite the fact that you own yourself, rendering null and void the concept of ownership, government, itself, as ownership is in any personal respect, a binary measurement. You either do, or you don’t. Same with property. So to regard the whole of Japanese land as the “public property” of the Japanese citizenry is blatantly false, on multiple levels.

Not only do I not own it, but even they don’t own it. It is the pruvlic property of the Japanese government, or just Japan, for short. Those that have yet to equivocate private property and government could argue that point, (communists, lovers of the government, and anarcho-capitalists, lovers of private property) but straight down the ticket anarchists know better. If the entire island of Japan was forklifted into the air, dropped over the Asian continent and found itself smack dab on top of Beijing, would the island now belong to China? Or would it still belong to Japan? Wouldn’t a theft of this magnitude depracticate retribution and restoration?

This is the example by which I shall advent the differenciation of material ownership, and spacial ownership. Material ownership, or property, is the claim to the rights to alter and unalter a certain substance. Spacial ownership, or domain, is the claim to the rights to dictate what material comprises a certain space. The difference is subtle, but as illustrated with the following example, important. Imagine a person in the comfort and privacy of their own home. They are sitting in their favorite lazy chair reading a book, smoking a pipe, in dim but suitable lighting.

Suddenly, a stranger bursts through the door, walks into the homeowner’s kitchen, and begins to fix himself a sandwich. Now, the capitalist would claim that the main problem with the above scenario was the fact that the stranger has taken the man’s sandwich, which he presumably materialistically owns. The communist might retort that the only reason the stranger would ever dare enter another’s home was that the stranger must have been starving/abused/enslaved, and call for the abolition of the private ownership of sandwiches. What they both fail miserably to realize, is that amongst all this generalizing and posited justification, there is literally no economic difference between these two scenarios that is worth arguing about. In either case, you have the same net worth of sandwich to distribute, and regardless of how it is distributed, somebody is going hungry to whatever extent they don’t end up consuming said sandwich. The real problem with the scenario is not that the stranger is doing anything in particular, rather that he or she was there in the first place, whether they needed to be there or not. What we have, really, is a person reading a book peacefully under the presumption that they can do so alone and in peace, (exerting spacial ownership) and having this presumption violated by a person with no respect for privacy, or the concept of private domain. It would have been just as bad had the stranger walked in and attempted to read over the homeowner’s shoulder. Yet the difference (or similarity) between these cases has no recognized legitimacy by so many of all the political pulpits.

Pruvlic property is kept invisible by the silent collusion of property and domain, and only a few other sleights of mind. In Anarchy, however, these differences are faced and tackled head on, because Anarchy is the best (only) organizational system there is, willing to not just identify but SOLVE these non-ad-hominem problems and others like it. Abolish pruvlic property, be controlled by neither some nor one. An Anarchist pwns the State that owns.

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