In the history of human civilization, the concept of property is one of the most ancient and, therefore, fundamental. Dividing into “mine” and “not mine” is the first experience that barely grown babies face. In the very first codes of laws that have come down to us from Mesopotamia, one can already read about punishments for stealing other people’s donkeys, pigs and sheep, as well as slaves. It also contains references to land plots that could be rented.
This means that the state already then recognized and guaranteed the protection of the property rights of the people inhabiting it; on this basis, the first social contracts were drawn up, which did not fundamentally change in subsequent centuries.
Ground for inequality
The attitude to property thousands of years ago, of course, was not the same as it is now, it was determined by other factors, and often material values were not property in the literal sense, being rather possession or use. For example, land – the most important value of any agrarian civilization – everywhere, from Ancient Egypt to the Inca Empire, was considered, as a rule, to belong to the gods. Another thing is that the supreme ruler acted as a god or his incarnation in such cases. Technically, he was, as they would say today, something like a chief manager, but in the constant absence of a real “owner”, he turned, in fact, into the only manager of wealth.
Communal property, originating in tribal societies, did not necessarily disappear. But ownership did not yet mean complete independence. The structure of ownership in archaic societies, as it developed, began to resemble a nesting doll – a community or clan owned the land, members of the community who were subordinate to the clan or community could have their allotment within the community, and everything together belonged to the state / overlord. What a particular person owned was more personal rather than private property – it could be a simple set of items that were sometimes enough for a lifetime.
The community was more characteristic of pastoral societies; and since the cultivation of the land required an investment of more time and effort in the production of a product compared to raising livestock, in agrarian societies there was a faster transition to tribal or family ownership, that is, to property in a more or less familiar sense. The amount of labor invested began to determine the uniqueness, and therefore the value of a particular resource.
In the Germanic tribes, each member of the community was annually assigned his own plot for cultivation; in Sparta, each Spartan received land by birthright, although he could not give or sell it – there were a great many distribution mechanisms in ancient societies, but basically everything coincided in that the income from the provided land, “harvest”, was still considered to belong to the owner minus the established contribution in favor of the community or the supreme authority.
Right to grievance
The supreme power, through the distribution of rights to receive benefits, classified society. Thanks to the manipulation of property, a social hierarchy was built; the possession of one or another amount of goods was identical to the position of a person in this hierarchy. Even the fine for theft was different for different classes – the higher, the higher the position of the victim.
In the slave era, property could be not only objects or livestock, but also people. The slave had no property – on the contrary, he himself belonged to someone. Property, therefore, had another important function: its presence generally separated a person with rights from a person without rights. The conditions and restrictions on the use of property determined the degree of freedom of any person.
This principle, modified at different times, has survived almost to modern times: feudal systems, serfdom, property qualifications in elections embodied the same statement: “Tell me what you own, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“All acute questions of economic life are closely connected with the concept of property, which, however, in itself belongs more to the field of law, morality and psychology than to the field of economic relations,” considered the nineteenth-century philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. The concept of property should be interpreted more broadly than the right to own material values. In close connection with it, the concept of personality also developed. Within the framework of a clan, tribe, or eventually a single family, not everyone had the right to manage, for example, their own lives. The formal owner of the allotment, herds and slaves was the head of the family – respectively, he also owned children and households. The wives and children did not own this property and thus de facto belonged to the father of the familia, as it was called in ancient Rome. The head of the family could sell or kill not only a slave, but also his own son with the same success. Watching the complex discussion going on in our country now about the law on domestic violence, without even looking at the Middle East, for example, we can see that these conservative foundations are still very strong, although not so radical anymore. However, the last cases of selling wives in England were recorded only a hundred years ago.
In a hierarchical society, possession is the only way to stake out a place for yourself, through property to get the right to state protection for your food and your life. Therefore, the history of the development of social institutions as a whole represents the constant desire of the disadvantaged elements of society – whether slaves, women, blacks or peasants – to transcend the hierarchy and acquire rights, for which it was necessary to acquire property. The struggle for property was a struggle for one’s own self, right up to the struggle for personal space: after all, the inhabitants of the Middle Ages could not count on it either, living in the same room with sometimes very large families – the problem, however, in many places remains relevant to this day.
Distribute and Conquer
It is no coincidence, perhaps, that enthusiasm for the ideas of the sharing economy is often shared by people from the same social group that sympathize with the ideas of, for example, feminism: for them, not only the human right to own a thing ceases to be important, but also the right of a man to undivided possession of a woman. It should be attributed to the same set of values.
On the other hand, the state (with the exception of socialist experiments-exceptions, the first of which, probably, should be recognized as the state of the Incas) has always been interested in supporting the owners, since anyone who owns the means of production became an element of the economic system. The development of the economy – the emergence of monetary systems, the division of labor, industrialization – broke down archaic economic structures: due to the objective factor of constant population growth, society and the state needed more efficient principles for the production and distribution of goods.
As society was fragmented into ever smaller fractions, labor went beyond the boundaries of communities and families, became the business of each individual person, who also had to take care of his place in society, but on his own. The worker, who had only his own hands and head, already acquired an independent subjectivity in the economy, was a unit capable of relatively quickly changing one process to another. He had to be reckoned with, and his duties towards the community or clan were also blurred. Labor became the basis of property.
Things that once denoted a person’s position lost value as the economy transformed. For a city dweller, for example, a land allotment has ceased to be a necessity; the first and second generations of townspeople – migrants from the villages by inertia still perceived the land as a value, but the possession of six acres no longer made them participants in a significant economic process. For younger city dwellers, land has definitively become either an optional luxury item or a purposeful business tool, also not unique in itself.
In parallel with this, the family was slowly but surely atomized – since wives and children ceased to be working hands, it has become completely unnecessary for a citizen to have a family. One can still argue about the increasing practice of divorce from the point of view of morality, but this is a continuation of the same process: a person leaves the family for the same reasons for which the family left the clan in its time. Today, a male or female nuclear family is a socially acceptable phenomenon in society; moreover, she had conscious adherents.
It turned out that the true measure of the value of a resource is not so much the labor itself, but the time spent on it. A member of the nobility could be sure that the main benefit of possession was status and the benefits that came with it, and so it was in many ways, but in fact its benefit was the saving of time; he was not forced to spend his life on monotonous work, that is, he achieved the goal in the shortest way compared to those who had to exchange health and years for benefits.
The process accelerated rapidly at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, when, with the fall of empires, the millennium-old idea of the divine right of supreme power to distribute wealth collapsed. Revolutions were, among other things, also the victory of the rational over the irrational. From now on, a person who had already got rid of responsibility to the community, also got rid of responsibility to the overlord, became completely left to himself.
irresponsible approach
The traditional importance of status is still high, but in our time, the path to it has become even shorter (sometimes just a couple of successful actions or even ideas are enough for this), and competition has increased. Food began to get to man by the standards of our ancestors indecently easily; in a post-industrial society, intangible, intellectual resources of a person began to play a great value, opening the same road to a position in society as long-term cultivation of land or metal, but much faster.
However, if the conversion of labor into goods can become almost instantaneous, almost without a resource accumulation stage, then there is no need to waste time on accumulation – perhaps the only truly non-renewable resource for a person. Mobility in every sense is becoming an increasingly important source of human advancement in society; here we mean not only saving time, but also the maximum absence of anchors-attachments – to living space, to the family, to everything cumbersome. The amount of goods per unit of time in this case becomes much larger – conditionally, instead of working for a long time to be able to use a luxury car, now you can effortlessly drive many different luxury cars every day all this time. This system is getting more and more attractive.
If previous generations struggled to take on as much personal responsibility as possible to relatives and society (after all, any large property had to be serviced, taxes paid for it, which made a person a “taxpayer”, that is, a full-fledged citizen), then for For many young people, responsibility becomes a burden even to the family, not to mention the state. Already now we see in full swing the process of rejection of national and ethnic attachments. The idea of the sharing economy is in many ways the idea of a conscious disclaimer of responsibility, or rather its delegation. There is probably a connection here with such a boring problem as the unwillingness of young people to attend elections: for them, elections mean the same outdated imitation of integration into the general system, like planting potatoes in a suburban area, simulating participation in the economy. Politicians, by the way, now and then set an example, also demonstrating the possibility of coming to power in much shorter ways than was accepted a few decades ago.
At first glance, the ideal sharing economy society may seem similar to a socialist utopia, but there are fundamental differences: responsibility is not taken by force, but is delegated voluntarily, and is delegated not to the state (which in any socialist society is disguised behind the word “people”), but to others. people. The state may certainly be skeptical about the renunciation of responsibility by citizens, but no old socio-economic system can still give way to a new one until this new system becomes ready to fully replace the old one. Roughly speaking, the industrial revolution could take place only when a critical mass of manufactories had accumulated, the advantage of factory labor over manual labor became obvious and its victory, therefore, was determined. The state will accept any more profitable and productive model of interaction with society, especially if its existence depends on it, although the period of struggle between models will apparently always exist.
Picture of the future
It would be too bold to say that the process of denial of responsibility and further fragmentation of society will inevitably lead to the dismantling of states. Societies will need supreme arbitrators for a very long time to come. However, trends are already emerging not only at the micro, but also at the macro level – by and large, placing orders by different manufacturers at the same Chinese factory is also an example of a sharing economy (there is no need to build your own factory if it already exists), and this seems , suits everyone, including states that put up with job cuts, that is, with the refusal of the company from responsibility.
It can be assumed that as it becomes easier to obtain the benefits of their growing quick availability, as mobility grows, the class of “new people” will also grow, for the sake of momentary convenience instantly building – and just as instantly, if necessary, tearing – social ties with each other, and not with large elements of society. They will not give up their property at all, but will prefer to use it only at a specific moment they need and only for their own purposes, that is, they will replace it with the shortest possible possession. Of course, at the heart of any such shared service will still be the owner, who acquires the property and makes it available to everyone else for a fee. But this owner himself will in the same way use for a fee what others have organized for him on the same conditions, that is, he will become the same element of the economic system.
With regard to the family, the process of fragmentation may in the long run lead to the emergence of superpolygamous and superpolyamorous families, if they can still be called that. The hierarchy will not cease to exist as long as there are objects produced in limited quantities. But automation will gradually limit them to only the field of art – and perhaps art will also become sharing art, and a home collection of paintings without putting it on public display will be considered the same strange whim as, say, breeding horses today, or even socially unacceptable behavior.
Such a society looks selfish, but in centuries it may turn out to be natural – just as today’s society would have outraged and amazed not only the inhabitants of antiquity or the Middle Ages, but even our great-grandfathers.