Private Property Rights Must Be Scuttled, UK Author Argues

To dismantle white privilege and create a more equitable economy, private property rights must rationalized and the entire modern capitalist system overhauled, Chandran Nair reported for UK’s openDemocracy.

Photo Insert: It is crucial to remember that modern conceptions of private property rights were constructed by white colonizers and settler communities during their conquest of the world.

Yet it is important to recognize that capitalism has a racial origin in the West – which knowingly placed white populations, and in particular Anglo Saxons, on top of the economic pyramid. This is evident through an examination of one of its core tenets: private property rights.

Neoliberal Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto helped to legitimize the idea in the West and around the world that property rights are the fundamental enabler of private enterprise, social mobility, and even economic equality.

Developing countries have not achieved high-income status and have not been able to enact capitalism “properly” not because of cultural differences or the effects of centuries of exploitation, repression, and inappropriate governance systems foisted on them. Instead, he believes, it has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights, most of which would be alien to centuries-old local systems, customs, and traditions.

But the truth is property rights are not universal: they are a social construct and cannot be viewed without historical nor socio-cultural context. It is crucial to remember that modern conceptions of private property rights were constructed by white colonizers and settler communities during their conquest of the world, from the Americas to India and Australia.

Western colonizers and settlers instituted property rights in local and international laws and through the world’s first corporations (the infamous East India Trading Co., for example) to protect in perpetuity the ill-gotten gains of plunder. Yet they never respected the property rights of others in this process.

In India, the British enforced taxes on the population and reserved a portion of those taxes to buy land and goods cheaply from Indian peasants not familiar with – let alone educated in – British law or trade values.

One scholar calculated that between 1765 and 1938, the UK stole $45 trillion from India in this way, among other crimes. Wealth has been created, magnified, and passed down across generations, reinforcing the white economic powers and privileges we see today.

In the US, since 1776, around 1.5 billion acres of land have been seized from native populations – an area around 25 times the size of the United Kingdom. The entire island of Manhattan was purchased for just $24 (equivalent to around $950 in 2012, adjusted for inflation).

Once land was conquered, stolen, or purchased unfairly, very small proportions were then partitioned off to native Americans – for example, the Chehalis people had their five-million-acre territory reduced to just four thousand acres in 1864 by President Lincoln. The native American civilization, which believed in the notion of sharing public goods and common ownership, were made tenants of their own land.

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