Imagine No Possessions … by Martin Willett

For me this is the point when John Lennon's Imagine ceases to be a good blueprint for the future. I can imagine life with no possessions and I don't like the idea.

The idea that all property is theft does not appeal to me and it does not accord with my long view of history, the really long view; the biological perspective. Property starts with the toothbrush. This is my toothbrush and nobody should share it. These are my shoes, they fit me and I wear them. This level of property right seems to be natural and easily defensible on grounds of utilitarian values. From this high point of the accord of property and universal good we must travel on to find the point at which private property ceases to be benign and starts to have serious downsides. At the extreme of one man owning everything it is easy to see that utilitarian judgment will come down against the absolute value of property, but exactly where the line is drawn is a matter of debate. Do I have a right to claim a house as my own until everybody has shelter? Do I have a right to claim that this land is my land, either as an individual or as a member of a group?

Think of your own experiences of private and communal property. I have worked in a number of different places where there has been an element of the communal about tea and coffee making facilities, places where contributions were asked and services provided communally. I found that on average the communal services were poor. Nobody ever thought that they had a fair deal.

Why do I have to pay the same as him? He has more drinks than me.

But you have two sugars in your tea.

But we are always running out of coffee, I drink black coffee and I don't like tea.

You never go to the shop.

You always buy that cheap nasty coffee, because you never drink it.

All the mugs are chipped.

You never wash them.

I think that lousy service under communal ownership and control is difficult to avoid. The benefits of catering to a larger group are fine in theory, as long as the theory assumes that the people involved will not behave in a normal human way. When a theory does not work in practice it is time to come up with a better theory, not to complain that reality is wrong.

Communal ownership and control should only be employed when the alternative is worse. This probably means I am not a socialist after all. As I have said before you can call me anything you want except late for dinner. I don't believe that communal ownership is better than private ownership, sometimes it is; sometimes it is not. In large organizations a new way of handling things becomes possible. When there are enough people wanting tea and coffee a point will be reached at which it becomes viable for one person to become a specialist in supplying the services that the people want. They can put in a tender for the job, and they can earn a legitimate income by providing a service that provides the people what they want. The service provider can take advantage of the economies of scale offered by the size of the collective without having to worry about unreliable volunteer labor.

This point can be illustrated by the youth hostel, the bed and breakfast and the large hotel. The youth hostel tries to get by with volunteer labor, and the result is the typical student living squalor and squabble. The bed and breakfast is too small to gain economies of scale so the labor charges of the landlady seem burdensome, or her efforts to cut costs to the point at which she can generate her surplus provide cause for complaint. A large hotel can get the benefits of economies of scale and use entirely specialized labor, as a result the service it provides is usually much better, in line with what the customer expects to receive for the money. However the hotel is not perfect because it has to seem to be providing value for money rather than actually doing so. So hotels start providing services that the customer does not really need and the customer uses them in order to feel like he has got value for his money. I very rarely have salami, ham, smoked salmon, four kinds of bread roll, Greek yogurt and figs for breakfast, but hey, it's there, it's paid for... Similarly at home I never have three twenty minute high-powered showers a day. And did I really need those extra three years at University, or did I just take them because my dad wanted to see the family get something back out of the welfare state?

The happy medium must consist of finding out what people really want and providing it at a reasonable cost. This seems to be the way of the new politics, the way of Tony Blair. It's the despised middle ground of politics. It is not sexy but it is sensible and addresses the true needs of the people.

It cannot be right for one person to own huge tracts of land while most people have none. There is a very old joke about a rambler crossing a grouse moor when the owner comes up to him and tells him to get off his land. "Your land? Where did you get it from?"

"From my father the Seventeenth Duke, and he got it from his father, the Sixteenth Duke."

"And what about right back at the beginning, how did the first Duke get it?"

"He fought for it."

"Seems fair enough to me, how about if I fight you for it now?"

All land ownership is ultimately about expropriation. Most land is now bought and paid for but who sold it? Where did they get it from? In most cases the answer is the first people seized it. They either occupied land for the first time or therefore assumed a right to own it or they stole it from the previous inhabitants. Does any man really have the right to own land and keep all other men off it? There is no absolute answer to that. The lesson of history is that might is right. If you won the war you were right to fight and you deserve all you take. Any answer to the land problems of the world that tries to give land back to its rightful owner is likely to do more harm than good. I am reminded of a story a journalist told of a hearing a Jewish settler with a Bronx accent talking about getting the thieving Arabs off his people's land. Later that day the journalist talked to an Arab.

"How long have you been here?"

"This house has belonged to my family since the year 70."

"So you moved here after the 1967 war?"

"No my friend, you misunderstand, this house has belonged to my family since the year you call 70 AD"

Where would you start in America if you wanted to give back the land? The native population was decreased to less than 10% of its pre-Columbian level, immigrants, refugees and slaves from all continents came, bred, interbred and the total population grew enormously. Most US citizens trace their ancestry back to several modern countries. Most so-called African Americans are full of European genes. I would hazard a guess that virtually no African-American born since 1940 was free of European genes.

The land itself cannot belong to one man in the same way that you own your toothbrush. Land is a special case. It is different. The ownership of large amounts of land gives wealth and privilege to a few which cannot be in the interests of the whole community. But just as clearly if land is held in common it is abused and debased. The answer to this problem lies probably in some form of gradual redistribution, using death as the mechanism. Land should be redistributed upon the deaths of the current landowner. In some cases the simplest option would be to let the children of the landowner inherit the land but only if this degree of landownership is consistent with equity and fairness for all.

I cannot imagine that anybody reading these pages has never played Monopoly; you must have noticed that once a player has begun to win ultimate victory is assured. Life is very like Monopoly but even less fair, players start with a hand that is likely to win or lose and also receive incomes that further this trend. Would you be happy to play Monopoly with a player who owned half the properties on the board and collects forty times as much as you do when he passes GO? That is the reality of life. The Duke of Westminster owns a huge section of the British Monopoly board, including large parts of the dark blue property in Mayfair. He has a hand dealt to him that is so good even several centuries of inbreeding could not allow him to make a mess of it. This is wealth, quite different from money. Wealth generates a supply of money and influence. The bigger the wealth the bigger the supply. Acquiring or losing money is a lot easier than doing the same with wealth. Wealth is comfort and security to those that have it, and an affront to the rest of us.

The very nature of wealth is that it is only really valuable when it is relatively rare. When only a very few people owned their own home doing so was a great badge of virtue and self-reliance. It made you a burgess, a bourgeois. Now home ownership is more widely spread it is valued less. What you own is not important, what matters is what you own extra. Just as calories only count when you eat more than your companion, wealth only matters if you have more than another. It follows that wealth and equality cannot be easily reconciled. I believe that as a rule private landowners do a reasonable job. I am not in favor of seizing all land and having collective farms. When this was tried in the Soviet Union it led to catastrophe and famine. There should, however, be a policy of reducing excessive landholdings. Areas of farms that produce a large surplus of income should be taken into common ownership on the death of the landowner. The core of the land can be retained by the family of the landowner and the excess should be leased off on renewable 99-year leases. The free market will ensure that the land finds a buyer. Large blocks of non-agricultural land and property could be dealt with in a similar way. Only excessively large ownership would be taxed in this way. There should be the option to be richer than your neighbor, but not the option to own the whole neighborhood.