Possible Research Paper

https://www.patreon.com/posts/possibl...

I'm thinking about doing a research paper for C4SS debunking classical liberal historical mythology on the origins of private property and commodification, with the following to start off my research:

Karl Widerquist. The Prehistory of Private Property
Enzo Rossi and Carlo Argenton. Property, Legitimacy, Ideology: A Reality Check
https://www.cooperative-individualism...
Michael Hudson et al, eds. Privatization in the Ancient Near East and
Classical World (if I can ever track down an affordable copy or pdf)

I touched on some of the same themes in Communal Property: A Libertarian Analysis, but I want to come down even more strongly on the ideas that

1) the overwhelmingly dominant version of property in land that prevailed from the Agricultural Revolution until the rise of the state, and in many areas until medieval or colonial times, was the kind of open field system that existed in medieval England, in the Russian Mir until about a hundred years ago, and so on.

2) what right-libertarians and classical liberals think of as "private property" in land -- individual, alienable, commodified, fee simple -- has only predominated where the state has intervened and forcibly nullified customary rights, and "privatized" the commons. It's what Livy described in his accounts of the patricians enclosing the public lands, what happened in the English Enclosures, and was done by Warren Hastings in Bengal and by colonial empires throughout the world.

Basically everything that classical liberals posited as the origin of the institutions they defended was based on ahistorical speculation and Robinsonades that were subsequently disproved by actual historians: The claims that private property arose naturally through peaceful individual appropriation and "mixing of labor," that specie currency spontaneously arose from the problem of "mutual coincidence of wants," that the predominance of the cash nexus and commodity production arose spontaneously from some natural "propensity to truck and barter," that the state arose from a Social Contract... You get the idea. In reality all these things came about through a much different history -- a history, to borrow a phrase, written in letters of fire and blood.

I think when I get a little more caught up on my backlog of notes for Exodus, I may start alternating between that and researching the new paper from one day to the next.