Capitalism Is the Total Desacralization of Property

Discussion

IP:

"Overall, the critiques from the left generally miss the mark, whereas the critiques from the right are more on target but are largely ahistorical. And none of these critiques really attempts to drill down and work out exactly what capitalism is in the first place—except, to its credit, Marxism. If capitalism is simply something like “private ownership of property for profit,” where’s the objection? Private property is as old as the hills, and man has always expected profit from the soil. If this definition applies as well to us today as it applies to the classical world, perhaps we need to dig a bit deeper.

As an alternative to this I propose a different definition of capitalism, and implicit in this definition is a foundational critique. The definition is simple: Capitalism Is the Total Desacralization of Property. All the valid critiques just mentioned are comprehended and contained in this definition.

The emphasis here is on property. Capitalism is primarily about property, because economics, from Greek oiko-nomos (lit. “household law”)—economics without property is empty of content. But capitalism is not about private property, certainly not in the Marxian sense—Marx’s notion of private property cashes out to the ability to rent things: non-usufruct property. But non-usufruct property is ancient. Double-entry bookkeeping is ancient too, so it’s not about profit either. Nor is it about markets, commerce, entrepreneurship, supply and demand, commodification—it’s not even about capital. All these things formed the backbone of ancient economies.

Capitalism is not primarily about private property, but it’s about some sort of property. So, to understand the break between capitalism and what came before it, let’s work our way back, and find out how property has changed with time.

On the surface, the major break between feudal and capitalist property relations was in breaking away from joint-ownership. There’s an inherent sociality to feudalism not found in later social orders. Feudalism arose from the combination of vassalage with fief-holding—that is, it arose from the inherently personal obligation to a man, in conjunction with the granting of immovable property by that man. Property under feudalism is bound up with social obligation—all property is held subject to the performance of duties.

But the duties are not entirely one-sided. The mark of feudal property is the double-proprietorship, and this two-way ownership holds between lord and vassal, as well as between landlord and tenant. The vassal holds his fief only so long as he renders his lord homage and service. Later, as feudal property became desacralized, this service could be acquitted in terms of payment, but originally the obligation had to be carried out personally. However, the lord also had duties to his vassal, and if the lord didn’t offer protection, immunity, and political authority, the vassal was not obligated to him. It was the same between landlord and tenant—the tenant owed the landlord service, but the landlord owed him protection and the maintenance of his rights. In feudalism we see the superior ownership of the lord of the fief coexisting with the inferior ownership of the tenant. How different is all this than under capitalism? Joint-ownership is not just possible, as under capitalism, but all property is corporative.

One mark of sacral property is inalienability; feudal property was not exactly inalienable, but in some degree indivisible. The serf can’t be alienated from his land and can’t be parted from his family—this is one of his rights, which is God-given and sacred. More sacral still is the conveyance of the fief, the transaction upon which the entire feudal economy depended, and this was done by the vassal rendering the lord homage and fealty. These two obligations are not exactly synonymous—homage is older, and traces back to the ancient Germanic custom of admission into the männerbund, whereas fealty gives Christian sanction to this obligation. Homage, however, was the essentially religious tie that bound all feudal society together, including its property relations.

All feudal property stood upon this sacral basis, however indirectly. Later, the glue that held the system of property relations together came to be the great chain of being, where each man in the divine hierarchy, from bonded serf all the way up to the Holy Roman Emperor, could trace his part in the social order unto the throne of God himself. And property itself was in some sense consecrated. It was restricted in its usages; it was possible to abuse it; above all, property conferred not only rights, but duties. Property was not exactly a sacred relation, but nor was it purely economic—it was a mixture of the two. The break between feudalism and capitalist was not so much the break between corporate and individual ownership; more fundamentally the break involved the loss of this mixed sacrality.

But it was a mixed sacrality. Feudalism was a mixture of Germanic and Roman elements, and to see the different elements each brought to the table, we have to seek the origins of feudalism itself."

(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/capitalism-an-archaic-critique-part)