View source for History of Property as a History of Desacralization



=Contextual Quote=

"Capitalism is not something new, but is simply the logical conclusion of something old — capitalism is the total desacralization of property. Feudal property still retained something of the sacred character handed down from the earliest times, and where capitalism makes a qualitative break from it is in its total, or at least near-total abdication of this sacrality. Not all anti-capitalisms are created equal, but all are anti-capitalism, and that is the problem. In other words, anti-capitalisms cede frame to capitalism, standing in opposition to it. The archaic critique of capitalism, however, does something quite different—it frames capitalism as standing in opposition to itself. Sacral property is not the absence of capitalism; capitalism is the absence of sacral property—capitalism is the derivative term, and this has important ramifications. ... Above all, the archaic critique of capitalism lays bare the essential solution: resacralization."

- IP [https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/capitalism-an-archaic-critique-part-f4f]


=Discussion=

IP:

(source is a 'archaic' i.e. conservative critique of capitalism)

"The history of Roman property relations is complicated, but there are a few important things to note about it.

First, from the earliest times to the end of the imperium, there was a move from res mancipi to res nec mancipi. Today when we want to buy something we tap a piece of plastic against another piece of plastic, and the transaction is done. For the Roman of the earliest times, the situation could not have been more different. For the archaic Roman, all economic transactions were essentially sacred matters, requiring an elaborate ceremony known as the mancipatio (lit. “taking hold of the hand”). A sale was not a mere handshake, but an elaborate ceremony presided over by a god, with prescribed ritual actions and verbal formulae that must be performed exactly for a valid transaction to take place. The reason for this was that for our Roman, ownership was not an agreement between men as to the status of a thing, but the status of a thing in the eyes of the god. This of course required an impartial witness, and if either buyer or seller zigged where they should have zagged, if either should stutter and perform the ritual invocations anything but letter-perfect, no transaction had taken place at all. Property conveyed in this way was called res mancipi—goods requiring the mancipatio. Originally there was no other means of conveyance.

This point-of-sale system was necessarily somewhat limited and localized. Over time, as the needs of Roman society changed, a second category came into existence: the res “nec mancipi”—goods not requiring the mancipatio. For now, we can think of the distinction as roughly between movable vs. immovable property, which it later came to represent. At first, the basket of “movable” goods was quite small, but as time went on it grew to where most goods were easily conveyable—which is to say, desacralized—and eventually nearly all forms of property were desacralized. We see echoes of this in feudal times with the move from the feudalized law of the land to the law of movables, and in modern times from the law of realty to the law of personalty.

But the main distinguishing mark between classical and feudal property relations was that unlike feudalism, the classical world at all times had the concept of freehold or allodium—absolute ownership with no superior, which is to say, fully sacral property.

The popular image of the classical world is quite misguided. Often, we think of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Caesar as the root and wellspring of traditional European society, but the classical world was the result of a revolution, the result of a long structural conflict. It is to the archaic world as liberalism is to feudalism—the one was a revolutionary critique and replacement of the other. We can see that the classical world itself involved a desacralization, but from what? To understand classical notions of property, we have to go back further, to the rootstock of Aryan peoples, to their primitive notion of property.

Like all archaic peoples, the Indo-Europeans—the ancestor people of the Romans, Greeks, Germanics, Celts, and many others—did not observe a distinction between law, custom, and religion. The religion they practiced was not yet the polytheism of Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Odin, and others; their religion was ancestor worship. For them, the home was a temple—all religion was originally domestic, centred on the home and the dead buried on the property. They believed that upon death the soul didn’t part with the body, but remained present to it along with the body’s needs, so the duty to minister to the needs of the dead in the afterlife was incumbent on the living. This meant that the tomb resided on the property along with the altar, that regular funeral banquets were given to the dead along with daily libations and sustenance, and that the centre of the home was the sacred hearth fire, which was connected with the dead.

For this people, and for all its daughter peoples well into the historical period, the hearth, the rites, the gods—all these were private to the family. And the executive presiding over all these was the paterfamilias, the “House Father”. He was at once high priest, supreme magistrate, commander in chief in times of war—and most relevant to our purposes, he was sole proprietor. We can think of him as absolute monarch and supreme pontiff rolled into one—perhaps we could call his rule microstalinism.

For our Aryan House Father, property was crucial to the practice of religion. Without a family property, the ancestors could have no resting place. For him, religion, not law, guaranteed the right of property. In fact, he would not even have understood the distinction. Law was a function of religion—every legal procedure was a formal religious ritual, no less than the economic procedure in the original res mancipi. So, the right of property was more absolute than we can even imagine today. Today, the right of property is founded on the principle of social contract, the right of labour, or other principles—back then, it was founded on the principle of private, domestic religion.

The originary notion of property was something more private than anything that has existed in 3,000 years. With a full, historical understanding of the meaning of private property, we are in a position to see the absurdity of defining capitalism as a function of private property, whether for profit or otherwise—although the qualification of “for profit” calls to mind alienability, which is a distorted way of saying desacralization.

No property could be more private than that of our Aryan House Father, because his notion of property was altogether particularized. His notion of property is the grandfather of Blut und Boden. His notion of property demands inalienability. His notion of property is the ultimate in corporatism.

In sum, the archaic notion of property is the ultimate in private property. Lineage governs ownership, not natural law. This, and not capitalism, is the polar opposite of the usufruct property so celebrated by Marxists. The Marxist attempt to draw a line between capitalism and itself is utterly naïve, because properly understood, it is desacralization of property which gives birth to both communism and capitalism—not opposites, but cousins. First, the move from res mancipi to res nec mancipi desacralizes property. Later, usufruct enables the use-based proprietorship of the emphyteusis—a further desacralization. Still later, the secularization of the homage and the discharge of obligation in impersonal terms moves us still closer to capitalism. At every stage the relation between owner and owned devolves into mere use—we call this “commodification”. This is the fountainhead of our “rights based” moral paradigm—today only rights attach to property; duties attaching to property is unintelligible.

What began as particularized, inherited, rooted in the soil, inalienable, and corporative, through the slow march of time devolved—though by no means necessarily—into something universal, deterritorialized, free, and individual. '''Over thousands of years, in the move from the archaic to the classical, through feudalism and ultimately to capitalism, the history of property relations is a history of desacralization'''."

(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/capitalism-an-archaic-critique-part-f4f)
[[Category:Peerproperty]]
[[Category:Civilizational Analysis]]
[[Category:P2P History]]
[[Category:Neotraditional]]
[[Category:Spirituality]]

[[Category:Peerproperty]]
[[Category:Civilizational Analysis]]
[[Category:P2P History]]
[[Category:Neotraditional]]
[[Category:Spirituality]]