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AntiCapitalist MeetUp: the vault of nature is not the vault of heaven [1]
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Date: 2022-07-10
Imperial Vault of Heaven at Temple of Heaven in Beijing, China "In the philosophy of space and time, the “territory” is, of course, the ontology of space and time (i.e., its nature or being), whereas the principal “map” is the substantivalism (or absolutism) versus relationism dichotomy."
How contentious are commodity spaces. Are they the perfectly competitive free market spaces imagined by libertarians or are they data points or network nodes abstractly representing the historical path from market towns to metropolitan sprawl. Is the commodity space the set of all possible commodity bundles or is it the path of long histories of class struggle and capital accumulation.
Whether intellectual property or land, property rights must be treated as a generalizable commodity. The dual approaches to property rights are also false dichotomies: the first, which argues that property and identity are necessarily bundled together and considers property to be a human right; and the second, which understands them as explicitly separate and views property as a commodity.
The dichotomous contradiction is the intervention of other elements made problematic in accumulated social-political capital such as the state. Eminent domain transforms that libertarian fantasy of freedom into legalized appropriation, where the right exercised by governments like the United States operates to usurp private property for public use, following fair(sic) compensation.
eminent domain and the localized state apparatus
The power of a state, provincial, or national government to take and trade private property for public use, is more often than not fee simple ownership. In some cases, the super-profits made by these financial actors are best conceptualized as forms of rent, derived in part from the monopoly ownership of a basic need. This entails “the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny.”
The designation of a property deemed "blighted" or a "development impediment", is based on the principle that such properties had a negative impact upon surrounding property owners, but was later expanded to allow the taking of any private property when the new third-party owner could develop the property in such a way as to bring in increased tax revenues to the government.
Fee simple ownership became blood simple violence in the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ land under settler colonialism. Such conflicts are examples of governmentality in that It proposes that government by the state is only one form of governing, that the terms state and government are not synonymous, and that actions taken by the state alone cannot bring about its desired ends. Commodification is the result of displaced possession of property rights via financialization and speculation.
We know that further commodification occurs, whether to pay college athletes and the continuing struggle of trafficking humans as commodities across borders or as other human violations. Commodifying natural resources embodies the ultimate challenge to planetary destruction regardless of the anthropocentric frame of reference.
Housing, land, and property (HLP) rights provide an interesting spatial and temporal intersection of conflict and struggle or capital and labor.
“While those using conflict commodities seek means of quick and easy access, transfer of possession, and extraction and transport, this is accomplished more easily with some commodities than others (Lujala and Rustad 2011). A number of conflict commodities are geographically remote, limited in quantity, or difficult to locate; and can depend on arduous or costly extraction methods or require specific forms of transportation (timber, oil) and complicated payment methods by outside actors (ibid.)…. Such a widespread spatial distribution also makes controlling or stopping the trafficking in conflict HLP rights different than spatially concentrated conflict commodities.” (stabilityjournal.org/...)
For example, property rights, or people’s legal right to own, use and sell land, resources and other goods, can provide an incentive to sustainably use natural resources. However, people in many countries around the world do not have clear property rights over land, water, minerals and more, putting natural resources at great risk.
Because of the abstract nature of such exchanges, reducing commodities as values measurable in prices or currency only seem non-spatial or anti-spatial in spite of or because of financialization. Land financialization distorted land management and local government behaviors and created many mega urban projects and large-scale infrastructure projects based on land financing approaches. This applies even more to urban built environments. For example, the transfer of development rights functions no differently than the market for pollution credits.
Private versus public conflicts surround claims for property ownership that may incentivize favorable public outcomes, which are that: 1. Property rights can prevent ecosystem degradation. 2. Property rights can encourage the provision of ecosystem services. and 3. Property rights can promote investment in conservation and efficient use of resources. All of these can be capitalized much like the term “ecosystem services” organizes the exchange-value of such services.
x A company called Nature's Vault is selling "natural assets" based on the ownership of mining rights, while saying that mining will not actually occur once people purchase them.
https://t.co/aFkgqsGV8C — Truthout (@truthout) July 6, 2022
Your ownership of a mortgage is also fictitious capital, and your use-value for car ownership is only for an ostensibly rented product that only in the rarest cases lasts your lifetime. We see such financialized contention in the changing of land-use rules in instances like the Trump administration’s attempt to open federal lands for private mining exploitation. Similarly, the trade in electromagnetic spectrum rights as well as pollution credits and the auctioning of rights in mineral extraction resemble the lease auctions for siting of wind turbine farms. These are not free-market competitions especially in the organization of bids and the qualification for bidders.
As usual this is more of a think piece in the hope of some useful anticapitalist discourse.
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