Modern property rights are neither fixed nor natural. Instead, they are historically constituted and legally enforced through dispossession, and remain tied to unequal societal relations that shape every aspect of our social belonging.
Since the advent of civilisation, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding, and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.
— Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society1
What is property? How do we define property? In its most common and intuitive conceptualisation, property is seen as an absolute ownership of tangible material objects. William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century jurist, defined property as the ‘sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe’.2 Absolute dominion over things meant that ownership was characterised by self-interest, with little to no social obligations.3
By the twentieth century, with the introduction of intangible assets like bonds, patents, and trademarks, property came to be increasingly viewed as a bundle of rights. It no longer remained exclusively tied to absolute ownership or tangible assets. A third understanding, which is becoming increasingly relevant, views property as a relationship, not only between people and material and immaterial objects, but also between people themselves. We also find property exhibiting a dual character. Owning property as personal possession is not the same as owning property as a productive resource or capital that generates a future return, more often than not from the efforts of others.4
Those who live on the wasteland of capital — indigenous communities displaced by development and resource extraction projects, undocumented migrants, people with criminal records, people with a disability, people suffering from mental health problems or addiction issues — are the worst sufferers of modern capitalist property relations. What they often lack is a place they can call home, a fixed address. Without one, they are disqualified from accessing the social safety net or meeting the employment criteria. They may live among us, yet belong otherwise.
Later in this essay, we will employ this distinction between private property as personal possession and property as a productive resource to tease out the disastrous implications for individual autonomy, livelihood, and belonging. We will see how the privatisation of public resources in the name of economic prosperity drives alienation, dependency, and dispossession, enabling a predatory wealthy class to appropriate our collective social wealth. The overarching argument of this essay is that modern property rights are neither fixed nor natural. Instead, they are historically constituted and legally enforced through dispossession and remain tied to unequal societal relations, shaping every aspect of our social belonging.
Let us begin by tracing the genealogy of the idea of property as absolute ownership and productive resource, its relation to the dispossession and proletarianisation of the European peasantry, to the decimation of indigenous peoples and the evisceration of indigenous ways of living under colonial rule.
Theft is Property: Primitive Accumulation and Colonial Dispossession
Throughout history, human exploitation has been a persistent theme. Still, between the 14th and the 18thcenturies, when feudalism gradually gave way to capitalism, liberal thinkers and economists of that period welcomed this transition as a turning point, a giant leap towards general emancipation.
In classical liberal accounts, for the first time in history, the lower classes broke free from the shackles of command and obedience and, motivated by their natural inclination towards self-determination, engaged in production and trade as free individuals.5 In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith characterised the entire process as peaceful: industrious, frugal proto-capitalists saved enough to invest in productive resources, forcing those less diligent to sell their labour for wages, thereby facilitating a massive increase in human productivity.6
It was Karl Marx who first punched holes in this liberal origin story. Marx notes how it is akin to the theological concept of original sin, and argues further that it is ill-equipped to explain the origins of capitalist relations. For Marx, not only is this liberal account of capitalist transformation based on circular reasoning, but it also falsely advances an ‘idyllic’ history of capitalist accumulation that is replete with conquests, enslavement, robbery, and murder.7
The circular reasoning manifests as a series of presuppositions: capital accumulation presupposes surplus value, which, in turn, presupposes a capitalist mode of production that itself presupposes commodified labour power, leading to a scenario in which capitalism presupposes its own creation.8
To avoid this vicious circle, Marx unearths a prior historical transformation not contained within the closed system of capitalist accumulation, which he terms ‘primitive accumulation’, and which logically precedes the latter.9 Using Great Britain as a case study — the most advanced capitalist country in the world at the time — Marx presents the history of the transformation of property rights that facilitated Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism as an example of primitive or original accumulation.
The feudal Great Britain in which this transformation first took place was quite unlike ours. For one thing, property rights weren’t exclusive as they are today. Rather, lands were either commonly held or subject to multiple rights claims. Serfs and peasants, subordinate to feudal landlords, had customary rights to open fields and common lands for such activities as collecting firewood, grazing, and cutting turves.10
However, through a series of enclosure acts, which Marx calls “Parliamentary form of robbery”, the ruling class granted themselves ‘the people’s land as private property’, transforming public resources into private estates. So complete was this transformation that by the “19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the communal property had, of course, vanished.”11
Once the communal lands were partitioned and fenced off, peasants lost their long-held customary rights to access and use them. Losing access to the means of production on which peasant communities relied to produce much of their subsistence items, they became increasingly reliant on the market to procure items they once themselves produced. The separation of agriculture and industry led to the emergence of a competitive labour pool, forcing peasants to relocate in search of employment, thereby driving urbanisation and proletarianisation.12
Contrary to liberal claims, the history of this transformation from feudalism to capitalism was, in fact, written in “letters of blood and fire”.13 Instead of voluntary subjugation, peasants, serfs, and other immediate producers actively fought against this forced creation of a market society by means of state-sanctioned violence that cut their relatively unmediated access to the primary means of production.14 Primitive accumulation thus has nothing natural about it and comes, as Marx famously put it, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.15
As Paddy Ireland observes, “It was in the context of enclosure, more impersonal markets, increasingly abstract calculated credit, a declining ‘moral economy’, and the rise of more self-interested (‘rational’) behaviour by market participants that Blackstone formulated his idealised conception of property in terms of ‘sole and despotic dominion’ and ‘total exclusion’”.16
While Great Britain was reorganising its property relations by rewriting its property laws, it was also engaged in a massive project of territorial expansion across the Atlantic. English colonialists set up plantation economies in lands they seized from Native Americans. These were financed by metropolitan merchant credit, sustained by first white indentured and then enslaved black labourers, and ruled by a slave-owning planter class.17
Justifying these colonial enterprises and the establishment of European systems of property in North America required developing a different kind of logic altogether — one that could legitimise the appropriation of lands held by indigenous nations and address the moral challenges it posed. Philosophers like John Locke shouldered this arduous task.
Locke, who had professional, personal and intellectual investments in the English imperial economy, developed a labour theory of appropriation: indigenous claims to land are invalid because they lacked both a concept of property — understood as enclosing and improving land by labouring upon it — and the concept of sovereign authority, rendering America open for just appropriation.18
Locke further reinforces this appropriative logic with a labour theory of value grounded in the idea of a civilisational hierarchy. He postulates a fictive universal tacit consent to use money, one to which Native Americans were never party, leaving American lands to remain in a state of natural common, open to unilateral, nonconsensual appropriation by Europeans who utilise money to store the value of human labour and increase the common stock of mankind on a global scale.19
Marx cited the capitalist transformation of indigenous lands as an instance of primitive accumulation.20However, there still remains a contradiction between Marx’s “conceptual intension” or definition of primitive accumulation and its “descriptive extension” or scope, for his definition tends to homogenise the history of capitalist transformation.21 Extending Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation to settler colonialism in the Americas would warrant its reconstruction.
As we have already seen, based on his study of Great Britain, Marx observes that the expropriation of land led to the proletarianisation and exploitation of the European peasantry — the extraction of surplus value from wage labourers. However, as Robert Nichols shows, when it comes to the colonies, expropriation need not entail proletarianisation and subsequent exploitation.22 The brutal and systematic destruction of the indigenous communities of North America did not necessarily transform them into wage labourers, as opposed to the European context, but led to their elimination as distinct peoples.
Patrick Wolfe locates the primary motive for this elimination in the acquisition of new territory.23 Rather than exploiting their labour, settler colonialism aimed at replacing indigenous societies altogether. Indigenous groups were often summarily liquidated. Even when they weren’t, they experienced elimination through forced assimilatory tactics such as child abduction, religious conversion, resocialisation via religious missions and boarding schools.24
The seizure of indigenous lands cannot simply be described as theft of property. Nichols shows that, in the colonial context, the very act of theft not only precedes property but also produces it, a dynamic he terms the ‘recursive logic of property’.25 While in typical European frameworks, property must exist before it can be stolen, in the context of settler colonialism, “theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft.”26
Once property is generated through its own seizure, indigenous people can only be retroactively recognised as “original owners of the land”; their proprietary interests are acknowledged only after they have lost it — possession becoming dispossession’s effect, rather than its precondition.27
On this reconstruction, primitive accumulation allows us to speak of at least two forms of expropriation: proletarianising and eliminatory. But this categorisation need not be binary. In other colonial contexts, in which native societies weren’t eradicated but were forcibly incorporated into the global, transnational circuits of capitalist accumulation in an exploitative, asymmetric relationship of dependency, another reconstruction of its conceptual intension will be required.
Not only is the typology plural, but the transformation itself is unfinished. In other words, the process of reorganising our relationship with the natural world need not belong to the distant past. Modern expropriatory transformations of property relations, including access to public resources, are hailed and justified on grounds of economic progress. We turn to them now.
Profiting from the Labour of Others and the Wasteland of Capital
In the 21st century, the gulf between property as a personal possession and as a productive resource has never been wider. The ownership of a product for personal use — a television, a computer — has limited consequences for others. On the contrary, ownership of a productive resource — a factory, a power station — has significant implications for others. As Jean-Philippe Robé shows, when productive resources are increasingly owned by powerful, multinational corporations, this undermines the individual autonomy and self-determination of non-owners, including those they directly employ.28
That private companies manage to take control of key productive resources is partly due to government policies that privatise public lands and government services. In Great Britain, for example, key public companies and public utility services were privatised by the Thatcher government, as was public land equivalent to 10 per cent of the British landmass.29
Control of valuable assets such as housing, communications, patents, and digital platforms has given rise to rentier capitalism, in which private companies profit from extracting rather than creating any new value. Rentiers are motivated by a proprietary rather than entrepreneurial ethos, in which they are content to extract steady revenues rather than innovate, creating conditions for economic stagnation.30
Another instance of such revenue streams arises from the ownership of public debt. A small bondholding class has gained ownership of public debt, skewing resource distribution upward and directly benefiting an interest-receiving financial elite at the expense of tax-paying ordinary citizens.31 A common feature of these revenue streams is that they all, directly or indirectly, facilitate the transfer of part of the product of one person’s labour to another via monetary transfer.32
This is another instance of the redistribution of surplus value, structurally similar to the exploitation of wage labour discussed above, though occurring after the point of production rather than at it. What makes rentier extraction a durable legacy of primitive accumulation is that ownership of a productive resource alone secures a permanent claim on the labour of others.
If primitive accumulation once involved the forcible removal of people from their ancestral lands, today, displacement often occurs without removing people from their physical locations. The effects of such displacement, however, often mirror those of settler colonialism, where expropriation happens without incorporation.
Just as elimination required no incorporation of indigenous societies into wage relations, capital today, as Ince shows, separates people from their means of subsistence with no intention of incorporating them as wage labourers. The “ever-expanding global surplus population” that capital creates “does not even belong to the ‘reserve army of labor’ and dwells in the wasteland of capital”. Public goods — social security, public utilities, education — were once historically won by social movements as compensation for the original loss of the commons. The erosion or privatisation of public goods, however, displaces people from these non-market means of survival and reproduction, without displacing them physically.33 Once people are forced into total market dependency, it radically transforms every aspect of their social belonging.
Belonging Otherwise
Capitalism is a fundamental set of social relations built on private property and wage labour. For capitalism to function, inequality must persist in terms of ownership and access to the means of production. The ownership of a productive resource necessitates the existence of wageworkers. To coexist under capitalism, owners and labourers must lead different lives — they must belong otherwise.
This dynamic was discovered in the colonies by the English politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who attempted to understand why Thomas Peel’s 1829 attempt to colonise Western Australia failed. Despite taking with him a capital of £50,000 and around 300 wage labourers, Peel failed to establish a capitalist society in Western Australia. The labourers he brought along had little reason to remain wage workers due to the superabundance of arable land and became landowners soon after arrival.34
As Marx argues, in the colonies, Wakefield “discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things”, and that “property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage worker.”35
If this simple truth about capitalist production is glaring at the colonial frontiers, it becomes obscured in the capitalist metropoles that promise everyone an equal shot at prosperity. We are told anyone who applies their natural talent in a productive activity and works hard can succeed in life. In reality, the privatisation of public resources — health, housing, education — creates unequal conditions for nurturing and developing talent early in life, shaping life trajectory and outcome. The hardest-working people often toil away generating wealth for their employers.
Modern capitalist societies, by their very arrangement, cap success along socio-economic divides. This is reflected in property ownership. The working class struggles to pay for housing and is subject to exploitation by a rent-seeking proprietary class both at home and in the workplace. Meanwhile, success and economic security for the middle class are capped at home ownership, which requires them to surrender a portion of their incomes in mortgage payments to banks and other financial institutions.36 Today, true economic independence and prosperity can only be achieved by a minority elite class that exerts control over productive resources and profits from the labour of the majority.
If the privatisation of public resources has improved productivity, this has hardly benefited everyone equally. Contrary to Locke’s proviso, improving the common stock of mankind via privatisation has led to a situation where abundance coexists with unmet needs. Basic subsistence items remain undistributed if people are unable to afford them: supermarkets will destroy unsold food items rather than distribute them; empty and abandoned buildings will be closed or destroyed rather than allowing people experiencing homelessness to take shelter.37
Those who live on the wasteland of capital — indigenous communities displaced by development and resource extraction projects, undocumented migrants, people with criminal records, people with a disability, people suffering from mental health problems or addiction issues — are the worst sufferers of modern capitalist property relations. What they often lack is a place they can call home, a fixed address. Without one, they are disqualified from accessing the social safety net or meeting the employment criteria. They may live among us, yet belong otherwise.
Any attempt to address this global crisis of dispossession must begin with recognising the historically contingent nature of property rights: rather than being fixed or natural, they are socially and legally constructed and enforced by law. Yet democratic control of what remains public can only go so far, given how much of our collective resources have already been privatised. As the scholars of indigenous studies engaged throughout this essay argue, ensuring justice and equity in access to our collective social wealth will require us to go beyond the narrow Eurocentric binary of private property versus the commons and view our relationship with nature as one of care and responsibility, shaped by a reciprocal attachment.
Image Credit: Kanō Sanraku (Public Domain)
Notes
- Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society (Charles H Kerr And Company, 1877), p. 552 http://archive.org/details/ancientsociety035004mbp
- William Blackstone, The Oxford Edition of Blackstone’s: Commentaries on the Laws of England: Book II: Of the Rights of Things, ed. by Simon Stern (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1765–69.
- Paddy Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism (Bristol University Press, 2024), p. 54, doi:10.46692/9781529235807.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 8.
- Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke University Press, 2020), p. 57, doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smqjz.
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1937), p. 321 http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207956 accessed 9 July 2026.
- Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Twenty-Six’, n.d. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm accessed 9 July 2026.
- Gavin Walker, ‘Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt’, Rethinking Marxism, 23.3 (2011), pp. 384–404 (p. 386), doi:10.1080/08935696.2011.583016.
- Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Twenty-Six’.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 42.
- Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Twenty-Seven’, n.d. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm accessed 10 July 2026.
- Nichols, Theft Is Property!, p. 61.
- Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Thirty-One’, n.d. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm accessed 10 July 2026.
- Nichols, Theft Is Property!, p. 62.
- Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Thirty-One’.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 44.
- Onur Ulas Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 42.
- Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, pp. 46–47.
- Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, p. 40.
- Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Thirty-One’.
- Onur Ulas Ince, ‘Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, and Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention’, Rural Sociology, 79.1 (2014), pp. 104–31 (p. 114), doi:10.1111/ruso.12025.
- Nichols, Theft Is Property!, p. 81.
- Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8.4 (2006), pp. 387–409 (p. 388), doi:10.1080/14623520601056240.
- Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, p. 388.
- Nichols, Theft Is Property!, p. 114.
- Nichols, Theft Is Property!, p. 9.
- Nichols, Theft Is Property!, pp. 33–34.
- Jean-Philippe Robé, ‘Taming Property’, Revue Européenne Du Droit, no. 4 (2022) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363337547_Taming_Property accessed 14 July 2026.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 80.
- Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018), pp. xx–xxxvi.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 96.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 100.
- Onur Ulas Ince, ‘Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation and Capital’s Violence’, Political Theory, 46.6 (2018), pp. 885–914 (p. 904), doi:10.1177/0090591717748420.
- Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America. A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1834) http://archive.org/details/englandandameri00unkngoog accessed 21 July 2026.
- Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Thirty-Three’, n.d. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm accessed 21 July 2026.
- Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 94.
- Ince, ‘Between Equal Rights’, p. 904.
