The ill-fitting boot: How private property obstructs universal access to quality goods

“ But you begin to see now one set of reasons at least why every one has not good comfortable boots. There could be plenty of leather; and there is certainly plenty of labour and quite enough intelligence in the world to manage that and a thousand other desirable things. But this institution of Private Property in land and naturally produced things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using ground, or moving material, and that have to be bought out at exorbitant prices, stand in the way. All these owners hang like parasites upon your enterprise at its every stage ”

“ Is 34there no other way of managing things than to let these property-owners exact their claims, and squeeze comfort, pride, happiness, out of the lives of the common run of people? Because, of course, it is not only the boots they squeeze into meanness and badness. It is the claim and profit of the land-owner and house-owner that make our houses so ugly, shabby, and dear, that make our roadways and railways so crowded and inconvenient, that sweat our schools, our clothing, our food—boots we took merely by way of one example of a universal trouble. ”

“ Patent leathers must be creamed and rubbed with a chamois cloth or linen or flannel rag after all mud and dust have first been removed. This operation should be repeated daily. Some men maintain that patent leathers should be varnished as soon as they come home from the bootmaker, but I disagree with them. A varnished patent leather has always a cheap look, and the coat of veneer is only applied as a last resort, to hide the cracks. Russet boots and shoes are treated daily with the special cream sold for them, which can be obtained at any bootmaker's or shoe shop. ”

“ There is certainly a love of symmetry in the human mind; but art is not required to make the feet symmetrical. One foot is the complement of the other, and the two taken together, when placed side by side, make a sort of dome of which the two great toes, which should be parallel to one another, form the apex. The boots then should be made to the natural shape of the foot, and square toes, though not so objectionable from a health point of view, are equally bad, artistically speaking, as the pointed ones. Plenty of room should be given in the leather above the great toe, for, as Mr. ”

“ Goodyear’s untiring life. That he will succeed in this, there now exists not a shadow of doubt. The combinations of the hard, the semi-hard, and the soft vulcanized India-rubber, have given him all the needful elements of success, and ere long, boots and shoes 132of India-rubber which need not a morsel of leather for their formation, will be as plentiful as over-shoes are now, and even more so. The power of the hard, the semi-hard, and the soft vulcanized India-rubber to resist wear, is one of their extraordinary features. ”

“ It lies in the fact that economic production by reason of the illusive value of private enterprise, is directed not towards the satisfaction of such universal and primary necessities as food, shelter, clothing, leisure and reasonable comfort, but towards the creation of unnecessary luxury and artificial frippery, towards the piling up, by means of advertisement, monopoly, exploitation and every kind of chicanery of unproductive accumulation of private property. ”

“ And anything that is wrong cannot be made right without changing it.
We Socialists are determined to change the laws relating to private property. We assert that the present laws are wrong. We are prepared to prove that they are wrong. We are eager to demonstrate that the poverty of the masses is the direct result of the ownership, by a few, of a certain kind of property that should not be privately owned. We refer, of course, to the industrial machinery of the country, which is owned by those who do not use it and used by those who do not own it. ”

“ That with private property in the necessary instruments of production, individual liberty as understood by the eighteenth century reformers must be more and more restricted, i. e., that in our existing economic condition individualism is impossible and absurd. (2) That even hostile or indifferent politicians have been compelled to recognize this. (3) That unrestrained capitalism tends as surely to cruelty and oppression as did feudalism or chattel slavery. ”

“ A poverty-stricken people can never be a free, a happy, a religious, or an educated people. No reform that will not give the people the means of acquiring property by honest industry—which will not enable them to be independent of wages-slavery—which will not enable them to live in houses of their own, and allow them free access to the soil of their country, is worth their serious attention.
We defy all the genius and statesmanship in the world to save a population from being the slaves of middle-class vampires so long as land is private property. ”

“ Property rights must meet the test of social expediency. If private property is defended on the ground of social expediency, it must show good social results. It is not a sacred thing; it is open to examination, and must be judged by its fruits. Of all the forms of income, that from property has been most strongly attacked. The thought is that enjoyment of wealth should not be found apart from labor, and that it should bear some proportion to services performed. The enjoyment of an ample income by one who does no more than to draw checks or to sign coupons seems to many minds to be unjust ”

“ The true sanction of private property, consists in its effect to stimulate men to industry, and the improvement of the understanding ; from the consideration that they will enjoy whatever their knowledge and industry may gain. Exactly the reverse of this sanction, and this effect, is the doctrine, that knowledge or industry will be excited and increased, by transferring a portion of their gains from themselves, to orders, hereditary, titled, hierarchical or stock. ”

“ You find at once you are interrupted. Along comes your first obstacle in the shape of a man who tells you the cattle and the leather belong to him. You explain that 28the leather is wanted for people who have no decent boots in England. He says he does not care a rap what you want it for; before you may take it from him you have to buy him off; it is his private property, this leather, and the herd and the land over which the herd ranges. You ask him how much he wants for his leather ”

“ We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of private property in land, which are currently relied on or proposed for the relief of poverty and the better distribution of wealth, and have found them all inefficacious or impracticable.
There is but one way to remove an evil—and that is, to remove its cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. ”

“ The present system fails to do the very thing which it proposes to do, because its lack of design means that it defeats itself in its own working. It is like a man so disorganised in his nerve centres that every time he lifts his hand to strike some one else he injures himself.
This is particularly true of private property in natural monopolies, like land. The experience of every people in the world, whether it be a barbaric tribe or a civilised nation, is that, when land becomes subject to private proprietorship, poverty inevitably follows. ”

“ So I assert that private ownership, so called, is not a proprietary quality. It extends to and includes only the use; the absolute ownership of all land being, in fact, in the community composed of all individuals. ”

“ OF all the fallacies accepted by men as truths, there is none more widely prevalent, nor more fatal to happiness, than that which assumes the measure of possession to be the measure of enjoyment. All over the world, the strife for accumulation goes on; every one seeking to increase his flocks and herds—his lands and houses—or his gold and merchandise—and ever in the weary, restless, unsatisfied present, tightening with one hand the grasp on worldly goods, and reaching out for new accessions with the other. ”

“ For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth, its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. ”

“ I shall begin with observing, that this quality, which we shall call property, is like many of the imaginary qualities of the peripatetic philosophy, and vanishes upon a more accurate inspection into the subject, when considered a-part from our moral sentiments. It is evident property does not consist in any of the sensible qualities of the object. For these may continue invariably the same, while the property changes. Property, therefore, must consist in some relation of the object. ”

“ Then what more natural that in the end each one should claim for himself the products of his toil and care, and that a system of exchange should be set up?
PRIVATE PROPERTY—a thing attached to man rather than to his family or tribe—has come into the world, furnishing us a basis on which to examine and criticise all the following systems of civilization. The individual now sets himself apart; no longer producing for the common use, but for himself alone ”

“ Now, the only mutable and progressive portion of law, as we have already seen, is that which concerns property. If, then, you ask what reforms are to be introduced into the right of property? M. Troplong makes no reply; what progress is to be hoped for? no reply; what is to be the destiny of property in case of universal association? no reply; what is the absolute and what the contingent, what the true and what the false, in property? no reply. M. Troplong favors quiescence and in statu quo in regard to property. What could be more unphilosophical in a progressive philosopher? ”

“ The resolution to make an end of private property is gathering force every day: people are beginning to learn the difference between a man’s property in his walking stick, which is strictly limited by the public condition that he shall not use it to break his neighbor’s head or extort money with menaces, and those private rights of property which enable the idle to levy an enormous tribute, amounting at present to no less than £630,000,000 a year, on the earnings of the rest of the community. ”

“ But, viewed from any angle, the unrestricted private ownership of property is a curse to the people and always has been. If it were not a curse, in the sense that it enables some to rob others, no one who is in his senses would be in favor of it. The desire to use property is a legitimate reason for wishing to own it, but the desire to own property that one does not use can arise from no other motive than a purpose to use such ownership as a bludgeon with which to rob the users. ”

“ So it was quite according to precedent that those who taught the right of all to property should be accused of attacking the right of property. But who, think you, were the true friends and champions of private property? those who advocated a system under which one man if clever enough could monopolize the earth--and a very small number were fast monopolizing it--turning the rest of the race into proletarians, or, on the other hand, those who demanded a system by which all should become property holders on equal terms? ”

“ Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule of a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not culture and charm, have still many virtues. Both these statements would be quite true. The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. ”

“ Human society was ruled by property grabbers; masters, kings, capitalists, providing toil, disease, war for the masses of mankind. That is the rule of capitalism, and cannot be otherwise.
But under communism, profit is abolished, and with it the exploitation of man by man; private property is [Pg 197] no longer a factor in the life of man; property becomes universal, all natural and created wealth belong to society, to every member of the community, as secure a birth right as air and sunlight. ”

“ Private property also continually interferes with or obstructs public measures which would greatly benefit all, and frequently to merely please the whim or caprice of an ill-trained individual....
“With a well arranged scientific system of public property, equal education and condition, there will be no mercenary or unequal marriages; no spoiled children; and none of the evils which proceed from these errors in the present system, if crudities which pervade all the departments of life, and are thoroughly inconsistent, can be called a system of society. ”