Private Property Regimes Research Articles

Marx e a estética

O artigo comenta as ideias de Marx expostas no Caderno III dos Manuscritos de 1844, destacando o papel da sensibilidade na formação estético-cultural do ser social. Analisa criticamente a dualidade estrutural dessa formação sob o regime da propriedade privada, na qual a riqueza da arte é destinada aos ricos e aos demais privações. Ao fim e ao cabo, parafraseando Lukács, o objetivo do artigo é apreender e debater as tensões dialéticas no “campo da luta entre experiências passadas e novas impressões provocadas pela arte”.

Property is only another name for decentralized creation of knowledge

Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl argue in a recent paper that a private property regime is incompatible with allocative efficiency insofar as it allows owners to ask for monopoly prices to potential buyers. In order to remedy this defect without penalizing investment efficiency, they propose to implement a Harberger tax. In this paper we show that the Harberger tax is a mechanism that penalizes the informational investment necessary to reach efficient estimates of the fundamental value of assets and, therefore, a mechanism that move us away from both investment efficiency and allocative efficiency.

A Theory of Property and Sociopolitical Change

Contemporary property theory highlights information costs as the most important determinant of exclusion rights and numerus clausus-type standardization: rising information costs lead to stronger exclusion rights and more standardization—that is, a reduction in the number of allowed property forms—whereas falling information costs have the opposite effect. What this paradigmatic model lacks, however, is a theory of how and why information costs change in the first place. By developing such a theory, this article demonstrates that, in important cases, the legal impact of information costs tends to be counterbalanced by concurrent changes in individual preference, and that preexisting predictions about the relationship between information costs, standardization, and exclusion are therefore partially wrong, and otherwise incomplete. Scholars have long understood that information costs, especially those related to property, are negatively correlated with social and political cohesion: tighter communities and stronger states correlate with lower information costs, whereas sociopolitical disintegration correlates with higher information costs. But this is only half the picture: sociopolitical cohesion is also negatively correlated with the diversity of individual preferences, in that higher levels of sociopolitical cohesion homogenize preferences, whereas sociopolitical disintegration diversifies them. Information costs and preference diversity are therefore synchronized in many sociopolitical contexts: when information costs rise (or fall), so does preference diversity. Recognizing this synchronization challenges some of the central predictions of current property theory, but reinforces others. Most importantly, it implies that there is often no obvious correlation between information costs and legal standardization. Although rising information costs incentive more standardization, simultaneous increases in preference diversity drive up the frustration costs of standardization, and therefore incentive less standardization. Either side can emerge victorious from this legal tug-of-war. The article identifies several major historical episodes in which a sharp rise in information costs was, contrary to current theoretical predictions, followed by the creation of many new property forms. In contrast, the positive correlation between information costs and exclusion rights is perhaps even stronger than what current models predict: rising information costs boost the attractiveness of exclusion-based private property regimes, but so does the corresponding increase in preference diversity.

PARA NÃO DIZER QUE NÃO FALEI DO CRIME DE LESA PÁTRIA DE TEMER: os Decretos 9.309, 9.310 e 9.311/2018

A quebra das regras democráticas que culminaram na impostura de Michel Temer à presidência da república é analisada a partir de um fator gerador, o contexto de oportunidade de classe para os grandes invasores das terras públicas no Brasil. Embora a desenvoltura dos latifundiários travestidos de capitalistas e vice versa não seja tratada como uma novidade, depreende-se que a sua intensificação ao longo dos governos do Partido dos Trabalhadores resultou de uma opção política orientada para a renúncia às transformações estruturais ante a perspectiva de mediação de conflitos inconciliáveis como o são aqueles que opõem saqueadores do bem comum ao restante da sociedade. Os decretos que liquidam a grilagem premiando os grileiros são o ponto culminante da gestão territorial temerária do Estado que, ao invés de coibi-la, a vem favorecendo desde a instauração dos marcos introdutórios do regime de propriedade privada. O critério da compra em hasta pública como condição para a obtenção das terras públicas simultaneamente à proibição das posses foram a maneira de bloquear de fato os acessos potencialmente incompatíveis com o monopólio de classe, mas os bloqueios de direito graças aos atos de Temer são entendidos como ônus de longa duração que mais cedo ou mais tarde terão que ser confrontados pela sociedade.

Bureaucratic Territory: First Nations, Private Property, and “Turn-Key” Colonialism in Canada

Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as a new kind of federal municipality in Canada. These changes took place in two ways: First, bureaucrats situated Aboriginal property within the state apparatus and reconfigured Indigenous territorial rights into a series of “regulatory gaps” regarding voting thresholds, certainty of title, and the historical misrepresentation of First Nations economies. Second, the government crafted legislation under what is known as the First Nations Property Ownership Initiative that, by closing regulatory gaps, would produce private property regimes analogous to municipal arrangements elsewhere in Canada. These bureaucratic practices realigned internal state mechanisms to produce novel external boundaries among the state, Indigenous lands, and the economy. By tracking how bureaucratic practices adapted to Indigenous refusals of state agendas, the article shows how the bureaucratic production of territory gave form to a new iteration of settler-colonialism in Canada.

Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization by Andrea Smalley

Reviewed by: Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization by Andrea Smalley Kerri Keller Clement Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization. By Andrea Smalley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. ix + 324 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 paper. In Wild by Nature, Andrea Smalley asks readers to consider wild animals not simply as commodities desired by European Americans, but also as participants in and resistors to North American colonialism. With perceptive prose, Smalley examines legal codes, treaties, governmental regulations, newspapers, diaries, and colonial promotional rhetoric to cover extensive ground, venturing from the Chesapeake Bay to the Southern Plains, and from the 16th through the 19th century, to track encounters among European Americans, wild animals, and Indigenous peoples. Beaver, wolves, fish, deer, and bison assisted, stymied, and altered European Americans’ colonizing visions by influencing legal definitions of possession and stimulating conflicts between private property notions and common hunting and fishing access. Rather than passively watching as European Americans marched through the land, through their physiology and behavior patterns and their value as marketable goods, these wild animals both resisted and assisted the colonizing process and in doing so, changed the colonizers’ laws and regulations concerning wild animals and private property regimes. Wild by Nature opens with the first encounters of Europeans, in particular the English, with indigenous animals. To encourage colonization, early English promotional literature painted exotic pictures of the rich abundance of New World animals. By manipulating Old World class tensions related to elite control of hunting and possession of game, promoters highlighted the colonies’ cornucopia of wild game as free for the taking. Potential and actual colonists embraced this rhetoric, treating New World wild animals as common property and common marketable goods. In so doing, however, their competition led to legal confrontations and even violence. Smalley concentrates on instances where wild animals instigated warfare, disputes over private property and regulation, capital accumulation or loss, and Indian dispossession. Beaver pelts and white-tailed deer skins drew European Americans westward, while the threats wolves posed to livestock joined concerns about access to mobile fish to force colonizers to clarify and adapt Old World notions of private versus common property regimes and access to animals, as well as the meaning of ordered civilization. Smalley’s work has implications for the history of colonization, environmental and agricultural history, rangeland management, and the history of hunting and fishing regulation. For example, the hunting of white-tailed deer and subsequent depletion of their populations in the East led hunters such as Daniel Boone to move farther west. In their quest to provide skins for the market, Boone and other hunters violated property boundaries and Indigenous lands claims. Smalley turns next to bison, whose economic value, along with their social and feeding habits, encouraged European American occupation of the Southern Plains and incited violence, like the 1874 Red River War, which generated conflict between trespassing bison hunters, the American government, settlers, and Indigenous peoples. [End Page 215] Following bison-related violence, American legal and regulatory control solidified from the East Coast to the Southern Plains, culminating in the enclosure and attempted control of wild animals in parks and preserves in the 19th and 20th century. Smalley links her choice of species to the amount of regulatory legislation they inspired or forced colonists to change. While this makes sense, it also prioritizes creatures seen to have commercial value (or who threatened valuable livestock as was the case with wolves). Her argument about animals affecting legal codes through the nature of their physiology and behavior patterns, however, would seem to fit other, less marketable creatures caught up in European American colonization, including mountain lions, bears, and even insects. Wild by Nature nonetheless succeeds in demonstrating that wild animals, by their very nature, challenged and changed colonial presumptions about human control over the process of North American colonization as expressed in legal regimes and private property. Kerri Keller Clement Department of History University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Uncommon Lands: Public Property and the Rise of the Individual

This article examines the theoretical hurdles that the English legal system faced in trying to come up with a coherent conception of public land in the Victorian period. Rapid urbanization and industrialization meant that the pressure to preserve open space was intense, but a conception of public land—land that belongs to everyone—was strikingly absent from English law. "The commons," this article stresses, is importantly different from "the public." The absence of the public from the English theory of property helps us see the ways in which the regime of liberal private property continued to carry traces of older customary forms of tenure, and to be governed by ideas (use, access, etc.) that complicate—and, often, contradict—liberal assumptions about the nature of property.

Collaborative Approaches to Flow Restoration in Intermittent Salmon-Bearing Streams: Salmon Creek, CA, USA

In Mediterranean-climate regions of California and southern Oregon, juvenile salmon depend on groundwater aquifers to sustain their tributary habitats through the dry summers. Along California’s North Coast streams, private property regimes on land have created commons tragedies in groundwater and salmon fisheries, both classic examples of commons that are often governed collectively and sustainably by their users. Understanding the linkages between salmon and groundwater is one major focus of salmon recovery and climate change adaptation planning in central California and increasingly throughout the Pacific Northwest. In this paper, I use extended field interviews and participant-observation in field ecology campaigns and regulatory forums to explore how, in one water-scarce, salmon-bearing watershed on California’s central coast, collaborators are synthesizing agency and landowner data on groundwater and salmon management. I focus on three projects undertaken by citizen scientists in collaboration with me and Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District staff: salmonid censuses, mapping of wet and dry stream reaches and well monitoring. I find that collaborative research initiated by local residents and agency personnel has, in some cases, created a new sense of ecological possibility in the region. I also consider some limitations of this collaborations, namely the lack of engagement with indigenous Pomo and Miwok tribal members, with the Confederated Tribes of Graton Rancheria and with farmworkers and other marginalized residents, and suggest strategies for deepening environmental justice commitments in future collaborative work.

Affective Housing Ownership in China’s New Property Regime

This article investigates the ‘affective’ dimension of Chinese urbanites’ ubiquitous practices of real estate investment and hard bargaining against housing demolition. In their endeavours regarding the active or ‘passive’ possession of housing property, investors and evictees share an immense mania and anxiety over exploiting or missing out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the property pursuit. I depict how the notion of affect, as represented by anxiety and a vernacular moral expression, conjoined to reshape urban subjectivity. The present case of housing investment mania and counter-demolition acuity in a whole new private property regime represents a fluid context for exploring affect’s concrete penetrating power that allows us to go deeper toward revealing social phenomena and sociality.

Analysis on the Effectiveness of Common Property Regimes in Common Resource Pools

This paper aims to observe and ascertain the effectiveness of common property regimes in managing natural resource pools. The first objective is to interpret the bundles of rights used and managed by a series of resource users and understand what role each user has in managing common resource pools. The paper also determine through several case studies of different common resource pools the effectiveness of implementing common property regimes in maintaining and using the resource at a sustainable level. We argue that common resource pools are the best property regimes for natural resource management. We also mention that they are under the threat of private property regimes, because such private property may lead to overexploitation and eventual degradation of a natural resource. Finally, we use several case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of common property regimes.

Collective Foods

In this article, I explore food sharing, one of the most salient social practices in rural Namibia. In so doing, I develop a model that situates food on the continuum between private and communal property regimes. I argue that the place it takes is largely shaped by the social costs involved in excluding someone from having a share. Those costs are situational, and as they rise, basic food, once privately owned, becomes quasi communal and is shared. The model is explored with qualitative and quantitative data about food transactions, which also facilitate an investigation of when, where, and why demands are articulated and typically met.

Determinants of Forest Degradation under Private and Common Property Regimes: The Case of Ethiopia

This study considers the endogenous determination of land ownership systems to rigorously compare differences in the changes in forest quality between private and common property regimes. By employing the propensity score matching method, we found that there was significantly less forest degradation in private property areas than in common property areas. We also found that good accessibility, a flat surface, and good light conditions significantly induced forest deterioration in private property areas. In contrast, we found completely opposite results for common property areas. (JEL Q23, Q24)

Forest loss, monetary compensation, and delayed re-planting: The effects of unpredictable land tenure in China

Over the past 65 years, forest tenure in China has oscillated unpredictably between private and village property regimes. This policy-induced uncertainty has distorted the harvesting decisions of individuals granted rights to grow trees and has lowered the value of China׳s forest output. We provide an analytical framework for assessing these effects quantitatively. Understanding the consequences of this policy-induced uncertainty is particularly important since China is currently engaged in an ambitious plan to increase its domestic supply of timber. To conduct this analysis, we extend the literature on forestry economics when there is a risk of loss due to forest fire or pests. We (1) take account of the possibility that replanting can only resume after an interval of uncertain length (with immediate replanting as a special Case); (2) investigate the effects of compensation for such losses based only on the net value of the stand of trees at the time of the loss; and (3) compare it to compensation that would leave the wealth and rotation decisions of the farmer unaffected by the presence of uncertainty.

Community-Based Organic Agriculture in the Philippines

This paper explores institutional mechanisms that might be required to boost both organic agriculture and rural development in the Philippines. Special attention is paid to community-based organic agriculture as a pathway to rural development. The Philippines has two decades of experience of community-based natural resource management. Unlike public natural resources such as forests, watersheds or fisheries, however, the community-based organic agriculture programme is intended to deal with the private property regime. Thus, if the programme is to be successful, agrarian land reform must continue. Integrated rice–duck farming is among the suitable and viable options for organic agriculture, given that rice is a major agricultural crop and duck meat is popular in the Philippines. Area-based organic food certification systems need to be formulated and a government–farmers partnership should be forged to facilitate farmers' access to domestic and international organic food markets.

Private Land and Common Oceans

In the literature on property rights, there is general consensus framed by people such as Boserup and Demsetz that common property regimes will change to private property regimes when resources are scarce and population increases. This is mostly correct where land tenure is concerned. However, there are many cases where common property regimes continue even though the population has grown and resources have become scarcer. Ocean areas are almost always held as common property. This article analyzes property regimes that develop for land and ocean and the conditions under which they do so. The analysis is based on worldwide ethnographic case studies. I argue that the form property regimes take is determined by economic defendability. Many variables influence economic defendability, ranging from technical change and physical attributes of the resource to government action and cultural factors. That arable land is usually held privately suggests this solution is adaptive for land with high economic defendability. However, the fact that many ocean areas, forests, pastures, and swidden lands are held as common property suggests that this type of tenure may be an optimal solution when the value of resources are low relative to defense costs.

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú Mike Strayer The “delgado, inteligente, nervioso y . . . explosivo” Antonio Helú Atta lived as a newspaper and magazine editor, filmmaker, dramatist, and fiction writer known for his unabashed championing of the detective genre in Mexico (Villaurrutia 17). This largely-ignored father of Mexican detective fiction, however, also maintained deep, yet hitherto forgotten, ties with the Mexican avant-gardes. Helú’s involvement with both the Stridentists and the Contemporáneos not only informed his literary output but his radical, working-class politics, bridging the gap between literary avant-gardism and popular fiction. In his most famous novella La obligación de asesinar (1947), Helú develops an anarchistic hermeneutic for solving crime in which avant-garde free play out-deduces bourgeois reason. Through ad hoc investigations Helú’s detective – a lumpen thief named Carlos Miranda – brings into relief the failures of the Mexican Revolution and hints at alternative futures antagonistic towards private property regimes. Understanding Helú’s avant-garde affinities thus salvages his work from the dustbin of literary history by opening up certain radical possibilities for a literary mode, detective fiction, widely known for its hegemonic underpinnings. The Detective Mode South of the Border Most literary critics only consider Helú’s work important in relation to the broader genealogy of Mexican detective fiction. Speaking, for instance, of La obligación de asesinar, one literary scholar laments that “la importancia del libro es más documental que estética” (Negrín 40). For many critics, Helú’s work is only valuable in so far as it occupies what Ilan Stavans has called “the cornerstone of detective letters in Mexico” (75). Consequently, Stavans and other critics typically employ Helú’s literary biography in order [End Page 273] to contextualize the “literary explosion of this ‘subgenre’” during the nineteen seventies and eighties in Latin America (74). This is perhaps due in part to Mexican detective fiction’s perceived debt to foreign fonts of creative output, resulting in its misrecognition as, what Donald Yates calls, “a type of imported literature” practiced by so-called “native authors” (xi-xii). Notwithstanding the ivory-tower anthropology of Yates’s assessment, the empirical outcome is not all that surprising: a shallow pool of Helú scholarship. Over the past sixty years only a handful of academic books have treated either Helú or La obligación de asesinar in passing. Such is certainly the case with Persephone Braham’s Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons (2004) and Glen S. Close’s Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction (2008). The most recent academic book to reference Helú – Artful Assassins (2010) by Fernando Fabio Sánchez – continues in the mold of previous literary histories by situating Helú as the noble precursor to bigger and better things yet to come (61). Couple this with a Queen’s Quorum reference to La obligación de asesinar from 1948 where Helú is credited with “founding a south-of-the-border school of detection” and two or three websites, along with a few anthologies, and therein lies the extent of criticism devoted to Helú (125). This critical neglect is especially strange, however, considering the influence that Helú has exercised on generations of Mexican writers like Carlos Monsiváis – who authored the prologue to the latest compilation of Helú’s stories and novellas published by Porrúa in 1997. Monsiváis, in fact, praises Helú as “un autor que creyó radicalmente en la literatura policiaca y a ella consagró lo mejor de su activa, generosa vida profesional” (19). Fifty years earlier, in another prologue to Helú’s work, the avant-garde poet Xavier Villaurrutia enthusiastically commented “para la sed de los lectores de novelas policíacas, existe ya el pequeño oasis de los cuentos policíacas de Antonio Helú” (16).1 In other words, two of the most prominent Mexican intellectuals of the twentieth century have put their stamp of approval on Helú’s work, and yet no serious academic scholarship has paid him any due attention. Much critical ink, however, has been spilled on Latin American detective narratives that channel hard-boiled detective fiction, which “appears to be a [End Page 274] much more...

Settler Colonialism as Structure

Understanding settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than a past historical event serves as the basis for an historically grounded and inclusive analysis of U.S. race and gender formation. The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenes, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide. Settlers sought to control space, resources, and people not only by occupying land but also by establishing an exclusionary private property regime and coercive labor systems, including chattel slavery to work the land, extract resources, and build infrastructure. I examine the various ways in which the development of a white settler U.S. state and political economy shaped the race and gender formation of whites, Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans.

Book review: Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, by Matthew T. Huber

Matthew T. Huber Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and Forces of Capital, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2013; 253 pp: 9780816677856, 25 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The historian David Nye (1998) explains, 'as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed ... Processes of capitalism and industrialization alone do not explain this rapid development or [the massive] national difference. Culture does.' Matthew T. Hubers Lifeblood builds critically on this idea, explaining that capital is central to a particular construction of a cultural politics of life--'the lived practices and meanings that naturalize capitalist forms of power and hegemony'--an 'entrepreneurial life' made possible by socioecological relations that extract, refine, consume and enliven 'dead ecologies' of fossil-fuel energy. Huber's focus, importantly, is on 'life' and particular construction of an 'American way of life' under oil-fired capitalism, as opposed to fossil-fuel machine-dominated 'work' (for more on work, see Noble 1977, 1984). He explains that oil is 'a central energy resource shaping forces of social reproduction ... real subsumption of under capital ... [wherein] appears as capital, or what Foucault calls the enterprise form so central to neoliberal subjectivities.' With this focus, Huber adds a unique analysis to growing literature on energy and capitalism, providing a critique and supplement to work of, amongst others, Timothy Mitchell (2011) and Mazen Labban (2008). In theoretical introduction to work, Chapter 1, Huber focuses on 'fetishism of oil', which embeds it with an undialectical 'thingness', an alien character and attribution of causality outside of social relations. As Huber argues, oil needs to be understood as a specifically material aspect of alienated and seemingly autonomous power of capital over living labour. The cultural politics of capital shifts from formal to real subsumption of as wage-labour relation and social reproduction based on commodity relations is supplemented with a material transformation made possible by oil (a home, car and family), and when 'life' is expressed materially as an 'individualized product of hard work, investment, competitive tenacity and entrepreneurial life choices'. Huber argues this is central to creating and reinforcing 'lived process' of neoliberal hegemony. The power of oil, then, is not in its socio-natural properties alone, but in particular historical geographies and social relations that harness its versatility, abundance, energy density and liquidity. Huber's larger historical account focuses on how materiality of oil shapes its 'system of provision'--from extraction, distribution and refining to consumption. The rest of book focuses on particular moments of crisis and stability in development of petro-capitalism in USAs--specifically, 1930s, 1945-1973, 1970s, and 2000s--which align with specific points of 'system of provision' so heavily influenced by materiality of oil. In Chapter 2, Huber roots struggle over production and reproduction of under capitalist relations in what Marx termed 'value of labor power'. Under historical and geographical context of Great Depression and New Deal response in 1930s, a massive reconfiguration of value of labour power was emergent from struggles between labour, capital and state over issues such as wages, housing, living conditions and public provision of services and infrastructure--or largely, determinants of standard of living. Achieving 'American way of life' was complicated by oil overproduction resultant from US legal regime of private property and subterranean oil deposits, which in turn resulted in glut, collapsing prices and a political regime that intended to curtail production through pro-rationing that would set 'recommended' production limits. …

Water rights between social activism and social enterprise

Water rights involve an amalgam of property rights and socio-economic rights that possess an inescapable regulatory dimension. The resulting uneasy mix of public responsibilities and private property regimes means that the details of the legal entity structure involved are central to the viability and effectiveness of implementing water rights on the ground. Small-scale social enterprise structures offer a fascinating site for exploring the tensions endemic to the field of water rights. This article explores the ways in which the entrepreneurial energies of business approaches to the implementation of water rights articulate with the impetus for structural change embedded in practices of social activism. Our main purpose is to interrogate too easy an assumption of uni-dimensional or static relationships between social activism and social enterprise. We argue that there are multiple diverse relationships possible between them, including oppositional, evolutionary, complementary, and dialectical relations. We illustrate these shifts empirically with examples from India and Bolivia. The article stresses the ambiguous potential of both empowerment and oppression when business methods are used to secure social outcomes, including those promised by the guarantee of a human right to water.

From Community Conservation to the Lone (Forest) Ranger: Accumulation by Conservation in a Mexican Forest

This paper explores the paradigm shift from 1990s models of community conservation that encoded environmentalist praxis within legal and cadastral frameworks, to recent attempts to encode environmentalist principles and goals within individual practice. Using the case of Chimalapas, Mexico, I look at how community-based conservation was abandoned after being deemed 'too political' to implement, and how new models of conservation not dependent on community consent emerged. Environmental services models of conservation pay individuals for forest ranger services, for reforestation, and for access to waterways and for water use. These models commodify land and labor in new ways, and join carbon markets as an important new avenue for what I call accumulation by conservation. They also institutionalise conservation practices designed for private property regimes, despite the fact that the world's well-preserved forests are located principally on indigenous, communally-organised territories.