Property is by it's nature antagonistic to freedom. Property is the ability to control productive assets at a distance, the ability to "own" something being put to productive use by another person. Property makes possible the subjugation of individuals and communities. Where property is sovereign there can be no freedom within it's domain. The owners of scarce property can deny life by denying access to property, or if not outrightly denying life, then make the living work like slaves for no pay beyond their reproduction costs.
British classical political economist David Ricardo first described Economic Rent in the early 19th century. Put simply, economic rent is the incomeVenetian Statute on Industrial Brevets the owner of a productive asset can earn just from ownership itself. The owner earns Rental income not by doing anything or making any sort of contribution, but just by owning. In the terms of John Stewart Mill, the rent collector earns money even as he sleeps. Take for example two identical buildings, one in a major economic center, and one in a minor city, while both may be of identical materials, both require identical amount of work to maintain, in terms of the costs that must be undertaken by the owners to bring these buildings to market at dwellings or commercial spaces there is no difference. The building in the major city will however earn more income than the one in the minor city, not withstanding the equal amounts of work and expense undertaking to maintain them. This difference is Rent. Rent is not collected for any contribution to production, but because of legal privilege such as a title to a valuable location. This does not mean that the owner does not ever do anything, only that the value of whatever contribution they make is not calculated as "Rent." Rent, in economic terms, is the income earned for allowing others to use property, ultimately, this income is derived by claiming a portion of what they produce as your own. As our ability to provide for our material subsistence requires access to the property that makes up our "means of production" we must agree to transfer a portion of what we produce to those that allow us to access such means, or else we could not live. The portion of a producer's productive output that can be demanded for the right to exist is the entire total of their productive output, minus the producer's subsistence costs. This is the conclusion reached by David Ricardo in his 1817 "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation," and this is the basic bargaining position faced by all of us who are born into a world entirely owned by others.
In his "Essay on Profits," David Ricardo argues: "The interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community." This analysis was not based on social milieu such as upper class or lower class, but rather based upon relationship with the factors of production, landlord or capitalist, and thus is based on class conflict. e As a representative of the emergent Capitalist class, Ricardo did not intend his critique of land rent to be extended to the income earned by Capitalists. Critical commentators like William Thompson and Thomas Hogskin, the best know of the "Ricardian Socialists" did just that, arguing that profits earned by Capitalists are just as exploitive and unearned as the rents of landlords, and from their work the critique of "Capitalism," a term coined to draw an analogy with Feudalism, begins. Thompson and Hodgskin pointed out that the interests of workers are opposed to the interests of both landlords and capitalists. Socialism and all other movements of the "left" start with this class conflict as their point of departure. The belief that producers themselves should own the means of production was already common among socialists of the time, notably among the supports of Robert Owen and the co-operative movement. Understanding class as being based on relationship to the factors of production, not on categories such as as rich and poor, or noble, clergy and peasant, but as Capitalist, Landlord, and Worker, provided a solid intellectual foundation that allowed a more scientific socialism to emerge from it's Utopian roots.
Rent allows owners of scarce property to drive property-less workers to subsistence. David Ricardo explains: "The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race". It is often claimed that this can be refuted because of the difference between the theoretical "natural" price and the actual market price of labour, but such an argument is simply an equivocation, Ricardo himself explains that market price fluctuates. Subsistence should not be taken to mean the bare minimum required to actually survive and reproduce. Even in Ricardo"s time, most workers were generally not in the position that if they earned one penny less they would immediately fall over and die. Rather, workers, by their very definition, are unable to earn enough to do anything more than make a living and struggle to live according the acceptable standards of their community. The "acceptable standards" are established in terms of the canons of taste and decency established by a predatory economic elite. Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who's work lays the foundation for the institutional economics movement argues that it is an essential feature of class society that in order to live according to our community standards of respectability all but the very richest must dispose of practically their entire income in what Veblen calls "Conspicuous Consumption" and "Conspicuous Waste" or else face social exclusion and further reduced prospects of upward mobility. "Failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit" Veblen argues in his 1899 "The Theory of the Leisure Class"
Workers have more than cultural forces working against their ability to form Capital from whatever earnings that retain beyond subsistence. So long as workers do not have property, whatever wage increases they gain are swept away by price inflation, most often as the result of increased money competition for locations and the increase of land rents. This is no secret to Capitalist negotiators and their public sector collaborators. Reducing real wages by inflation as an alternative to reducing money wages works because of the "money illusion.' As John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most important economist of his day and the founder of modern "macroeconomics" writes in his 1936 "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money": "It is sometimes said it would illogical for labour to resist a reduction of money-wages but not to resist a reduction of real wages [...] experience shows that this is how labour in fact behaves." Daniel Bell makes this process clear in his paper "The Subversion of Collective Bargaining," where he examines several cases of wage increases won by collective bargaining and shows that these do not lead to a change in the general level of real wealth, in most cases workers who received wage increase had not increased their share of wealth, only wound up paying higher prices.
Property is not a natural phenomenon, but rather something that is created by law. The ability to extract rent is dependent on one"s ability to control a scarce resource even when it is being used by somebody else. In other words, the ability to force that other person to share the product of their labour with the property owner. Property is control at a distance. In this way, rent is only possible so long as it is supported by force, which is happily provided by the State to the owners of property. Without a means of forcing those who put property to productive use to share the product of their labour with the absent and idle property owner, the property owner could not earn a living, let alone accumulate more property. As German revolutionary Marxist Ernest Mandel claims in "Historical Materialism and the Capitalist State" (1980): "Without capitalist state violence, there is no secure capitalism." The purpose of property is to ensure that a property-less class exists to produce the wealth enjoyed by a propertied class. The institution of property does not benefit workers. This is not to say that individual workers cannot become property owners, but rather that to do so means to escape their class. Individual success stories do not change the general case. As Canadian political philosopher Gerald Cohen, proponent of Analytical Marxism, quipped, "I want to rise with my class, not above my class!"
The current global situation confirms that it is the case that workers, as a class, are not able to accumulate property. A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth. Extensive statistics, many indicating growing world disparity, are included in the report.
It is in the context of this great disparity of wealth and the struggle between classes that any investigation of intellectual property must be understood.
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