Regarding property, I was recently reading something on it for another thread. In reading your discussion below I was thinking that property is best considered as relationship between people regarding things not a relationship between people and things (which people often think of it as); and secondly that the issue for us is abolition of private property in the basic means of production, not so much socalled personal property. Also, I find "historically constituted"as a good "cousin" to use with "socially constructed."
I you are interested, I have some other thoughts on the rules (or culture) that governs our conduct as you describe. Have you considered how the systems of rules change ? This opened up a new idea for me recently , after considering this puzzle for a long while.
Charles Brown
Detroit
>>> <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> 11/25 10:02 AM >>>
Enzo wrote:
>Well, let's say "evolved". "Constructed" sounds too
much of a conscious,
>finalistic design.
Yes, that's a problem, a limitation of the terminology that implies conscious agency. What I or rather my discipline means by 'socially constructed' is complex. When I say, for example, that property is a social institution, I mean this on at least two levels. Property, say as we think of it in the West, only exists because people engage in activities, practices, discourses that 'create' property. So when I'm doing my 'what is property?' lecture I come to class w/ a briefcase strap that is conveniently broken. I dump all the contents out and scan the room looking for a new bag I like and take it and start to take the contents out.... I say start b/c usually at that point a ruckus ensues "Hey what are ya doing?" There is a lot of embarassment, attempts at jokes to excuse my bad behavior, etc Anyway a conversation ensues: 'what IS property exactly?' Everyone wants to make property a tangible 'thing' at first when they try to define and this is no accident. Then we talk about ways in which I could have taken someone's bag: asked for it to keep, asked to borrow it for a specified period of time, paid for it w/ cash, paid for it w/ an 'A' in the course. Of course, then we talk about the acceptability of these scenarios: the first and last aren't especially acceptable when it comes to briefcases. It is generally okay to keep a cigarette, a pen, etc. (And it is fascinatin' to bum a smoke and never smoke it just hold on to it, it's very annoying to the person you bum the smoke from.) It's almost never okay to exchange grades for property like briefcases. And, we eventually talk about power: they'd have more quickly and probably physically stopped a peer from taking the bag. The next lecture is on the macro level processes through which property is maintained: law, the state, public policy, etc. All of this in a comparative context, examining the property rules in the form of kinship rules that govern what can be *done* with property in a Kenyan tribe where they understand property as primarily governed by social rules for it's *use* That is, whereas Marx posited a kind of primitive communism in which members of communities shared property, it is actually more complex than that: property is governed by rules regarding its use and what can and cannot be done with it.
The point is, of course, that we have rules, informal and formal, that govern our behavior. But they're not natural, they're the product of history, social interaction and the 'rules' that guide (though don't determine) our actions. And so forth.
>True, but a powerful factor behind the appeal of the
concept of struggle as
>engine of change, especially in people of the left,
lies in the parallels
>with the class struggle in the social context. Once
one has a hammer...
Yeah which is why you should discuss things with grrRls more often. GrrRls do silly things like try to use butter knives to removes screws. Sorry couldn't resist. I'm teaching a course on methods and cracked that joke the other day
>Are you telling me that individuals do not act
according to their own
>values? That goes against everyday's experience. Of
course, values are in
>turn influenced by lots of factors, including social,
historical, natural
>etc.
While values are diverse they are not infintely so. That is, within a specific social, historical context the values people hold will be different but will be so within a certain range of acceptability. In the