Property, debt and interest

Property arose as the disposal of the non-user in parallel with and in place of possession as the disposal of the immediate user. If the origin of possession is to be sought in the possessor’s own labor, then the origin of property is to be sought in political and economic norms. Property arises as political property when one group of people is able to subjugate another group, when one part of the population rises as a political force over another part. Property makes it possible to create elaborate means of production, to invest on a large scale, to maintain a sufficient duration of the production and circulation, to calculate and distribute risks. If possession is a feature of a low composition of meaning, then political property is a feature of an activity with a high composition. Political property is associated with the rise of chiefdoms and states. Irrigation systems, military installations, massive ancient and medieval architecture are its material evidence.

“Thus, in tribal hydraulic societies property is simple, but it is simple with a specific tendency toward the predominance of political, power-based, property. This tendency increases with the size of the community. It becomes decisive in simple hydraulic commonwealths that are no longer directed by a primitive (tribal) government, but by a state” (Wittfogel 1957, p. 238).

Changes in the rate of surplus activity, in value saving and investment, draw a line between application, possession and property. The value of a surplus product is a “quantitative expression” of disposal and use: the transition from application to possession and from the latter to property is associated, first, with an increase in the size and rate of the surplus product, and, second, with a shift in the mechanisms of alienation and appropriation of the surplus product—from brute physical force to customs and from there to laws. Political ownership enables the appropriation of the surplus activity or its product in direct natural form—for example, in the form of corvée labor or rent in kind.

Simple self-reproduction is characterized by unstable accumulation. Periods in which increased surplus allows the large-scale making of means of production—irrigation systems, for example —are often followed by periods in which what has been achieved is consumed and destroyed. The very structure of the traditional order, with its political ownership, its communal and private possession, implies that investment is either reduced to the activity of the all-powerful king (or chief), who is unable to implement the many projects necessary for the division of meanings, or that investment is reduced to the petty activities of individuals and families who cannot raise enough funds for significant projects.

Appropriation in kind contains a contradiction in itself: on the one hand, it is a condition for the existence of the polity; but on the other hand, by appropriating labor or its product in kind, the polity hinders the development of a competitive commodity exchange. Overcoming this contradiction required the transformation of political or state property into economic or private property, the development of written laws, fiat money and interest.

Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger showed that debt and interest arise when possession turns into private property. In their view, possession is a physical or material concept, while property is an immaterial or legal concept:

“Possession always means the right to dispose of certain goods or resources and thus to use them physically, and is independent of whether property rights exist or not” (Heinsohn und Steiger 2009, p. 91). “Property never arises naturally. It can only be created by a legal, i.e., non-material action. Once property is created, it carries an unearned and intangible premium, the property premium. This premium exists in addition to the physical use of the goods or resources held and consists of two forces: (i) it is capable of supporting the issue of money, which can only be created in a loan agreement, and (ii) the right to this premium serves as collateral to obtain a loan” (ibid., p. 471).

Since its very inception, money has served the purpose of accumulation, i.e. saving and investing value. For a long time, this function was limited to precious metals as a tangible form of money. Fiat money emerged with the advent of credit. Medieval states needed money for their projects, especially to wage war and pay mercenary armies. They obtained money by borrowing it from creditors. However, political property is the prerogative of the state, and the sovereign often considered what he had borrowed as his property, i.e. he did not repay the debt. Creditors, suffering from the arbitrariness of the state, developed a new form of property—economic or private:

“Montesquieu describes here first how commerce was hampered by the prohibition of interest-taking by the church and was consequently taken up by the Jews; how the Jews suffered violence and constant extortions at the hands of nobles and kings; and how eventually they reacted by inventing the bill of exchange (lettre de change). The final portion of the chapter draws striking conclusions: ‘…and through this means commerce could elude violence, and maintain itself everywhere; for the richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere without leaving any trace. … In this manner we owe … to the avarice of rulers the establishment of a contrivance which somehow lifts commerce right out of their grip’” (Hirschman 1977, p. 72).

The transition from political to private property, i.e. the emergence of bills of exchange and the development of sovereign debt, led to monetary transactions as a special type of commodity transactions in which it is not goods that are traded, but money itself. The payment for money is interest.

“… Money as a whole takes on a very distinctive character in specific monetary transactions; that is, when it does not function as a medium of exchange to other objects, but as the central content, as the object of a transaction sufficient to itself. Money is an end in itself in the purely bilateral financial operation not only in the sense that it has suspended its qualities as a means, but also in the sense that it is, from the outset, the self-sufficient center of interest, which also develops its own distinctive norms and, at the same time, completely autonomous qualities and a corresponding technique” (Simmel 2004, p. 309).

Debt and interest commercialized traditional society. As more mercenaries were hired, the concept of wage activity spread. As products became commodities, consumers depended more on the market and monetary income than on subsistence production. As private property took hold, there was less room for communities or communal forms of possession. Robert Lane distinguished between warm and cold societies. He called societies based on emotional support, empathy and reciprocity “warm”, and societies based on impersonal relationships and money “cold”:

“From Marx and Engels’s statement that ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, then callous cash-payment,’ to Tönnies’ ‘in Gesellschaft every person strives for that which is to his own advantage and affirms the action of others only in so far as and as long as they can further his interest,’ to Weber’s alleged movement from the communal relationship ‘based on the subjective feelings of parties… that they belong together,’ to the more impersonal interest-based associative relationship, to Sebastian de Grazia’s view that the contemporary commercial ‘competitive directive’ requires us to reduce all affective relationships, to Fromm who argues that capitalism at least, and perhaps all modernity, leads us to treat each other as machines—we find in all these sources and their many epigones expressed the idea of the modern cold society” (Lane 1978, p. 453).

A warm society is based on a material community: unity of place and time of life, joint action and joint possession of the basic conditions of life—a forest, a river, a field. Warm societies are those of personal communication, passion, repute and rumors. A cold society is based on an abstract community: the unity of socio-cultural order and ideas, that is, on impersonal communication, money and private property.

Historically, the more specialized the activity and the active power, the more fragmented the socio-cultural order is. This can be seen in the division of property rights. Internal effects are those results of an activity that are appropriated by the subject of the activity, and external effects (that is, externalities) are results that are appropriated by someone else. James Meade described externalities using the example of farmers who grow more apple trees and neighboring beekeepers who benefit from increased nectar sources. Increased sources are the external effects of the farmers’ activity on the beekeepers. This example shows that externalities occur when one economic unit benefits from the actions of another at no cost to itself. Meade called these the “unpaid factors of production” (Meade 1952, pp. 56-57). Externalities can be either positive (goods) or negative (evils).

In a traditional economy that was based on common possession, the growing of apple trees and the keeping of bees were combined within one unit. In this case, externalities did not arise or they were appropriated by the unit itself. An external effect occurs only when the farmer and the beekeeper run private enterprises, that is, when the rights to apple trees and the rights to bees are divided between them.

The beekeepers’ benefits can also be transformed into property rights if they have to pay for the use of the increased nectar sources. The increase in meanings requires as its condition the division of effects and property, but such a division in turn requires more complex cooperation and more complex administration: the evolution of private property shows that rights cannot be completely divided. There always remains an indivisible residual, resulting from the uncertainty of the environment, from the fact that such a division itself requires expenditure.