Anarchist Common Property

I just stumbled upon an excellent essay at Anti-State.com by Carlton Hobbs, titled Common Property in Free Market Anarchism, which puts together a conception of the treatment of property which is neither state property (as is usually meant by "public" or "common" property) nor strictly private property. This addresses the issue of objects, resources, or land which are used by a number of people and not owned by any of them privately. By extension, this deals with the "Tragedy of the Commons" and the reality that things often do not cleanly fall into the category of "private" or "public" property.

The conception arrived at by Hobbs is that, rather than the common categories of "private" and "public" property, there should be three categories: "unowned", "excludable", and "unexcludable". The idea behind this is that with something like a path, which is used by a number of people, no single user of the path can claim exclusive rights of access, and so ownership of the path is, in a sense, shared by all those who use the path. Therefore it would be illegitimate for one person to claim the path as his own and attempt to exclude other people from using it or crossing it.

If someone did want to block the path, claim a section of it as their own, or otherwise compromise its usefulness, they could not treat the property as "unowned" -- they would have to secure the consent of the community that uses it. At the same time, the path is not "excludable" -- it can be used by a number of people, which differentiates it from "private" property in the conventional sense, which is "excludable". In this sense, each person who uses it partially owns the path, and no single person has the right to transfer ownership of it or exercise any of the rights that one can with "excludable" property.

Hobbs goes into much more detail, and considers situations where scarcity becomes an issue, how pollution would be treated in this system, and many other details. All in all, the essay is very good and provides a good start to a commonsense theory of how various kinds of property could be treated in an anarchist society.

A final note: I found it very interesting how Hobbs' application of the idea of use-as-ownership worked out so naturally. This of course is very similar to Proudhon's "mutualist" idea of property being defined by occupancy and use. The way Proudhon's relatively "leftist" conception of property (which I have always found interesting and largely valid) and Hobbs' free market conception seem to converge is especially interesting.

For those not familiar with Proudhon's ideas of property and possession, you can check out his Wikipedia page or his most important work on the subject, What Is Property?.