The key to avoiding the curse of a comfortable life was to create artificial scarcity for the rural poor. As Arthur Young observed in 1771, "everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious" (cited in EP Thompson 1963, 317). Access to common land touched a particularly sensitive nerve among more affluent property owners. Marx (1977, 881 and EP Thompson, 1963, 217 ) cited by a Dr. Hunter who fretted that "a few acres to the cottage would make the laborers too independent."

Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth ~~ Bertolt Brecht

http://www.idcommunism.com/2017/08/bertolt-brecht-five-difficulties-in.html

Summary

The great truth of our time is that our continent is giving way to barbarism because private ownership of the means of production is being maintained by violence. Merely to recognize this truth is not sufficient, but should it not be recognized, no other truth of importance can be discovered. Of what use is it to write something courageous which shows that the condition into which we are falling is barbarous (which is true) if it is not clear why we are falling into this condition? We must say that torture is used in order to preserve property relations. To be sure, when we say this we lose a great many friends who are against torture only because they think property relations can be upheld without torture, which is untrue.

Nearly 1,000 Homeless People Died in LA in 2020 as 93,000 Homes Sit Vacant ~~ Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani and Jacob Woocher

https://portside.org/2020-11-02/nearly-1000-homeless-people-died-la-2020-93000-homes-sit-vacant

We must see real estate market for what it truly is: an institution rooted in settler colonialism that allows land (and the housing that sits atop it) to be distributed and controlled by those who have enough money for their preferences to matter.

AS THE GLOBAL HEGEMON COLLAPSES, CAN PRIVATE PROPERTY BE FAR BEHIND? ~~ Stephen Miller

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/as-the-global-hegemon-collapses-can-private-property-be-far-behind

This article lays out clearly the rights given to private property - including the fiction of depreciation of capital, and how these are exploited by the capitalist class at the expense of the working class.

PRIVATIZING THE COMMON GOOD: THE 21ST-CENTURY ENCLOSURES ARE HERE ~~ Ashley Dawson

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/privatizing-the-common-good-the-21st-century-enclosures-are-here

~~ posted for Collectivist~~

Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.

Capitalist Property ~~Paul Lafargue

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1903/06/caproperty.htm

Individual property can only exist in a primitive stage of human life, because of its two attributes, it is the product of the owner's labour, and it is used by him.

These two qualities, regarded is indispensable to and inseparable from individual property, have left so strong an impression upon the human mind that the defenders of capitalism idiotically state that property is the reward of toil. Nevertheless, capitalist production can only exist when individual property is stripped of the two attributes which alone justify it.

Personal wealth is still, indeed, the result of labour, but it no longer belongs to the workers who produce it; the means of production (land, machinery, mines, &c.) are not owned by the wage-workers who use them, but by the capitalist who has not made them, and who does not work them. Capitalist property does not, consequently, possess the two attributes of individual property.