“PROPERTY IS (STILL) THEFT!” FROM THE MARX-PROUDHON DEBATE TO THE GLOBAL PLUNDER OF THE COMMONS

Abstract

Generally speaking, in our philosophical tradition it is usual to conceive the issue of
property and theft in terms of a rigid opposition. Whether a right of nature (Locke) or an
institution established by the Sovereign’s sword (Hobbes), private property constitutes the safest
defence against thieves, robbers and outlaws. The owner, legitimately guaranteed in the enjoyment
of his properties, has to be protected (or, if necessary, to protect himself) from the extra-legal
violence of theft. Nevertheless, there is at least another story to be told, another trace (if not
actually a tradition) to be reconstructed, rescued from the oblivion in which our mainstream
history of philosophy seems to have banished it: that is, the idea that property and theft, far from
being polar opposites, are on the contrary two faces of a same coin.
In the following, we’ll try to focus our attention on a single episode of this alternative line of
thought, in order to clarify its present implications and its possible political relevance in the terms
of an opposition against global capital’s new dynamics. We are referring to the controversy that,
in a certain sense, sanctioned the passage from the “utopian” to the “scientific” form of
socialism: the Proudhon-Marx debate on property and theft.