Paul Cockshott on Modes of Property

Typology

Modes of Property Table - By Paul Cockshott

This typology is proposed by Paul Cockshott.

"Who owns what is the basic question which must be answered by any system of prop- erty law. The atoms of property relations are owners and the things they own; systems of property are like molecules built up of these atoms. The simplest property relationship is ‘A owns B’. But at different times and in different places this right of ownership amounts to different things. To a peasant farmer with property in land and a commodity dealer with property in wheat futures, own- ership has a different practical significance. Let us consider ownership as being made up of four components: the right to use, the right to buy, the right to sell and the right to inherit. In the previous example the peasant is more interested in the right to use and to inherit; to the commodity dealer the rights to buy and sell are everything. (By the right to inherit we include acquisitions by means of marriage.) We can order the component rights as follows: use, sale, purchase, inheri- tance. These rights can be treated as logical predicates. In logic a set of ordered pairs (A,B) for which some predicate holds is termed a relation. For instance, the relation of usufruct is the set of all pairs (A,B) such that A uses B. We thus have four distinct relations that define property rights. These derive from four predicates: the relation Usufruct from the predicate (A uses B), the relation Sale from (A can sell B), Purchase from (A can buy B) and Inheritance from the predicate (A can inherit B).

A given pair of entities, for instance a trader on the wheat futures market (A) and a shipment of wheat (B), may be members of more than one of these sets. In this case the pair (wheat futures trader, wheat shipment) would be included in the relations Sale and Purchase. This is because the Sale relation includes all pairings of potential sellers with all that they can potentially sell, and similarly for Purchase.

A property right between a class of owners P and a class of owned things Q can therefore be characterised by the set of property relations that pairs (p,q) can belong to, there p is an instance of P and q of Q. A property right between classes of entities is therefore a set of between 0 and 4 relations.

Since any predicate is a Boolean relation, we can thus encode property rights in terms of 4 boolean values, giving a total of 16 different forms of property right."

A uses B	A can sell B	A can buy B	A can inherit B	examples
no	no	no	no	(slave, American law)
yes	no	no	no	(collective farm and land)
no	yes	no	no	(hired worker and labour)
yes	yes	no	no	(??)
no	no	yes	no	?
yes	no	yes	no	(consumer and electricity)
no	yes	yes	no	(commodity trader and commodity)
yes	yes	yes	no	(capitalist firm/factory)
no	no	no	yes	??
yes	no	no	yes	(traditional peasant and land)
no	yes	no	yes	??
yes	yes	no	yes	??
no	no	yes	yes	??
yes	no	yes	yes	??
no	yes	yes	yes	??
yes	yes	yes	yes	(full bourgeois right)

More information

• Property