The Abuse of Property

Untimely Meditations

1. THE AGONY OF EROS, Byung-Chul Han

2. ON HITLER’S MEIN KAMPF: THE POETICS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM, Albrecht Koschorke

3. IN THE SWARM: DIGITAL PROSPECTS, Byung-Chul Han

4. THE TERROR OF EVIDENCE, Marcus Steinweg

5. ALL AND NOTHING: A DIGITAL APOCALYPSE, Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Höfer

6. POSITIVE NIHILISM: MY CONFRONTATION WITH HEIDEGGER, Hartmut Lange

7. INCONSISTENCIES, Marcus Steinweg

8. SHANZHAI: DECONSTRUCTION IN CHINESE, Byung-Chul Han

9. TOPOLOGY OF VIOLENCE, Byung-Chul Han

10. THE RADICAL FOOL OF CAPITALISM: ON JEREMY BENTHAM, THE PANOPTICON, AND THE AUTO-ICON, Christian Welzbacher

11. GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: A DIALOGUE, Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy

12. PORTRAIT OF THE MANAGER AS A YOUNG AUTHOR: On STORYTELLING, BUSINESS, AND LITERATURE, Philipp Schönthaler

13. WASTE: A NEW MEDIA PRIMER, Roberto Simanowski

14. THE DEATH ALGORITHM AND OTHER DIGITAL DILEMMAS, Roberto Simanowski

15. LAW AS REFUGE OF ANARCHY: SOCIETIES WITHOUT HEGEMONY OR STATE, Hermann Amborn

16. ENLIVENMENT: TOWARD A POETICS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE, Andreas Weber

17. AGAINST NATURE, Lorraine Daston

18. GOOD ENTERTAINMENT: A DECONSTRUCTION OF THE WESTERN PASSION NARRATIVE, Byung-Chul Han

19. THE ABUSE OF PROPERTY, Daniel Loick

The Abuse of Property

Daniel Loick

translated by Jacob Blumenfeld

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Der Missbrauch des Eigentums © MSB Matthes und Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin. First published by the imprint August Verlag.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, German Federal Foreign Office, collecting society VG WORT and Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Loick, Daniel, author.

Title: The abuse of property / Daniel Loick ; translated by Jacob Blumenfeld.

Other titles: Missbrauch des Eigentums. English

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2023] | Series: Untimely meditations ; 19 | Originally published as Der Missbrauch des Eigentum in Berlin by August Verlag. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022029582 (print) | LCCN 2022029583 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262545501 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262374361 (epub) | ISBN 9780262374354 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Property. | Right of property. | Property—Social aspects. | Acquisition of property. | Personal property. | Property—Political aspects.

Classification: LCC HB701 .L76413 2023 (print) | LCC HB701 (ebook) | DDC 323.4/6—dc23/eng/20220623

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029582

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029583

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To the Institute for Comparative Irrelevance (2003–2013ff.)

Contents

Better Squat than Rot

1 The Use of Property

The Liberal Justification of Property

The Ontological Justification of Property

2 The Abuse of Property

The Social Critique of Property

The Ethical Critique of Property

The Political Critique of Property

Epilogue: Not Being at Home in One’s Home

Afterword to the English Edition: From Occupy to Abolition

Acknowledgments

Notes

Better Squat than Rot

The German squatters’ movement of the 1970s coined a slogan still in use today: better squat than rot.¹ This rallying cry opposes the widespread practice of homeowners leaving apartments and buildings empty in order to speculate on real estate prices and drive up rents. Vacancy often has the effect of damaging the buildings or letting them fall into disrepair. The squatters, in contrast, put the empty houses to use and start renovating them (as long as the police let them, of course).

The meaning of the squatters’ call goes beyond its agitational use in concrete housing struggles; namely it directly refutes the basic dogma of property theory, according to which the use of a thing presupposes ownership of it. The practice of repairing through squatting [Instandbesetzen] denies this connection, and on the contrary, assumes that property is not a condition but rather an obstacle to use. The expression destroying through owning [Kaputtbesitzen] indicates that something is being damaged through property—that it produces not use but instead abuse.

The following reflections are an attempt to systematically explain this form of property critique. This should be understood in a more general and radical sense, not only concerning homeownership, but every form of property. Accordingly, it is not just about an excess of private property in the hands of a few individuals but rather about every property-like relation between human beings and the world. The abuse of property is thereby interpreted from an objective and subjective side: the legal institution of property deprives objects of their usability by human beings, and deforms human beings themselves in such a way that they are no longer capable of meaningfully using objects.

Just as the phrase destroying through owning is detached from its concrete context and interpreted in a more general sense, the expression repairing through squatting is meant to not only refer to the specific activity of occupying houses but also function more generally as an umbrella term for various forms of action that practically critique property. Occupying has always been one of the most important weapons in the repertoire of social movements, from the factory occupations of the workers’ movement to the tree occupations of environmentalists and land occupations by Indigenous activists, to the more recent occupations in Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Syntagma Square, or Puerta del Sol. These occupations were not simply about appropriating and taking possession of space; an occupation is not an annexation. Occupations are rather the opposite: the revision of the abuse in property, or ex-appropriations. They make the occupied place usable again in new, no longer property-like ways; in this respect, every occupation is an act of repair. There is thus no reason to reserve this term only for physical presence in a particular place. Denying the legitimacy of the prevailing property rights can take many different forms. For example, the establishment of alternative modes of production, circulation, and forms of consumption through location-independent, immaterial, and nonproprietary practices, such as commoning, cracking, or file sharing, can also be seen as forms of reparative occupying. Squatting is particularly emblematic, but by no means the only kind of repairing through occupying. All the above-mentioned repair-occupations have both an objective and subjective side. They effectively revoke the ownership of a thing from individuals (or a collective) and return it to general usability; in the act of occupying, they also mobilize affects, attitudes, and insights that can, at best, cure the proprietary deformation of subjectivity.

This book hopes to contribute to the theoretical reflection of real social struggles. On the one hand, this means that it reconstructs the goals of a particular political practice, but intervenes in them philosophically too, such as by highlighting the shortcomings and problems of certain types of property critique, and the promises and advantages of others. On the other hand, it is a plea for praxis as well—that is, for the critical theory of society to reconnect to the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.² This call for practical relevance arises from insight into the extent of inequality and injustice, obscenity of consumption, and threat of ecological destruction that the current global property regime has created, given the viable alternatives and political actors pressing for change existing here and now. Yet the practical dimension also already emerges from the very structure of the form of property critique developed below. Only a political critique of property—a critique whose relation to practice is irreducible from the outset—will be able to keep the transgressive, polemical, and conflictual dimension of repair-squatting alive, and therefore escape the bourgeois paradigm of appropriation.

Better squat than rot—the premises, implications, and consequences of this demand will be explored in two stages: first, through a critical reading of classical justifications of property, and second, by reconstructing the various critiques of property along with their respective status and limits.

The first part is devoted to the two most important bourgeois strategies of argumentation: the liberal and ontological justifications of property. Liberal justifications of property revolve around the legitimacy of the privatization of property—that is, the transfer of a thing from original common ownership to an individual’s power of disposal; the key figure here is John Locke. Ontological justifications of property attempt to prove the indispensability of a specific relation to self and world produced by property; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provides the paradigm case here. Both strategies of justification presuppose, in their own ways, the bourgeois assumption of the reciprocal implication between ownership and use. A critical reading, however, shows that bourgeois theories are forced to legitimize various forms of abuse alongside the right to property: either, as with liberal theories, by justifying exploitation, colonialism, and ecological destruction, or as with the ontological theory, by defending a subjectivity that can only relate to its inner and outer nature as something to be dominated.

In the second part, two classic critiques of property are reconstructed that respond to the bourgeois justifications of property. First is the social critique of property, formulated above all by Karl Marx, and second, the ethical critique of property, expressed by the Franciscans of