The property logic of IPR produces racial differentiation and is the root cause of colonialism – one cannot engage in the logic of property without succumbing to the property-racial matrix

Malini Ranganathan, Anne Bonds, “Racial regimes of property: Introduction to the special issue”, , 7 April 2022,

Property is generally understood as a “self-evident category” (Blomley, 2004: 2)—intuitively speaking, property is that which belongs to someone or something. Conjured though legal and extralegal enactments, property is deeply embedded in social and cultural life and is taken for granted in liberal modes of thinking. It operates as an unquestioned universality. Indicating the right to own something, and the right to enjoy that thing, legally recognized forms of property include real and tangible property, such as privately and publicly owned land, as well as intellectual property. Yet this commonsense notion of property as a “thing” obscures the web of social and power relations that must be performed to produce property as legitimate. Modern property, then, is not only an essential component of capitalist political economy but is also a shifting social formation animated by contextual assemblages of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. Theorized this way, property is far from fixed, but rather is an unfolding and continuously enacted set of relations that necessitates and in turn shapes the hierarchical valuation of bodies and places.

It should be stressed, as Marxists have long done, that property, as an exchange commodity, is secured not simply through state, market, and so-called legal interventions—the price, the title, the deed, the survey, the land registry, the police, and so on—but also informal, unwritten, and coercive forces of looting and fraud (Luxemburg, 1968). Property comes into this world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, 2010 [1887]). As is well documented, property’s material and symbolic significance is rooted in the ostensible shift from feudal to capitalist relations, even though feudalism etched by race, religion, and caste, for example, continues to prevail and structure capitalism (Robinson, 2000). Our focus on racial regimes of property draws from key scholarship theorizing property in its multiple meanings as both “an object and a relation” (Correia, 2013: 7), including the written and unwritten terms, contracts, and logics underpinning ownership (Bhandar, 2014, 2018; Blomley, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2016; Moreton-Roberts, 2015; Roy, 2003, 2017).

Using the settler-colonial contexts of Canada, Australia, and Israel/Palestine, Brenna Bhandar (2018) tracks regimes of property law—the juridical formation underpinning capital accumulation—that unfolded together with racial schemas and state violence to produce colonial subjects. One of Bhandar’s key arguments is that liberal thought and its norms of ownership and exclusion were not just dependent on racial differentiation (see especially Lowe, 2015; Mehta, 1999; Mills, 2008) but were also generative of racial differentiation—a process she refers to as “propertied abstraction.” Examining property necessitates thinking across different registers and forms of abstraction, including engagement with race itself as an abstraction. Indeed, geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002: 16) defines racism as “a practice of abstraction, a death dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories.” As such, race is made material through its articulation with other abstractions, including abstractions related to property possession and dispossession. Emphasizing this connection, Bhandar (2014: 211) argues that “abstraction functions in such a way so as to create legal forms of property and racial ontologies coterminously”—a “property-racial matrix,” (Bhandar, 2014) if you will.

The papers in this special issue, the outcome of sessions organized at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, start from Bhandar’s (2018) notion of “racial regimes of ownership” to theorize how property depends on historical and renewed modes of racial and other forms of differentiation. Yet, they also seek to move beyond the settler-colonial contexts profiled in Bhandar’s book, and beyond the category of “ownership” to include variegated regimes of access and tenure (e.g. rent and tenancy). In addition, the authors seek to trouble the rigidity of relations of domination so often portrayed in critical property studies, instead bringing to light the tenuousness, ambiguity, and messiness of the property-racial matrix, and the forms of resistance and refusal that render imaginative futures beyond property. It is one of the chief contentions of this special issue that while they may seem hegemonic and fixed, racial regimes of property are inherently unstable, constantly subject to undoing through and beyond their own internal logics. Marshalling critical property studies across disciplines and original empirical data, these papers extend scholarly conversations along three analytical axes: property’s (i) logics, (ii) materialities, and (iii) refusals.

Logics

Modern ontologies of property—notions of how property comes into being and how it inhabits the world—are thoroughly steeped in liberal, physiocratic, and utilitarian logics and assumptions; so steeped that it is difficult to see beyond the liberal pale. The socialist scholar CB MacPherson (1962) denaturalized these assumptions, and showed, drawing on Marx (often implicitly rather than explicitly), how indelibly tied liberal ontologies of property are to the logic of “possessive individualism,” a logic that MacPherson found lurking, in particular, in the writings of John Locke. As an originator of physiocratic thought, Locke was preoccupied with how property is born out of the relationship between one’s labor and the creation of value. If something had been vested with an individual’s labor, and therefore now had utility and therefore value, then it could be said to be properly possessed by that individual. Once possessed, such ownership guards against the overreach of the state. Reflecting on MacPherson’s intellectual legacy, Lindsay (2012) argues that at the core of “possessive” in “possessive individualism” is not ownership of the thing per se, but rather ownership and control over one’s labor. Taken to its extreme, to control property is essentially to control one’s person.

It is this assumption of control and free will over one’s person that Black radical and critical scholars of race (e.g. Bhandar, 2018; Harris, 1993; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Walcott, 2021) have probed by asking: who, according to modern property law, is the individual entitled to such self-possession? What is the ontological logic of such personhood? For Lockean thought to be internally consistent, the enslaved and non-European subjects necessarily had to be rendered sub-human and savage, devoid of personhood and incapable and unworthy of possessing their own selves. As Cedric Robinson (2000) reminds us, while racialism predates capitalism, the former was necessary for the latter to propagate: accumulation did not and could not develop outside of racial capitalism. The rise of chattel slavery in a global capitalist system in the seventeenth-century hardened the hierarchical division of humans and construction of racial ontologies: darker races were understood to be sub-human, capable of the extraordinary physical challenges necessary to produce productive property. In short, enslaved peoples were rendered as the lucrative property of others to make lucrative property for others. It followed from this logic that only European modalities of self-comportment, transforming and relating to the land, and taming nature could “count as property” (Blomley, 2004: 14, emphasis original). Indeed, the word “property” has at its root “proper” and “propriety,” or as Jodi Byrd et al. (2018: 3) put it, the word contains “a supposition of civilization and civility” (see also Blomley, 2005). European settlers viewed communal access to land and resources by Indigenous and Aboriginal groups in the Americas and Australia as the very definition of civilizational backwardness. Only those forms of labor and possession “characteristic of white settlement” could be “recognized and legitimated” as Harris (1993: 1722) writes. Conversely, non-European and/or non-possessory idioms of relating to the land were delegitimated and “desecrated” (Nichols, 2018: 12)—a process that continues today (Borras et al., 2011; Mollett, 2015; Wily, 2012).