Capitalism: An Archaic Critique, Part II

A Speech Delivered to the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, Oct. 29th 2022

This article is the second half of a speech I delivered this year to the Sydney Traditionalist Forum.

The Germanic world brought us the lord-vassal relationship, but the landlord-tenant relationship came from Rome. The double-proprietorship characteristic of this relationship arose out of late Roman antiquity, to solve a problem. Municipalities were communities of Roman citizens living outside Rome, patricians who owned the lands around it, called latifundia. These latifundia were worked by slave gangs, and the patricians often administered them by deputizing the more responsible slaves to preside over the less responsible ones. The Roman paterfamilias might give the slave gang leader a peculium for his trouble, but however responsible, the slave could never be a free tenant on the land. Still, this payment incentivized the leader, and gave him an interest in the productivity of the soil.

The municipalities, these communities of Roman citizens, were themselves presided over by Roman functionaries. But because of the instability of the later imperium, the administration of these municipalities changed hands so often that superintending large landed domains became nearly impossible. To solve this problem, the Italian municipalities started leasing land to free tenants in perpetuity, which gave the tenant even more interest in the soil than the slave leader had. This made these latifundia far more productive, and the arrangement was copied by individual proprietors—but the result was that the free tenant was seen as himself having a qualified proprietorship. We call this joint-ownership emphyteusis, and it formed that basic kernel of feudal property relations. This was something altogether desacralized, but when it met with the sacral relation of homage in the Germanic männerbund, the result was the feudalism we know.

At the same time, the feudal world was brought into being by a shift in the basis on which claims of ownership were judged. For the Roman, the law was sacred and highly ritualized, so violations against property were violations against the deity. But late in Roman history, for reasons of structural conflict, this changed abruptly. Whereas originally ownership was a matter of positive law, there arose a distinction between this and ownership as a matter of “natural” law—a basis in law vs. a basis in equity. We can think of law vs. equity as the ancient analogue of legal formalism vs. legal realism. Hence, we get the ownership of the lord—whose title to the land is based on descent—coexisting with the ownership of the tenant, who has no claim whatsoever according to sacred custom.

This move from law to equity—or from tradition to natural law—was accomplished over centuries, and paved the way for the emphyteusis. The important takeaway here is that the transition to feudalism was itself a desacralization. To see what fully sacral property looks like, we have to travel back to the classical world.

The history of Roman property relations is complicated, but there are a few important things to note about it.

First, from the earliest times to the end of the imperium, there was a move from res mancipi to res nec mancipi. Today when we want to buy something we tap a piece of plastic against another piece of plastic, and the transaction is done. For the Roman of the earliest times, the situation could not have been more different. For the archaic Roman, all economic transactions were essentially sacred matters, requiring an elaborate ceremony known as the mancipatio (lit. “taking hold of the hand”). A sale was not a mere handshake, but an elaborate ceremony presided over by a god, with prescribed ritual actions and verbal formulae that must be performed exactly for a valid transaction to take place. The reason for this was that for our Roman, ownership was not an agreement between men as to the status of a thing, but the status of a thing in the eyes of the god. This of course required an impartial witness, and if either buyer or seller zigged where they should have zagged, if either should stutter and perform the ritual invocations anything but letter-perfect, no transaction had taken place at all. Property conveyed in this way was called res mancipi—goods requiring the mancipatio. Originally there was no other means of conveyance.

This point-of-sale system was necessarily somewhat limited and localized. Over time, as the needs of Roman society changed, a second category came into existence: the res “nec mancipi”—goods not requiring the mancipatio. For now, we can think of the distinction as roughly between movable vs. immovable property, which it later came to represent. At first, the basket of “movable” goods was quite small, but as time went on it grew to where most goods were easily conveyable—which is to say, desacralized—and eventually nearly all forms of property were desacralized. We see echoes of this in feudal times with the move from the feudalized law of the land to the law of movables, and in modern times from the law of realty to the law of personalty.

But the main distinguishing mark between classical and feudal property relations was that unlike feudalism, the classical world at all times had the concept of freehold or allodium—absolute ownership with no superior, which is to say, fully sacral property.

The popular image of the classical world is quite misguided. Often, we think of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Caesar as the root and wellspring of traditional European society, but the classical world was the result of a revolution, the result of a long structural conflict. It is to the archaic world as liberalism is to feudalism—the one was a revolutionary critique and replacement of the other. We can see that the classical world itself involved a desacralization, but from what? To understand classical notions of property, we have to go back further, to the rootstock of Aryan peoples, to their primitive notion of property.

Like all archaic peoples, the Indo-Europeans—the ancestor people of the Romans, Greeks, Germanics, Celts, and many others—did not observe a distinction between law, custom, and religion. The religion they practiced was not yet the polytheism of Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Odin, and others; their religion was ancestor worship. For them, the home was a temple—all religion was originally domestic, centred on the home and the dead buried on the property. They believed that upon death the soul didn’t part with the body, but remained present to it along with the body’s needs, so the duty to minister to the needs of the dead in the afterlife was incumbent on the living. This meant that the tomb resided on the property along with the altar, that regular funeral banquets were given to the dead along with daily libations and sustenance, and that the centre of the home was the sacred hearth fire, which was connected with the dead.

For this people, and for all its daughter peoples well into the historical period, the hearth, the rites, the gods—all these were private to the family. And the executive presiding over all these was the paterfamilias, the “House Father”. He was at once high priest, supreme magistrate, commander in chief in times of war—and most relevant to our purposes, he was sole proprietor. We can think of him as absolute monarch and supreme pontiff rolled into one—perhaps we could call his rule microstalinism.

For our Aryan House Father, property was crucial to the practice of religion. Without a family property, the ancestors could have no resting place. For him, religion, not law, guaranteed the right of property. In fact, he would not even have understood the distinction. Law was a function of religion—every legal procedure was a formal religious ritual, no less than the economic procedure in the original res mancipi. So, the right of property was more absolute than we can even imagine today. Today, the right of property is founded on the principle of social contract, the right of labour, or other principles—back then, it was founded on the principle of private, domestic religion.

The originary notion of property was something more private than anything that has existed in 3,000 years. With a full, historical understanding of the meaning of private property, we are in a position to see the absurdity of defining capitalism as a function of private property, whether for profit or otherwise—although the qualification of “for profit” calls to mind alienability, which is a distorted way of saying desacralization.

No property could be more private than that of our Aryan House Father, because his notion of property was altogether particularized. His notion of property is the grandfather of Blut und Boden. His notion of property demands inalienability. His notion of property is the ultimate in corporatism.

In sum, the archaic notion of property is the ultimate in private property. Lineage governs ownership, not natural law. This, and not capitalism, is the polar opposite of the usufruct property so celebrated by Marxists. The Marxist attempt to draw a line between capitalism and itself is utterly naïve, because properly understood, it is desacralization of property which gives birth to both communism and capitalism—not opposites, but cousins. First, the move from res mancipi to res nec mancipi desacralizes property. Later, usufruct enables the use-based proprietorship of the emphyteusis—a further desacralization. Still later, the secularization of the homage and the discharge of obligation in impersonal terms moves us still closer to capitalism. At every stage the relation between owner and owned devolves into mere use—we call this “commodification”. This is the fountainhead of our “rights based” moral paradigm—today only rights attach to property; duties attaching to property is unintelligible.

What began as particularized, inherited, rooted in the soil, inalienable, and corporative, through the slow march of time devolved—though by no means necessarily—into something universal, deterritorialized, free, and individual. Over thousands of years, in the move from the archaic to the classical, through feudalism and ultimately to capitalism, the history of property relations is a history of desacralization.

The archaic critique of capitalism has a number of virtues. It comprises and integrates the concepts and criticisms of capitalism that came before it. Where the libertarian says capitalism is “private” ownership and a free market, we say that capitalism is the death of corporative ownership along with the abandonment of the res mancipi. Where the Marxist says that capitalism is “private” ownership of the means of production, he means that capitalism is non-usufruct property, and we say if only it were. Where the traditionalist says that capitalism is a “bread alone” philosophy and a recipe for hyper-centralization, we agree with him, and add that capitalism is desacralized property, alienable from man and god alike.

These are all special cases of our view, which sees in the originary and undistorted essence of capitalism a loss of property’s ultimate significance. When we say that capitalism is materialistic, commodified, exploitative, usurious, utilitarian, and mercantile, these are all distorted and indirect ways of saying that capitalism is irreligious. Three millennia on, and our objection to capitalism is the same as our forefathers’ objection to capitalism’s own forefathers.

The archaic critique of capitalism is not a simple reframing, but tells us something new about it. We emphasize the continuity of capitalism with what came before it, which was itself driven by the abandonment of the sacred in property relations. However, this doesn’t explain the break between capitalism and what came before it—if the process is ancient, how is capitalism something new and distinct? Capitalism is not something new, but is simply the logical conclusion of something old—capitalism is the total desacralization of property. Feudal property still retained something of the sacred character handed down from the earliest times, and where capitalism makes a qualitative break from it is in its total, or at least near-total abdication of this sacrality.

Not all anti-capitalisms are created equal, but all are anti-capitalism, and that is the problem. In other words, anti-capitalisms cede frame to capitalism, standing in opposition to it. The archaic critique of capitalism, however, does something quite different—it frames capitalism as standing in opposition to itself. Sacral property is not the absence of capitalism; capitalism is the absence of sacral property—capitalism is the derivative term, and this has important ramifications, but that’s a topic for another discussion.

Above all, the archaic critique of capitalism lays bare the essential solution: resacralization. The burden here is that the problem of capitalism is not separate from the other problems of modernity that demand resacralization, such as the problem of meaning, of the state, and of the family—not for no reason is oiko-nomos the “law of the household”. The issue is resacralizing property, which is not separable from resacralizing our world—this is “one struggle” against one problem.

Something new will rise from the ashes of modernity. The only question is do we want it? Some number of utils will need to be sacrificed in order to resacralize property, but sacral property is an engine for the production of gemeinschaft, a society equipped to build anew, capable of creation rather than slavish repetition, as modernity is not. There don’t seem to be any alternatives on offer that don’t lead straight back to church in fee to capital. The choice is between God and Mammon. That choice seems pretty clear to me.