Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

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IS OWNERSHIP THEFT?
the wonderful word 'our' into the practice of socialist cornmuna1living.
This is a great problem. Let us take rental shops, for example. Why should
such shops not be set up everywhere, so that those who wished to do so
could hire a bicycle, a car, a motor-bike, a motor-boat and other things for a
short time at little cost?17
Now it seems probable that Semichastny was an extremely envious
man. This is not only suggested by the challenge quoted above, but also
by the part he played in the ostracism of Boris Pasternak in the autumn of
1958, when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize. The Komsomol
leader called the poet a swine and demanded that he leave the Soviet
Union. This invective was too much for intellectuals even in Russia. It is
not difficult to imagine what an official might feel about poetic gifts
great enough to win the Nobel Prize, when this same official actually
takes offence at a child's saying 'my bicycle. '
Against the background of our entire analysis, Semichastny's proposal
is instructive for several reasons. The fanatical advocate of communal
ownership correctly saw that the feeling for private property was ineradicably
inculcated into and stamped upon the child during the process
of its personality formation. He probably did not know that decades
before, in some of the Israeli kibbutzim, for just such reasons, if not
perhaps very successfully, an attempt had seriously been made to set up
a rotation system, even for work clothes, so that no one could talk of 'his'
shoes or 'his' trousers. Nor did he know that even the simplest primitive
peoples, who are not yet 'corrupted by capitalism,' both recognize and
encourage an unconditional and secure title to ownership, even by young
children, of certain commodities. Strong evidence suggests that private
property is a constitutive factor in any social existence, and the attempt
to exclude it legislatively from the process of the individual's socialization
cannot appear until relatively late in cultural history, when a
process of political messianism has begun.
It is, indeed, a matter of some irony that the one place where Semichastny's
pet method has first taken on is America, that allegedly
materialistic stronghold of capitalism: increasingly, objects of daily use,
brand-new motorcars, motorboats, small aircraft, motor mowers, office
equipment of all kinds, clothing, pictures, etc., are regularly rented or
17 Neue Zurcher Zeitung, foreign edition, April 11 , 1959, p. 2.