Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

HIRED GOODS INSTEAD OF PROPERTY 375
leased, and that by average people who see the temporary hire of a new or
well-maintained object as more economical and practical than its lasting
possession.
This new attitude towards material possessions becomes possible
only if the individual has unconditional faith in his economic system,
knowing that he will always find in it a sufficient supply of commodities
for rent or hire. This 'communal economy' arises from faith in a
consumer-oriented market economy and foreshadows a new phase of the
capitalist, as distinct from a socialist, system. For the individual will
renounce concrete, lasting ownership in important areas of daily consumption
in favour of hired objects only if he no longer has cause to fear
that a political authority may introduce arbitrary restrictions on his
access to those objects.
Moreover, these human modes of behaviour, characteristics and
drives related to the concept of property, against which the purist
criticism of property as such is directed, would not simply disappear
with the elimination of private property in the narrower sense. Where the
individual, within the framework of family group, clan or village community,
has no private property, all the intentional and emotional manifestations
which occur at the frontier dividing owner from non-owner
are simply shifted to the frontier between family and outsiders or
between individual villages. One often gets the impression that the pride
of ownership and greed for possession in a small collective is greater and
more irrational (nationalistic) than in the individual.
We fmd it difficult to take seriously a critique of property which
opines that, once measures have been taken to abolish individual and
family property, all the most crucial problems will have been solved. For
the transfer of property does little to alter its meaning in terms of human
existence; whether the discretionary powers are in the hands of ten,
thirty or three thousand people, a man still knows that he is in a world
that must draw a boundary between thine and mine, where all transactions
have to be accounted for, where there is crime against property
and where a group will always seek to increase its property, if necessary
at another group's expense.
Nor is the matter very different if we draw a fine line between private
property as such and private property as the 'means of production.'
Mter all, many more things can serve asineans of production than just