I think one of the mistakes people make when talking about landlords is assuming that being against landlordism necessarily means being against private property. I see it almost in the opposite way. I am against landlordism because I want private property to be much more widespread than it is today. I don’t want to abolish the private ownership of houses or replace landlords with the State, municipalities, or communes. I want practically everyone to own the house in which they live. The problem with landlordism, from this perspective, is not that too many people own private property. The problem is that too few people do.
This is where my position remains much closer to Rothbard than to traditional mutualism. I don’t accept occupancy and use as the foundation of property rights. If you legitimately acquire a piece of land, build a house on it, buy it from its legitimate owner, or receive it through a voluntary transfer, it is your property. You don’t suddenly lose ownership because you leave for six months or because you aren’t personally using every square foot of it. I think Rothbard was basically correct here. Private property requires a stable theory of ownership rather than a system where property continually returns to an unowned condition whenever its owner stops physically occupying it.
But accepting Rothbardian private property doesn’t mean that I have to defend landlordism as an economic system. There is a difference between private property and a society permanently divided between people who own houses and people who spend their entire lives paying those people for permission to live in them. My ideal individualist anarchist society would eliminate that distinction by making ownership normal. Instead of abolishing private property because some people don’t have it, I want to expand private property until practically everyone has some.
In a weird way, I want everyone to become petty bourgeois, and I don’t really mean that as a joke. Marxists traditionally use the petty bourgeoisie to describe small proprietors who exist between the capitalist and proletarian classes: small business owners, independent artisans, shopkeepers, farmers and other people who own some property or productive capital without becoming major capitalists. Marxists generally expected capitalist development to squeeze much of this class out and push people toward proletarianization. I want to move in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of turning the small proprietor into a proletarian, I want to turn the proletarian into a small proprietor.
That makes much more sense to me as an individualist project. If someone doesn’t own his home, the objective should be to create economic conditions where owning one becomes normal. If someone depends completely on an employer because he owns no productive capital, capital should become easier for him to acquire. If someone wants to work independently, there should be as few barriers as possible preventing him from acquiring the tools, land, technology or capital necessary to do it. I don’t see why the answer to concentrated property should be less private property when the much more individualist answer is to make proprietorship accessible to ordinary individuals.
The modern housing system obviously isn’t an example of this. We live in a system where the State controls an enormous part of what can be built, where it can be built and under what conditions it can be built. There are zoning laws, permits, taxes, restrictions on development, monetary intervention and countless regulations affecting the supply and price of housing. The State restricts housing production and land use, protects the existing structure through law, and then we look at the resulting distribution of property as though it emerged spontaneously from a completely free market.
Remove that system and the economics of housing changes considerably. People could build smaller houses if that is what they want, land could be developed without the same political barriers, different forms of housing could compete with one another, and individuals would have considerably more freedom in construction, financing and association. Property taxes would also disappear, which matters because I find the concept itself incompatible with genuine ownership. If you can lose your house because you stop making perpetual payments to the State, there is an obvious sense in which your ownership remains conditional upon another institution.
This is where I think Tucker understood something important even though I don’t accept his theory of property. Tucker recognized that you cannot look at the existing distribution of wealth and automatically call it the product of a free market. He attacked monopolies and privileges created by the State because he believed they distorted the distribution of property and strengthened particular economic classes. I can accept this part of the individualist anarchist argument without accepting occupancy and use. In fact, I think Rothbardian private property provides a better foundation for what should replace the present system because it preserves strong individual ownership while removing the State privileges surrounding it.
The result I want is basically a society of small proprietors. One person owns his house, another owns a small workshop, someone else owns a store or works independently with his own equipment, while others organize businesses together or pool their capital voluntarily. There can still be larger businesses and considerable differences in wealth because I am not arguing for economic equality. I don’t care if one person owns a modest house while another owns a mansion. They have very different economic outcomes, but both remain proprietors rather than one being permanently dependent upon the other for access to a home.
That distinction matters because I don’t think anarchism requires everyone to end up economically equal. People have different preferences, ambitions, talents, priorities and circumstances, so there is no reason to expect a free society to produce identical outcomes. Trying to continually correct those differences would eventually require an authority capable of deciding how much everyone should have. At that point we would have reconstructed precisely the kind of political authority anarchism was supposed to eliminate.
What matters much more to me is the relationship between property and independence. Owning your home gives you a material sphere that belongs to you. Owning productive property gives you options that having none doesn’t. Having savings and capital gives you more room to make decisions without constantly depending on another institution. Property, when decentralized rather than concentrated through political privilege, can therefore become one of the material foundations of individual autonomy.
This is why I don’t find the conventional socialist solution satisfying. If we have a society where a minority owns most of the housing while everyone else rents from them, the socialist response is generally some version of collectivizing housing. But that doesn’t actually solve the problem I care about because the individual remains a nonowner. The institution controlling his home has simply changed. Instead of having a private landlord, he now has a municipal, State or collective landlord. If ten people are tenants while one person owns his home, I don’t want to turn the homeowner into an eleventh nonowner. I want the ten tenants to become homeowners as well.
The same argument applies to productive property. If workers have no capital, I don’t think the only alternatives are working permanently for someone who does or transferring productive capital to some collective institution. Workers themselves can become proprietors. They can acquire tools, save, invest, become self-employed, establish partnerships, create businesses and accumulate productive property themselves. A genuinely freed market should make this easier because the objective of individualist anarchism should not be maintaining a permanent proletarian class with no property of its own.
This would make individualist anarchism much more petty bourgeois than proletarian, and I think that is a good thing. The petty bourgeois individual has historically been criticized precisely because he owns something and wants to preserve his independence, but those characteristics fit individualist anarchism remarkably well. The small proprietor doesn’t need a capitalist class to own everything for him, but he doesn’t need the State or a commune to own everything for him either. He possesses his own property and interacts with other proprietors through exchange and voluntary association. If practically everyone reaches that position, “petty bourgeois” stops describing a small intermediate class and becomes something closer to the ordinary economic condition.
This is what I mean when I call myself anti-landlordist while defending Rothbardian private property. I don’t want to replace private landlords with one enormous public landlord, and I don’t want to abolish ownership. I want to eliminate the economic structure in which one class accumulates residential property while another class is expected to remain tenants indefinitely. The person who makes a house his home should normally be its proprietor, and an individualist economic order should make that the ordinary relationship between people and their homes.
The individualist anarchist society I imagine is therefore neither a society without property nor a society divided between a small property-owning class and everyone else. People can possess different amounts of property, accumulate it, exchange it, invest it and use it differently without requiring equality of outcome. What changes is the normal economic position of the individual. He owns his home, can accumulate productive property and has a material foundation for independence rather than spending his entire life dependent upon institutions that own everything around him.
Maybe this is the easiest way to describe what I mean by anti-landlordism. I want to solve the property question by creating more property owners rather than fewer of them. I don’t want to abolish the petty bourgeoisie by pushing everyone into a proletarian condition or placing everything under collective ownership. I want practically everyone to become petty bourgeois, because the individualist conclusion of private property is not a society where a few people own everything. It is a society where practically everyone owns something, beginning with the place they call home.
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