Lockean property rights are conditional trusts bounded by a right to subsistence

Evidence

Thus private property right is not absolute but provisional; it, too, is a trust, or stewardship. On this ground, governments are entitled to intervene to regulate property arrangements, to ensure that the prior conditions are met. Although communism is ruled out, communalism is not: the community has a right of use and access, a ‘usufructory’ right, whereby its members can fulfil the imperatives of subsistence and improvement. Locke asserts, concerning the well-off, that a ‘needy Brother [has] a Right to the Surplusage of his Goods’. Villages may maintain their ‘commons’, for shared benefit. There may even be ‘squatters’ rights’, where needy and industrious tillers may make use of undeveloped landed estates (§ 36). — , Second Treatise of Government and A…, 33

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Overturns the standard reading: the same author who grounds enclosure also licenses usufruct, commons, squatters’ rights, and a right to the surplusage of the rich.
• SEED: Angle: Locke as an unexpected resource for the left — the trust/stewardship clause as a textual basis for redistribution and commons defense.
• XREF: connects to: Lockean property logic lets oustees be displaced without being dispossessed. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 458; Land-rights law can be redirected to steward rather than possess the land — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1169; For most neoliberals, property rights are contingent instruments for competitive order, not absolutes — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 194 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Lockean property logic lets oustees be displaced without being dispossessed. #expands (1.00) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 458
• Land-rights law can be redirected to steward rather than possess the land #exemplifies (1.00) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1169
• For most neoliberals, property rights are contingent instruments for competitive order, not absolutes #corroborates (1.00) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 194
• The labor theory of property legitimized dispossession of unenclosed hunter-gatherer land #complicates (0.90) — , Second Treatise of Government and A…, 34
• Rights function as instruments of governance, not just limits on power #complicates (0.90)