Progressive economic reform depends on demoting pure property rights to technico-industrial functional necessities

Evidence

If the State were proposing to impose an economic direction by which the production of savings ceased to a “function” of a parasitic class and became a function of the productive organism itself, such a hypothetical development would be progressive, and could have its part in a vast design of integral rationalisation. But for that it would be necessary to promote both agrarian reform (involving the abolition of landed income of a non-working class, and its incorporation into the productive organism in the form of collective savings to be dedicated to reconstruction and further progress), and an industrial reform. One could thus reduce all income to the status of technico-industrial functional necessities and no longer keep them as the juridical consequences of pure property rights. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Gramsci’s distinction between parasitic income of a non-working class versus income as functional necessity within the productive organism — a key concept in his economic critique.
• XREF: connects to: Prior appropriation doctrine subsidized industry by letting water be taken free — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2135