Thomas Paine Personal Property In Society

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Agrarian Justice written in 1795, Thomas Paine states, “Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally. Separate an individual from society… and he cannot acquire personal property… So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.” Paine seemed to have developed a framework that depicts private property and accumulation, generated in a means alien from man’s existence as homo faber (exchange, hoarding, fetishizing the commodity) in a society as reliant on material conditions in place within the society (relations of production); and continued to assert that it is not the moral or ethical duty, but seemingly the “correct” modus operandi (“society ought to be”) to redistribute that wealth back into the society from which it was borne. In 1937 The Communist Party…show more content…
This, combined with the Housing Act of 1937, which set out to subsidize public housing and bring the impoverished out of slums, follows in the social-democratic legacy of Paine’s conception of the requirement for government to provide housing and the ability to work for their livelihood to those unable to become employed

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