Attempts to undermine the moral justification of private property by pointing to the highly social nature of wealth production are not new.

Here’s the late 19th century English economist J.A. Hobson making the same argument, in the context of a critique of the individualist anarchist (“Voluntaryist”) Auberon Herbert. I’m posting it here not because I agree with it, but because I think it’s a particularly interesting expression of the argument from a source that hasn’t gotten much contemporary attention. Herbert’s responses to Hobson can be found here and here.

…the means by which property is acquired is not, as alleged, by use of individual faculties alone. Even in the most primitive form of human life, property is really the creation of the organic co-operation of the family or tribal group: this most primitive division of labour strictly disables us from imputing any single product to the activity of the individual who was alone directly engaged in producing it. The hunter and his industrial squaw, by their mutual support, enable one another to produce whatever is produced in food, or clothes, or shelter. By a nice and almost infinite series of gradations, we pass from the simple co-operation to the highly complex co-operation of a modern society. Mr. Herbert still supposes an individual can, by himself, produce a piece of property. Now firstly, there is, as we have seen, no such individual; the modern man, in mind at any rate, is himself a highly social product; his thoughts, feelings, the skill with which he works, the tools he employs, all essential to his effective labour, are made by society. Upon material got form nature, and administered by society, he bestows this socially educated skill under the organized protection of society, without which protection, as all history teaches, individual industry is impotent. Nor is that all. The property which Mr. Herbert seeks to conserve, is not really the ownership of a material thing, that is generally useless to the individual, it is the “value” of the property which he really prizes: that value is strictly a social product dependent upon the needs, the appreciation, and the purchasing power of other persons working with the same social protection and aid which he himself enjoys, and having developed, by slow process of social civilization, an elaborate system of markets and mechanism of exchange. This is what is meant by saying that property is social in origin and nature. No one can make anything by himself that is worth making…All these facts the gospel of self-ownership ignores.

The essay from which this passage is drawn, “Rich Man’s Anarchism” (what a great title!), contains some other nice statements of common anti-libertarian arguments too, including a critique of the move from self-ownership to ownership of external property, and a freedom-based critique of property in land.

As far as I can tell, though, the essay isn’t available anywhere on line. It’s available in this collection, though, which has a number of other really nice pieces in it too.