Liberal arguments regarding land as property usually depict common property and private
property as contradictory property regimes. The private ownership of land defines exclusive
rights that include the right to exclude and the right to alienate and thus is seen as the engine of
private accumulation. In contrast, common property is condemned as its opposite: it limits
individual rights and imposes instead indivisible rights to land ownership in ways that impede
capitalist progress. Liberal formulations usually understand property as a legally defined relation
between an owner and a thing, in this case land. According to critical legal theorists, however,
land ownership, whether common or private, defines a set of social relations. This view
understands common property and private property as commensurate rather than
contradictory. Both define exclusion (though at different scales) and both describe individual
rights (though defined by different use rights or spatial boundaries). Surprisingly, popular thinking
among even radical land grant activists in property struggles in New Mexico, USA locate
common property, in opposition to private property, as the wellspring from which transformative
social relations can spring in ways that draw on, rather than critique, liberal theories of property
in efforts to oppose the baleful effects of private property. This paper returns to Marx's notion of
commodity fetishism in Capital, Volume One as a lens though which to examine these property
struggles.
David Correia is an Assistant Professor in the department of American Studies at the University
of New Mexico. His research interests focus on environmental politics, violence and its
relation to law & property, critical human geography and political economy. Correia has a
regional focus on New Mexico and the wider U.S. Southwest. His recent book, Properties of
Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico (University of Georgia Press,
2013) traces Spanish colonial histories and contemporary struggles over property in what is
today northern New Mexico. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Antipode,
Geoforum, The Journal of Historical Geography, Radical History Review and many others. He
also writes essays and articles for a variety of popular outlets, including CounterPunch,
the Weekly Alibi and La Jicarita.
