[Upd-discuss] Re:

[sandor]

Prof. Mickey Davis wrote:

>1. What is this doing on this list?
>  
>
    To offer historical context to the current western view of the 
public domain? That is how I understood it..
    Why do you feel it non-relevant?

>2. If the Greeks were first, where did "Thou shall not steal" come from? 
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    Now I'm curious what the paper says!

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch04.htm

    The last couple paragraphs before the footnotes I think provide the 
paper's thoughts on this.. Enjoy!

Thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age we see the old gentile 
order as still a living force. But we also see the beginnings of its 
disintegration: father-right, with transmission of the property to the 
children, by which accumulation of wealth within the family was favored 
and the family itself became a power as against the gens; reaction of 
the inequality of wealth on the constitution by the formation of the 
first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, at first 
only of prisoners of war, but already preparing the way for the 
enslavement of fellow-members of the tribe and even of the gens; the old 
wars between tribe and tribe already degenerating into systematic 
pillage by land and sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves and 
treasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short, riches 
praised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile order 
misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was 
wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches 
of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, 
which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little 
valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of 
all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general 
social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus 
amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which 
perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes, but 
also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, 
and the rule of the former over the latter.

And this institution came. The state was invented.

>
> ... the earlier private appropietors, like the
>Greek, where private property it is said to begin. ...
>
>Mickey
>
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