Abstract
Property forms one of the key liberal rights. In the liberal democratic era, the property right proved to be a dominant principle of liberal normative discourse that reverberated in parliamentary and municipal decision-making processes as much as in decisions of the constitutional courts in liberal democratic countries. This liberal property discourse, however, was recently challenged by movements that declared a public interest as an expression of demos. To wit the movement "Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen!" in Berlin that provoked the successful referendum aimed at expropriation of the rental housing company "Deutsche Wohnen" that garnered enormous profits by rising a rent excessively.
This case suggests that the liberal-capitalist account of property starts to be viewed as an obstacle to solve the housing crisis as well as other ones (financial, political, environmental, pandemic, wartime, etc.). In my Manifesto of the Socialist Movement (2023) I proposed to understand property in a genetic-structural way. Firstly, we should address the evolution of the dominant form of property, which is fictitious capital (Cédric Durand; David Harvey) meaning bank credit, public debt, company bonds, shares. Fictitious capital began to rule over the real economy, society, and nature. Fictious capital detaches itself from the real social and environmental needs and simultaneously prevents us from allocating resources in a way of solving the entangled crises of the present time. I argue that this dominant form of capital as covered by the liberal property right is going to be delegitimized by the fact that we live in the end times. We are facing planetary apocalyptic challenges that invite us to leave the liberal concept of property.