Contents

Preface, by Konrad Raiser

Foreword

Introduction

1: Absolute property creates poverty, debts and slavery

Ancient Greece

Rome

Ancient Israel, the Jesus movement and the early Church

Notes

2: The emergence of the capitalist po ssessive market society in the modern age

Property and its consequences

Thomas Hobbes

Notes

3: The case of John Locke: the inversion of human rights in the name of bourgeois property

The world of John Locke

Locke’s central argument: eliminate those who encroach on property

Locke’s central argument: eliminate those who encroachon property

The state of war

The legitimization of forced labour by slavery

The legitimate expropriation of the indigenous peoples of North America

Locke’s method of deriving human rights from property

Regaining human rights in the context of postmodernism

Notes

4: The total market: how globalized capitalism is eliminating the commitment to sustain life

The struggle to make property-owners accountable to society

The destruction of nature and of social cohesion

Notes

5: The enforcement of the total market through the absolute empire

Fighting for all the power

The coordinates of good and evil collapse

The global civil war

From hopelessness to despair

Is there a way out?

Notes

6: Latin American approaches to a renewed dependency theory

Development policy as a policy of growth

The new polarization of the world

Problems relating to a generalized development policy

Note

7: Rebuilding the system of ownership from below from the perspective of life and the common good

What is meant by life and the common good?

How can the ownership system be rebuilt from below?

Notes

8: God or Mammon? A confessional issue for the Churches in the context of social movements

The social movements

The ecumenical context

Becoming a confessing Church?

The political demands of the Church with respect to a new property system

Notes

Appendix 1: No to patenting of Life!

No to patenting of Life!

Appendix 2: The Cochabamba Declaration

Bibliography

Index