IIn Austria, property is sacred and property lasts forever. It is a legal charm for sanctioning exploitation and even destruction – without anyone ever being held accountable. For centuries, this social spell has bound forests, lakes, mountains and valleys, making them accessible only to an exclusive few. Nobody can change this. It seems that no democratic counter-magic can ever be a match for the power of property, even as the concentration of global wealth reaches ever-more grotesque proportions.

Property issues are negotiated quite differently if they happen far away, for example when people are displaced by land grabbing in the global South. Or when expropriation – which happens through privatisation, for instance – is seen as a necessity. And yet expropriation also takes place in Europe every day. Those who work usually keep only a fraction of the value they generate. One person's labour becomes the property of another.

In most places, individuals can no longer be physically owned by others. However, the symbolic claim of ownership over, for example, women or foreigners remains deeply entrenched. It continues to exist as "phantom ownership". When emancipation is achieved by those who were perceived to be owned, property owners can become violent.

All this calls for a global, anti-proprietary counter-spell. The founding of the Int. Agency for Expropriation is the order of the day: How can the spell of property be broken? Whose property needs most urgently to be communalised? Whose possessions need to be protected from seizure? And how is this all to be achieved?