Justin S. turns my rhetorical take on property rights into a syllogism which he then argues is false. This is a little unfair though certainly not completely out of bounds as itself a rhetorical strategy. The tradition of private property which descends to those of us in the West begins with the Roman ius civile. De Ste. Croix describes this as one of the two areas in which the Roman genius was superior to the Greek. Locke et al. certainly contribute to that tradition. That private property may have developed earlier elsewhere, I would have to concede. Ellen Woods argument about the importance of the free peasant-citizen in Athenian civilization is probably correct though it does not obviate de Ste. Croix's larger argument that the more democratic ('free') the polis, the more reliant it was on slavery as a labour system. My contention is that in the the tradition of Western 'civilization' private property rights in and of themselves both as a concept and as concrete institution were not inconsistent ab initio with the most gross and systematic denials of freedom. While it is unlikely that private property rights had nothing to do with freedom at any time anywhere, Marx's argument about the dual character of 'free' labour as being free of both feudal obligation and means of subsistence is sufficient to emphasize the perhaps universal ambiguity in practice of the relationship of freedom and property rights. Closer to home the existence of individual rights forced the ideology of slavery to deny the humanity of the African, thus leading to a harsher form of African slavery in Anglophone areas of the New World, than in the more feudal traditions of Latin America. In watching the results of recent elections in the West I become more than ever convinced that while socialism without some form of democratic control of the state is at the very least unstable, the converse is at least as true. Democracy without the absence of exploitation rapidly collapses into meaningless formalities. To emphasize Justin's original point about the labour theory of property, there are much more powerful objections to capitalism than the theft of the rightful property of the working class. Terry McDonough