I don't know where DrZoidberg got his history, but property rights are as old as humanity...
Older. Much much older. Chimpanzees have property rights.
I'm pretty sure John Locke wasn't a chimpanzee.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that our ancestors thought just like we did. They didn't.
What is your evidence for the second statement? How can you know it is true or even false?
I think that a person living in a different space (another location on Earth) thinks the same way in general (individual differences in some aspects) as other people. Similarly I think that people living in another time (our ancestors) think like us. It's not a matter of thinking differently, but having different data to process. Ask someone what colour is a swan - the Australian will say black, the Brit white. The ancestor had to process how to deal with not being eaten by a leopard, but the thinking process is the same as a modern person (ignoring any differences caused by language and experiences - the modern person is unlikely to have had this experience, but may have had a similar experience).
Note that if you are thinking of an ancient as say a citizen of ancient Rome, that there is also huge differences between a person living in say Spain and one living in say Eritrea. An interesting thing is that about fifty years ago I read Livy's 'Hannibal' and I said to my dad how similar the bureaucracy of ancient Rome that he talks about and the modern bureaucracy I knew of at that time were to each other.
There's a couple of things here:
1. Marx's view of the alienation of the factory was a LARPers fantasy of life as a farmer.
It's hard to overstate the cultural impact the industrial revolution had on humanity. When Marx was writing they still had agrarian cultural values, even though they didn't fit at all the world they were living in. In the 19'th century they kept going on endlessly about the buculic simplicity and innocent pure hearts of farm workers. The Fabian society etc. But it was a complete fantasy. Urban workers had a more fun life, were litterate and knew much more than their rural counterparts just a hundred years prior. Nobody (apart from a handful of well heeled poets) in the 19th century came to the city and thought, nah... not for me. I am going back to farm life.
The main reason the workers of the 19th century wasn't that they were more exploited than workes had been before. It was because they were now litterate and had a space for their own intellectual life. They were in fact less exploited than they'd ever been before in human history. The factory owners were desperate for new laborers which pushed wages up. Those extra wages gave workers the chance to have some free time and to get organised.
It's the same now with young women moving from the countriside of Bangladesh to work in sweatshops. We think they're being exploited. But they don't. Because they're comparing their new life in the factory to the grinding poverty of the farm.
2. We continually keep forgetting the cultural impact of Christianity on Europe. The idea that those at the bottom of the status ladder were worthy of dignity was something that Christianity introduced. That's a super Christian idea. Socialism is super Christian.
We also keep forgetting the monumental shift in thinking that Protestantism came with. The idea that everyone had their own relationship with God and it was up to each of us to find bliss in our own way. Nobody had ever thought like that before. Yes, Luthers goal was to go back to original Christianity. But he fucked up, to put it mildly. Protestant thinking had a huge impact on how western thought developed.
Property rights assume that everyone is worthy of having their rights respected. It also assumes that every individual has a right to shape their life and future as they see fit. Those two assume Christian and protestant values. Those are not universal.
Yes, I am aware the India and China has other traditions that also led to property rights. But that's a massive topic. I'm going to stay Eurocentric here to keep it manageable.
3. Everyone is communist, in their own family. Every family works on the communist principle. We've all seen it work. Society and the early tribes is just an expanded family unit. Assuming that early humans had property rights is silly. We know that the early city states functioned like communist communities. Everyone would farm communaly, going to comunal grain stores, and the priests would divvy it up according to need. Those systems only broke down as empires grew.
To sum up: Free market capitalism works so well that it's easy to think that our ancestors also saw the wisdom in this system. But we have no reason to think that's true. There's no historical evidence for it.
