Marx adopts a triadic model of the concept of property and emphasizes how this concept assumes different historical forms, including private property. I seek to explain why Marx must be thought to commit himself to the complete abolition of private property by beginning with how he speaks of property, equality and freedom as forming a constellation of concepts within capitalist society. This approach enables me to show how, for Marx, private property functions within a social world structured by contractual relations established between allegedly free and equal rights-bearing persons, whose self-conception and relations to one another are determined by an abstract exchange value that finds legal and political expression in a purely formal notion of equality. I argue that there are two key elements in Marx’s critique of private property. The first concerns how individuals are unable to relate to themselves and to others as genuine individuals in an economic and social system governed by exchange value. The second concerns how a system of exchange governed by this form of value dominates individuals and is thus incompatible with ‘free’ individuality.

Readers of American literature increasingly already know something about the career of Cherokee writer and editor John Rollin Ridge. In the preface to his 2018 breakout novel There There, Tommy Orange offers readers his version of Ridge’s claim to fame: “The first novel by a Native person, and the first novel written in California, was written in 1854, by a Cherokee guy named John Rollin Ridge.”1 The novel Orange references is Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, a semifictional story of a Mexican war veteran driven to vengeance by the cruelty of white settlers. Although it did not sell well in Ridge’s lifetime, Penguin Random House’s new addition suggests that Ridge’s importance to college syllabi and American literary scholarship will only deepen in the years ahead. As Ridge’s biographer notes, while it failed to provide Ridge with the financial security he desired, the novel birthed a public interest in Joaquín Murieta’s story that has been with us ever since.2

‘What is the value of global justice?’ is the question that leads the enquiry in this chapter. By tracking the circulation of a photograph of a defendant before the International Criminal Court, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the primacy of market value in the dominant understanding of global justice. As the photograph is circulated through news media, non-governmental organisations, to an artist’s studio, and to an exhibition, the value of the photograph crystallises as congealing the message, and legitimacy, of global justice as concerning the fight against impunity. From a theoretical perspective, this is explained through an emphasis on the photograph’s ‘exchange value’ over its ‘use value’. The chapter closes with a stock-taking, highlighting the narrowing of what is seen as global justice when it is marketised: (a) the narrowing of visibility impacts on the multiplicity of global justice visions, and (b) the narrowing of visibility renders structural violence invisible.