10 ms·

> “Private property” as used here refers to profit-driving ownership, i.e. the reference to “means of production”. It doesn’t refer to what would be called “per

• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > This is a blurry line as a sibling comment noted. If I want to start raising chickens on my property, do you take it away from me? What if I start selling the eggs from the hens to my neighbors, do you take it away from me then? No. So far what you’re describing is personal property. It’s one thing to own a toothbrush. It’s similar to make toothbrushes for your neighbors for their benefit. It’s another thing entirely to capitalize on that, making toothbrushes a vector for personal gain; making people pay more for that formerly shared endeavor, compete to provide it, engage in legal disputes around who may provide what. > Somebody will eventually have a more efficient production idea compared to the big government, and then they want to build it on their own property. Should their property be seized? Should they be imprisoned if they attempt it again? It’s similarly disappointing that the competition you have in mind is what it is. The goal in defining private ownership isn’t to distinguish it from public ownership! It’s to distinguish it from personal ownership. The distinction isn’t between state and people, it’s between people and organizations. Nobody should be put in prison for making a more efficient machinery of any kind. They should be blocked from either preventing other people from doing so, or from depriving others from the benefit of that improvement existing.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This is a blurry line as a sibling comment noted. If I want to start raising chickens on my property, do you take it away from me? No, the Marxist prohibition on “private property” isn’t actually a prohibition on having an ownership interest in any particular kind of thing, even if it is used for profit. It is a prohibition on the relationship by which one has a claim on the produce of others labor produced through the use of particular property. Now, the prohibition on that relation in practice makes owning lots of things less attractive than it is in a capitalist system (and that’s very much accidental). > All this to say: If I'm not relatively free to do what I want - barring the harm of other people - on my property, it's not really my property. Marxist don’t view exploitation of wage labor as not harming other people.
  • akarma 5y ago
    > No, the Marxist prohibition on “private property” isn’t actually a prohibition on having an ownership interest in any particular kind of thing, even if it is used for profit. It is a prohibition on the relationship by which one has a claim on the produce of others labor produced through the use of particular property. (1) So it's okay for me to sell the eggs from the chickens on my property, as it's not using others' labor? (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it's too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away? (3) Assuming the answer is yes to the above, what if I decide to automate the work instead, so I can profitably produce eggs without using anyone else's labor? Am I allowed to accumulate wealth, considering no other labor is involved, or should that be taken away?
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > (1) So it’s okay for me to sell the eggs from the chickens on my property, as it’s not using others’ labor? Probably (the “on your property” bit is pretty irrelevant here, the chickens are the relevant property.) > (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it’s too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away? Details of policy can vary considerably within the Marxist theoretical framework (and finding concrete examples is impossible as there aren’t any places that have really applied anything in this area of Marxist property approaches without Leninist modifications); fairly typically, in theory, the government would require the enterprise employing labor outside of the individual worker/owner (or possibly family) to be either public or collective, and contracting for labor on other terms would either be void or, I guess, might presumptively create a collective notwithstanding the surface terms. The penalty, if any, for a prohibit wage-labor contract (besides the contract itself being void) isn’t really a matter of general Marxist theory but of the praxis of the particular society in its context. > (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it’s too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away? Classical Marxist theory, being conceived in the 19th Century, didn’t really concern itself with large-scale, labor-free automation, but given Marx & Engels views on taxation – favoring direct, progressive, and significant taxes on income (capital and otherwise) and inheritances, as well as significant land-value taxes, etc. — it is certainly not outlandish to suggest that one Marxist position would be that you would be permitted to operate such an individual enterprise, but that as your returns from it increased in scale that they would be progressively more heavily taxed. You could, though, accumulate wealth that way, but not without constraints. Of course, some of those limits are present in many modern mixed economies (even with the allowance for rented labor), as tax ideas advocated by Marx, Engels, and others in the same Communist movement — very much in contrast to their ideas on property — were among their ideas that saw the widest success in the developed world in the transition from the classical capitalism that Marx critiqued to the modern mixed economy that generally replaced it.