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> [Marx] thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. I don't think that's accurate. Marxists want to abolish privat

• mason240 13y ago
  It's clear that a factory is a "means of production to be owned by the state," but everything is unclear. A car, a hammer - even the computer you are reading this on can all be used as capital and lent to workers to apply their labor to. Would all home computers be controlled the Marxists? Marxism is system that only makes sense at the very highest of levels (like the factory), but completely breaks down when looking at any kind of real implementation. Unlike computer science, where all levels of abstraction ultimately derive from a solid base of boolean logic, there simply is no base to Marxism/Socialism/Communism/Anarchism.
  • zeteo 13y ago
    >everything is unclear. A car, a hammer - even the computer you are reading this on can all be used as capital and lent to workers to apply their labor to. Yes, many means of production can be used by the owner as well but I don't think that makes the concept unclear. Marx only objects when you benefit from other people working for you and using it.
    • mason240 13y ago
      So what would happen in a Marxist society when I hire someone to do work with that hammer, computer, or car? Is someone going to arrest me? The proponents of it claim it would be a stateless society, but that clearly isn't true if they have the power to stop me.
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > So what would happen in a Marxist society when I hire someone to do work with that hammer, computer, or car? The simple, though not only possible, solution is that that doing the work itself, at least with the consent of the tool owner, entitles them to the value produced, and that contracts to the contrary have no effect to change that. > Is someone going to arrest me? That's a possible approach, too. > The proponents of it claim it would be a stateless society Marx, and some Marxists, claim that the adoption of their preferred policies would lead to the "withering away" of the State, but not that the policies themselves would equate to the absence of the State.
        • mason240 13y ago
          So like I said in another comment, it would be the state-by-another-name that would sending someone to arrest me for paying someone to write code on my computer.
          • dragonwriter 13y ago
            No, it would be the state-by-exactly-that-name enforcing whatever the rule was, which quite likely wouldn't be by arresting you for paying someone to write code on your computer, as that wouldn't actually address the issue with property relationship that Marxism is directed at (whereas redistributing the economic gains from that work would address that issue.)
          • dllthomas 13y ago
            It seems like just a collective refusal to enforce contracts that involve rents, while enforcing contracts that don't, would do a lot to put society on a Marxist footing (leaving aside entirely the question of whether that's a good idea - I'm somewhat inclined to say that it's not).
  • lamontcg 13y ago
    Its interesting that you immediately translated "means of production" in the preceding comment to "means of production to be owned by the state". There's other possibilities for "the workers owning the means of production" that don't necessarily involve the state owning the means of production. You can have the workers who do the actual work at the plant own the means of production, instead. Setting up a dichotomy between top-down heirarchial capitalism and top-down heirarchial statism implicitly ignores any possible middle paths.
    • mason240 13y ago
      Because in the end it they will be owned by the state. You can assign it whatever other names you want, but it will be a state. "workers who do the actual work at the plant own the means of production" This cuts right to the heart of my original comment. That is a very broad model that simply doesn't apply to most workers, and numbers of whom grow smaller ever year. Marxism is an obsolete idea based on a world that hasn't existed for almost a century now.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Setting up a dichotomy between top-down heirarchial capitalism and top-down heirarchial statism implicitly ignores any possible middle paths. Arguably, "top-down heirarchical capitalism" and "top-down heirarchical statism" aren't polar opposites, they're more adjacent neighbors -- there's a reason that many non-Leninist Marxist call Soviet-style Communism "state capitalism".
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        'there's a reason that many non-Leninist Marxist call Soviet-style Communism "state capitalism"' "No True Scotsman"? I'm not trying to say that's all that it is, just that it's certainly a potential explanation.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    Outside of Soviet-style Communism, one common resolution of this issue in Marxism and Marxist-inspired socialism isn't about what things physically are but how they are used. (Which isn't surprising, most categories in Marx are more about relations than essences.) Essentially, in this approach: Its not generally a problem for a person to own a tool, etc., and apply their own labor to it to produce value; there is no alienation there. Its likewise not generally a problem for a group of people to collectively own productive resources and apply their own labor to those resource to produce value which they share collectively. It is a problem for a person, or group of persons, to own property and rent labor from other people that are not part the owners of the property which is applied to that property to return value which is controlled by the property owner, with only a rental fee going to the suppliers of labor. It may be a solution to the above problem for the State, as a collective of the whole society, to own certain large-scale productive resources to which workers apply labor to produce value. However, this arrangement has dangers -- particularly, it has the danger of exactly reproducing the problems of capitalism which socialism is intended to address, with the entrenched authorities of the State acting in the place capitalists. (This is, incidentally, the "State Capitalism" critique of certain real-world systems, notably Soviet-style Communism, from socialist critics of those systems.) (There are other issues with capitalist-style property rules from a Marxist-inspired socialist viewpoint, particularly with unrestricted heritability.)
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      "It is a problem for a person, or group of persons, to own property and rent labor from other people that are not part the owners of the property which is applied to that property to return value which is controlled by the property owner, with only a rental fee going to the suppliers of labor." Stepping outside theory for a bit, I'll note "worker cooperatives" exist and are pretty interesting. They don't tend to exist in hugely capital-intensive industries, though (so far as I'm aware).
• hackerboos 13y ago
  Right-wingers often try to murky the waters when differentiating between private property and personal property. When talking about economic systems it's wise to classify property in three groups: 1. Personal property 2. Private property 3. Public property