Serious question

I always hear communists argue that private property will no longer exist once the state can no longer enforce it. Effectively, that private property only exists because the state enforces it and once we smash the state private property will go with it. I've never understood this at all. I feel like the state is consistently the ones who take property and disrespect property rights with eminent domain and the like. It seems to me that the biggest protectors of private property are men who sit on the porch with rifles and "beware of dog" signs. Explain like I'm five, how will private property go away?

That's clearly personal property.

...

Pic related is private property.
Redneck with his piece of land is personal property.

You have to disconnect the notion of private property being connected to land necessarily. When socialists talk about private property, we are talking about ownership of the means of production, the people who own all the shit that makes the shit that we use, like factories and industry.

What's the difference between private property and personal property?
Is my house private, or personal?

personal

There are literally no instances where the private militaries used to secure property throughout history did not function in tandem with major landowners and merchants as a de facto State apparatus that either became a State or acted like a State. I think that considering ideal An-Capistan does not exist and would not because it would just be a Minarchist Corporate Mega-plutocracy, you really are splitting hairs here. Basically you can minimize regulations and intervention in the workplace and the home, and you can allow all kinds of insanely risky financial activity and you can allow citizens to fuck and kill as they wish within reason of course and with loose precedence placed on the integrity of free association (so of course you can kill people for money if they sign a contract and smile when you do it). But, this will always always always involve and require legions of mercs and effectively permanent security systems which even if they are just computer software and large industrially manufactured security fences and electronic locks, you are still projecting the equivalent of the State outwards. Some of these firms without any boundaries and issues with licenses could get enormous very quickly and again would amass huge security apparatuses which would be up kept by cybersecurity experts and mercs along with private intelligence agencies and "corporate espionage experts". You would still see massive warfare and suffering induced by large techno-military conglomerates clobbering each other over limited and totally manipulated pools of natural resources. There is no point in An-capistan you should just have a minarchist mega-plutocracy with decentralized brutal military governance. That would be what you want and seems to be ultimately what Land or Stefan and others want.

So, you have to understand, we're not using the legal definition of "private property", it's not "property that is privately owned". It's things which are owned at a distance.

Under this, your home is not "private property", it's personal property. That is, most of the time, your person is not far from it. Another way to think of it is, it's not impersonal in the sense that a stock certificate representing 1/3,200,000th ownership of a company whose assets include some land and a building is impersonal.

So, what IS private property? It's shit like factories, office buildings, those giant boxes that have WAL-MART stamped on the front. Under developed capitalism, most of the time, private property refers to property that is owned by a corporation; that is, no single person actually owns that building, save for the legal fiction that is the corporate person that represents the collective interests of the shareholders.

This bizarre form of ownership is impossible without the state itself recognizing this legally-created entity. If you know anything about real estate law, there's really 2-3 types of concurrent ownership, one of which is inapplicable (relates to marriage) and two of which would be utterly impractical for the vast number of shareholders that own a modern corporation.

Additionally, if you (and maybe a couple hundred friends) were to go down to a Sony Factory and try to go in there and make whatever you wanted… who do you think is going to show up to arrest you in defense of Sony's shareholder's property rights?

So where does the private/personal line get crossed?


Thanks b

So why is private property bad? Isnt that like a group of people owning a building?

So if me and my wife own a building together, is that somehow bad?

Generally, if you can make a passive income off your mere ownership of it, it's probably private property.

Ok what about your personal house,that your rent a room out of..what then?

no the building is fine, its just if you both live on the other side of the continent and charge people to stay there and use that money to buy more properties etc etc you're a parasite. But you and wifey living in 3000 sq ft or even 2500 sq ft house with kids and dog is fine and encouraged

So by your definition, real estate is bad?

Yes though obvi there would need to be land plot distribution or negotiation and of course some kind of community development process in place which existed and exists in most asian communities especially in rural china and japan for millenia and I believe that 21st century humans are capable of far more deft and reliable carpentry than their ancestors though I do think the instinct and creativity will take time to come back. But yes to actually address what you said, real estate is evil and so are all people who invest or participate in it just like banking and high finance or the infotainment industry (yt, buzzfeed, twitter etc)

Okay, so this is where I get into those types of concurrent ownership. Under US law at least, there are three types:
1) Tenants in Common: Everyone owns a percentage share of the property which can be sold, gifted or passed down through inheritance. Each one has equal right to quiet enjoyment. This is a problem with as many owners as you have with the modern corporation.
2) Joint Tenants with Rights of Survivorship: Everyone has a percentage ownership which they lose upon their death, being split among the remaining Joint Tenants. It can be transferred to other owners, as well, but if transferred to a third-party outside the original Joint Tenancy, it defaults to Tenants in Common, creating massive headaches down the road until the final owner dies.
3) There's a third joint tenancy which isn't valid in all states and only applies to married couples. Pretty similar to Joint Tenants with Survivorship, though.

In any case, with, say 1,000 owners (I'm sure a company like Coca-cola has a lot more than that) but lacking the Corporate fiction created to force-multiply the upper class's wealth… none of these would work. Do you know all the paperwork that is involved in a real estate transaction, especially commercial real estate? Imagine having to do that every time one of those 1,000 owners wants out and sells to someone else, or dies, or gives their share to a grandkid for graduation, or marries a bimbo with giant fake tits that's 1/5th his age that takes all his shit? And this is happening with every business?

So, we have the Corporation to simplify things. But it also allows wealthy people to pool their wealth with other people to exploit the near-exponential growth potential when you reach a critical mass of capital. And it does this as it keeps nipping and cutting away at everyone else. Because the only way that fountain of profit keeps spewing is if it's fed from the surplus labor value of the working class.

So would you also say that all forms of lending, borrowing (basically usury) is bad?

lending at interest and borrowing more than you can reasonably pay back, knowing full well that you are impoverishing others and the community are both despicable practices yes. However a friend who knows they will have the resources to refund their companion should not be scorned for asking for some resources on the spot and especially if they have a strong bond between each other. I think lending things and not expecting anything back and yet having a culture of making sure you get people back is really the way to go. But of course when you are running empires and human-farms you can't do that can you mr corporate?

but how to we define the difference between personal and private? My definition is that anything thats useful can be privatised if its in a large enough amount and demand.

Land is useful. Gold is also useful. These are also personal items to us. Whats to stop someone taking your wedding ring because its better used to make computer components?

Not that guy from before, but I'd actually have to agree that under a market economy, interest is pretty much a necessity due to the Time Value of Money. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Money today is inherently more valuable than money a year from now.

So basically friends borrowing is ok, but not from random people right, in all cases?

Private property is property that you can earn income from without working. That is, your family farm is not private property. Your ConAgra mega-field tended by some guys and a ton of automated equipment. One of those earns passive income for its owner, the other does not.

if you're renting it out, its private, if you're using it yourself, it's personal, it's pretty simple. Socialism is not against trade. Although abolishing it is on the to-do list too.

Yes i agree with that but he was asking if I am against usury not if I think usury is not absolutely necessary in a market economy. In this model we have you absolutely need everything we have including central banking and credit economies and massive military spending and oil extraction. All that is necessary for THIS model, but is not necessary for all models and also not necessary for the best models.

Private property is claimed by a private individual who does not personally use it but rather allows other individuals to use it in exchange for the value of what they produce. A factory owner does not produce goods in his factory. Instead he gives wages to workers who produce commodities in his factory which he then takes and sells. The factory is private property.

Personal property is property that is claimed by an individual who actually uses it. You use your car to get to and from your job at the factory. Your car is personal property.

Personal property.
Private property.

Land belongs to no one, because nobody produced it. The produce from land belongs to the individuals who produced it.

Only if you are making connectors for electronic devices. Otherwise it is a fairly useless metal.

When you borrow from a bank, you aren't borrowing money from someone else. That is, you're not taking money from savers. That's not how banking works. When you borrow from a bank, a bank creates new money and lends that to you at interest. It's not a time-preference problem in the way many neoclassicals think of it (i.e. it's not a case of savers expecting payment for the service of giving you cash, which is the neat justification for it.)

That's no longer a fringe view: It's now the view of the Bank of England.

y'all niggas need to start using "property" and "possesions" instead, otherwise you're implying there's legitimate and illegitimate property
property is a factory, or appartments you rent out (and thus don't live in)
possesions is your house, your tootbrush, your clothes

Actually, now I have a question about absentee ownership: What about things that aren't practical to keep around you most of the time?
i.e. I can leave a car in my driveway, that seems intuitive and reasonable. You can't just come and take the car because I'm not using it right now, but what about something like an airplane and hanger that I'm not going to be using 95% of the time, but still have a basic stake in personal ownership of it?

Or am I jumping the gun in bothering to make the physical presence of the object a factor, instead of just the basic "Are you renting this thing out?" dichotomy, since the ownership rights basically hold intuitively except a few smug bastard edge cases ("What if I want to live in a factory?")

private car ownership was a mistake (unironically). nice trips though.

You're too wrapped up in the word "absentee" I think. The issue of private ownership is in it's coercive nature.

p.s. I'm pretty confident nobody will have a private plane in a socialist economy.

Inclined to agree for the most part.


There are similar edge cases: Is owning a holiday home that you don't live in 95% of the year not coercive in denying others the use of it? (On the stricter definition I adopt at first - not really, so long as you aren't renting it out - but that sometimes leaves a bad taste if there's a social need for more housing, for simply rewarding leaving the home empty.)

I'm not sure if it's a theoretical or a practical objection to owning a private aircraft. In practical terms I'd say if private car ownership was possible, private aircraft ownership - of the simpler types - ought to be.
Though theoretically it's relatively easy to imagine how leisure flying could be socialised. I mean, even under modern capitalism I'd bet most private pilots don't actually own planes, they just borrow them from flying clubs, so the practical need to actually own an aircraft is probably relatively low. Somehow the idea of sharing a plane makes me more uneasy than the idea of sharing a car, though. (My guess is due to the practical implications of wear-and-tear.)

I guess the question in simpler terms is whether simply refusing others the use of something that I'm not using and have no intention of using soon is coercive, or perhaps just unduly coercive. If I'm present, I can always point my toothbrush gun at whoever is trespassing - but if I'm not i've presumably got to rely on the abstract threat of force (presently by the police.) which opens up a huge can of worms.