Personal property vs private property

jesus

Private property was understood to be bourgeois property at the time. I think Marx may have referred to "personal property" as belongings but I could be wrong.

jesus christ lads.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
ctrl+F personal

Well that's egg on my face dude. My only excuse is that it's been close to a decade since I've read the Manifesto. I'll go sit in the corner now.

it might have been more memorable for me considering I was libertarian right before I read it.

There is no difference fundamentally, it's just an opinionated worldview that's being pushed as gospel.
I have a bunch of sports cars I never drive and rent out to people who want to drive my sportscars. The opinion of somebody on the sideline not involved in the trade who somehow thinks he is an authority about the trade (even though he is not involved in the exchange/contractual agreement) is just an opinion.

Renting is not trade

owning the car is personal property
renting the car is private property

weird huh

He didn't invent the term "private property" ffs that was (and still is) common political language, and he wasn't the first Socialist to attack the concept of it.

It is a trade of currency for access. We are exchanging something we both value more than what we have. I want the guy's money more than I want my supercars for a period of time, and he wants the reverse.

"There is no difference fundamentally, it's just an opinionated worldview that's being pushed as gospel."
Like I said, thinly-veiled opinions.

yeah, according to wikipedia, this only applies to a marxist worldview

But I never mentioned wikipedia, I'm talking about your own arguments. All the talking points can be rephrased as 'we feel as if' or 'we believe that' followed by 'this distinction between usage of things we don't own'. It's an opinion. The only opinion that matters is that of the guy who owns the sportscars. He can burn them if he wants to. My worldivew and opinion that follows states that burning sportscars is sacrilege: doesn't mean he won't burn the sportscars if he owns them. If I can steal it from him, then I own it and his opinion will be irrelevant. It all depends on who can kill the other guy and take his shit. More often than not, the people complaining about 'stop using that in a way I don't like' lack any authority to do anything against the sportscar owners. Try sneaking into Jay Leno's garage, the security will kill you.

i'm agreeing with you that it is silly and doesn't apply in the real world

He didn't. He didn't distinguish between these two, because they're the same thing. This distinction is an anarchist meme.

Nice words-twisting. Here's the complete quote:

i don't know what you're trying to say.
this quote from earlier:

seems to suggest personal property is okay but only for the proletariat?

Both of these are very good

No, it means that "hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property" doesn't exist anymore because of capitalism. There's no "personal property" to abolish.

how would be we go about abolishing essential things based on exploitation, like phones and cars?

The idea is to change the relations of production in such a way that capital accumulation is no longer the thing motivating people in your political economic system. That entails changing property relations in such a way to make the intersubjective relations that constitute capitalism completely senseless. So the way to explain communism's stance on property is basically "you'll still get to keep your shit and use it how you like, the economy just won't be organized around exchange for profit".

Believe it or not, most proles don't own phones and cars. And there's no need to own such things to use them; actually, the richest capitalists tend to rent the things you'll typically call "personal property": they live in hotels, rent cars or use cabs, etc.

That's the thing though, you can't objectively define what is "hard won" and what isn't, so basing your entire conception of property around that is really shitty. Capital is a social relation, not a material fact.

First-worlder detected. Not cars, I'll give you that. But phones?

Mate, "personal property" as people use it nowadays, to differentiate from "private property", i.e. the shit like computers and clothes that you own, are not being discussed in those passages at all.

The distinction he's making is that between the pre-capitalist owner of private property, like that of the small craftsman, which was based on the labor of its owner, and capital as private property, since capital is a social relation instead of mere ownership of something that is used to make money (like the small pre-capitalist craftsman's shop and tools). And because it's a social relation where people sell their labour and produce surplus in the creation of a commodity, private property today is predominantly "social" as opposed to "personal". This has absolutely nothing to do with what the OP is talking about, it's the same term meaning, again, a different thing.

But you can own capital, it is more than merely a social relation.

It's a massive and important distinction.

I never said it wasn't different, there is a distinction for sure. But it isn't only and entirely a social relation, you can own capital, too.

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it's really not a problem you have, you sound like a brainlet, so don't worry.

Capital: Wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing
It literally is that, though. You can expand the definition and look at its social implications, that's for sure. But to say that it is "not the sum of the material" when it clearly is related to it is disingenuous.
That's begging the question. There is a difference between gold and silver because they have utility even in a barter system, fiat currency is just paper, which has a lot less utility (and wasn't designed to be stationery). But capital is itself, capital.
Not necessarily, you can have capital being produced without having it monopolized.

Quoting dictionary definitions that refer to common vernacular when dealing with social scientists and philosophers who not only develop their own vocabularies but also wrote long time ago and in different languages is one the dumbest fucking things you can do. Good luck reading Hegel if you're going to stop every page to ask yourself "but isn't spirit the ghosty thingy? He's trying to fool me!".

Basically, that is the definition of capital as taken from Marx's notes that were eventually turned into Capital, vol. 3 So pretty much his latest word on the subject. There's also pic related to offer some guidance. Either realise that this is what he meant (and virtually every social scientist develops their own vernacular to explain social phenomena, as just inventing new words would be a bit retarded) and retrospectively reinterpret the little of Marxism you know in light of new information (including the passage you quoted above) or stick your head in the sand and go back to talking about cars in a garage. I'm not responsible for any deliberate ignorance of your part.

You've missed the point in such astonishing manner that I don't even know what to say. I don't know how to put this politely, but you really need to give up this "thinking" thing for a while until you sit back and read a bit. Either way, I'm not going to waste any more time with you.

This distinction comes.from Proudhonian Anarchists, not Marx.

As these point out

Marx does not really care about such a distinction since for most.people.it no longer exists. Most people don't own anything of meaningful economic role, no.means of production, living, etc. Most private property isn't mine, but someone else's. Not only that, Marx had already considered the logic of commodities (exchangeable property) as necessarily reading to capital formation, thus needing to be abolished completely. As he says in the manifesto, the deed has already been done by capital itself, so communists need not worry about doing it themselves in an advanced capitalist country.

I'll use commercial property for now on.

Is leftypol so anti-intellectual that it won't even read the communist manifesto? Are you guys fucking serious?

Tbh Marx tought his reader would be smart enough not to consider the toothbrush debate a problem. Poor old man.

You can't jettison ambiguity just by hoping and wishing.

The problem with the separation is that current bourgeois society treats them as the same, and you have private property title to everything you own. For example, whether it's your bourgeois factory or whether you are a proletarian with a nicked toothbrush, you can sic the cops on the thief.

There are two ways this can go:
A: you lose individual title to means of production operated by more than one person but not to things not classed as a means of production (by ?)
B: Title is abolished altogether and no authority will enforce it, so things are only yours if you can hold onto them.

A creates the problem of defining what counts and having some authority like a state enforce it as a law, and B: creates the problem that if you leave your house, you'd literally have no title for it, so someone could claim it simply by occupying it.

I assume under communism, you guys will have worker's democracy decide what gets title (personal belongings, homes, and land), and what doesn't (factories, means of production that involve more than one person to operate etc), Will different communes have different rules, or will they carry over some kind of centralized singular definition from a revolutionary state that came beforehand?

I'm not against communism. Capitalism is pretty gay, but I don't think you have your exact story straight on what you want? It should be clear and straightforwards so the regular people who are going to now take part in running the production of society know what they are getting themselves into. I might choose communism if it's not retarded.

That was my point.

Yes.

That's cars I was thinking about. I know phones are pretty widespread – not smartphones though.

That was my point.

See and

That is disingenuous because it allows them a blank cheque to operate entirely on subjective interpretation/circumstance. Capital has a specific definition that, if you payed attention to my claim, can OBVIOUSLY include social relations, but the claim that capital is completely removed from the end-result of the production line is simply not true.
There is a difference between using the word spirit (as it has more than one definition) and trying to distance the word capital from any kind of end-result of production or wealth that can be utilized for many different things.
Latest assuming he is the only entity capable of constructing a definition of 'capital'. That is not the case as there have been elaborations on the phrase and its implications after Marx. You just don't agree with most of them, as is befitting of this board.
I am trying to ground the discussion on the immutable fact that capital can circumstantially relate to social relations, but will always, as per its accepted/literary definition, entail "wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing". That 'wealth' can be related to many different things, I do not dispute this. I dispute the "ONLY" social relations or other phenomena narrowing-down of the concept.
None of this remotely elaborates on the responses I made. Stating that "Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital" literally begs the question, and making a false comparison to 'wealth' as it relates to capitalism (which can include fiat currency) and other kinds of 'wealth' is disingenuous.

Yeah, I mean just phones.

The distinction was better understood by the masses in Marx's time. They are almost identical in today's usage though.

This. Definitely this. You are brilliant user. This may be the first genuinely good idea I have seen on Holla Forums.

Well then as I said, one doesn't need to own a phone to use it. My job, for example, provides me with one.

I prefer "absentee property", because it spells out the main problem and can be easily understood as antithetic to the acceptable, personal kind of property.

(And, while some hardline Marxist is inevitably going to argue with this, commerce is not wrong in and of itself. At least not in contemporary people's minds.)

Commerce evolves into capitalism in and of itself.

It's not to hard to understand the difference Holla Forums

meant for

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Your shit belongs to me. Got a problem with that? Heh, stay spooked, kiddo.

I think the bigger issue is Marx defines private property different than what we use today. It makes people think their house and land it is on will be taken.

he doesn't. private property today means the same as it did back then. what happened is that "private property" eventually took on a second meaning, that being "that which is owned by a private individual/citizen," which is the meaning most people today are familiar with

It will (although most people don't have house nor land).

Read Marx, brainlet. It won't. The issue isn't that some people are houseless, it's that the productive forces in society aren't directed towards directly meeting people's needs.

I think a lot of confusion comes from how people think about property rights and how property works. A libertarian/ancap has the idea that any physical object can be property, and it becomes property through the Lockean Method, i.e. mixing your labor with it, while you can gain more property through exchanging with others. From this mindset there really is no difference between a toothbrush and a toothbrush factory, since they are both physical objects that the owner of both got through exchange.

I think a major problem Leftists have when it comes to this distinction is there's no system of property acquisition and a clear reason why you can own a car but not the factory it was made in, or why you can own one car for personal use, but you can't own a dozen to rent out. Again, I think this comes back to the fact that there's no widely accepted system for property acquisition, i.e. how you can come about owning something. If you say the worker owns whatever he produces or gains from exchange from another worker, then that comes into the problem of what if he saves enough capital to start a business: presumably the capital was previously his property but then it stops being once he tries to use it commercially, yet this violates the previous principle that the worker owns what he produces. If you say the worker owns what he personally uses/occupies, then that runs into the problem of how you define use and how long someone can not use something and it still belongs to them, or what happens if someone loans something to someone else; if the use principle applies to the MoP of personal businesses, how can it apply to the goods produced specifically to sell, since selling implies the owner has no desire to use it for himself.

Ultimately I have never figured out a satisfactory answer to the questions with these two systems, and the only answer I can think of is a consequentialist system, where things are owned only so far as it doesn't lead to exploitation. This isn't an optimal answer since it doesn't satisfy ancaps autismal desire for rules.

1) This is what makes people houseless.
2) I mentioned houselessness only to stress out that it makes no sense to talk about "taking away houses"; exactly like Marx did in the Manifesto.
3) The only way to make productive forces in society directed towards directly meeting people's needs is to abolish property altogether.

Things are owned by society as a whole.

You and anyone advocating this is retarded. Hasn't anyone learned that MUH PR only leads to failure. Theory is for those that want to get it, there needs to be simple declarations that the working masses can understand.

>Marx was against anybody owning anything. That he advocated for labour vouchers that people would use for access to individual consumption just means that he wanted you to obtain things with vouchers and then get mugged. It's also not really a mugging if I call it Wertkritik der Praxis.
This is what leftcoms actually believe.

1) That's more than a tad reductive
2) You said "It will" which, in the context of your reply, indicates that you think people would individually have their land/house seized. Not sure where you called this "senseless" tbh. Anyways, a mere transfer of property isn't sufficient to implement communism.
3) Abolishing property entirely makes no sense because there are loads of cases where exclusive ownership of a thing is desirable.

Not sure you're getting your leftcom caricature right here. The common complaint about leftcoms is that they're too focused on theory to do anything real, so their criticism of Stalinists for being shitty don't actually matter.

He was.

No, it means that he wanted you to obtain things with vouchers and then consume then (which implies then there's nothing left to own). He states it pretty clearly:

But what about people who want to live outside of the commune? If everything really is communal property, then wouldn't there really not be a personal vs private dichotomy?

But that's wrong though. Marx saw that capitalist relations of production actually cause property to become more and more consolidated over time, which produces the bourgeois and proletarian classes. Private property is a consequence of alienated labor, not the cause of it.

You are right that the Communist Manifesto is referring there to the trend of the individual artisan owning his own tools vanishing under capitalism. However, the Manifesto still supports the notion of some form of individual ownership rights continuing to exist:
This only makes sense if the term private property isn't meant to encompass all property concepts.
In its present form, so again the writing here is not about all property concepts.
This means that individual ownership of some things will still exist under communism.

isn't that exactly what he's saying?

In gommunism, anyone can walk into your house, take your shirt and shoes and fug your wife :DDDD

It makes no fucking sense to distinguish the two.

So supposed I have a shovel as my personal property, if I lend it to someone else, it becomes his property according to Marx?

Ain't nobody down with that.

And considering Marx's view regarding inheritance, it's likely the government would kick your door and get your toothbrush when you die, because your son wouldn't get to inherit it.

You fucking moron, property gives you the right to lend that shovel to a person. The act of lending it to them gives them a right to possess the shovel, it doesn't give them ownership of it. Additionally inheritance under communism would be a complete non-issue given it's lack of capital accumulation.

Im sorry im a bit drun.. okay quite drunk but what? I thought it was that he defined abolition of private property to mean abolition of the property of the capitalist and that personal property is what is personally used not exploited by others labour or was that someone else?

m8, Konsumptionsmittel or means of consumption is just Marxonese for consumer products. It doesn't mean only things that are consumed immediately. Or do you think that under communism your trousers will only last 24 hours and then explode?

today's definition of private property, especially in legal, business and official contexts, is the same as marx's. but when most regular people today use the term "private property," they mean something different from what marx meant; that is, they mean the possessions of an individual person

e.g. this t-shirt is my private property

Nothing attracts AnCaps and "Libertarians" like this simplest of distinctions,

It is. It’s far too easy to twist private property into the toothbrush meme. Commercial property is self explanitory. The distinction between private and personal property is what it’s used for. A chainsaw is personal property if you are using it to clear your own land because you want to put in a private garden or build a shed. That same chainsaw is private property if you use it to start a landscaping company. So we want to stop the use of personal property for commercial purposes, not the private ownership of property altogether.

No one can live outside of society.

Indeed.

A specific form of property became consolidated: the bourgeois one.

Which one is it?

For all intents and purposes, it does. Society hands them over to you for this specific purpose, because you expressed the need to consume them in the first place.

No, but no one else will put them on after I did.

Like when?

That's literally what I was saying, mongoloid.
The second one. There's no fucking contradiction here, retard.

In every case where a good either cannot be shared, loses value with use, or is customizable/modifiable.

wtf i love Not Socialism now

i can't tell if you're now agreeing or disagreeing with them

But there are people who would want to live outside the communal system. You can't force some farmer manning his individual farm in the countryside to become part of the commune. There might also be cities or towns that prefer an Anarchist market system.

You're missing the point. Communism would place productive property into the commons. Not participating in society would necessarily entail removing yourself from society entirely.

All productive property, regardless of how it is used by the present owner? All fields and workshops are now the property of the commune, no matter what?

You're just now discovering that communists like to reinvent words? The words "class" and "value" are also reinventions.
Read 1984.

how about "property for use"? state vs private dichotomy is stale as fuck

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