Removed by mod
Can an object be either private or personal property?
Removed by modI got into an argument about guns and my reasoning is guns, cars, and houses can be either personal and private property. For example, someone in a communist militia who owns a gun for the benefit of the militia would be owning that gun personally, while someone who is in a reactionary militia or hordes guns for their value would own those guns privately. Same thing for a house or car. If you own either of those out of necessity it's personal property while if you own either of these things not because you need them then it's private property. I think the intent of ownership is very important, I think a toothbrush could be private property if your hoarding them to sell. Does anyone get what I'm saying? Can we keep the discussion related to guns since that's where this question came up.
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Umm not quite. These terms aren't stand ins for "bad" and "good"
Personal property is the stuff you yourself actually use. Private property is stuff you don't use and yet somehow still own. You have shares or a 401k equivalent? You own private property.
So an artist can own their own paintbrushes, which are both personal property and means of production.
Similarly a right wing chud who is a member of a militia might own a rifle and that would be personal property. If he incorporated a militia he owned, then the militia's arsenal would be private property.
A leftist militia would either own their guns singly (personal property) or as a co operative, in which case it would be collective property.
What's the Marxist view of property, my view of it is obviously different from it. It can't just be a binary personal/private dynamic. Property ownership can be complicated.
Marx acknowledges that property ownership, much like class,has grey areas (A blacksmith has a team of apprentices who use his forge, is the forge personal or private property? Kind of both!)
He also points out that these terms dont really hold pre capitalism, high feudal landholding, for instance, isnt private property due to how feudal bonds work. Nor is government property.
But the primary dialectic is between collective and private property during the Capitalist/Socialist transition, since the vast majority of the economy is under private property relations
Explain the feudal property situation, I'm under the assumption it was a form of slavery and the serfs collective property. And the slavery that occurred in european colonies with non european slaves was a different more private property focused slavery than what happened in eurasian feudalism. And that under capitalism wage slavery is a thing and it's the least harsh of the three with a lot of self determination for the workers. But the thing is people are property and the goal of leftism is to liberate ourselves from being property, or at least get a bigger cage. So what difference does it make if there is a mutual benefit from feudalism? Serfs are still property, and to bring it back to guns, are they not property as well?
Well, feudalism wasnt better, it was just qualitatively different.
(Very broadly and eurocentric.)
West European peasantry were usually not serfs, at least after 1000CE or so. they could in principle leave any time, though in practice finding a place to go could be difficult given most cities had vagrancy laws.
East European Serfs were bonded to the land, but in principle had economic freedom over their own allotment as long as they performed corvee labour on the lords land or provided a tithe.
There were also Yeoman farmers (kulaks) and tenant farmers who owned or rented land respectively and could be quite wealthy. Amd then there are the cities and guilds and proto-capitalism.
But the biggest difference is further up, where the relations of Knight/Lord/King amd their interlinking responsibility get fuzzy and the concept of property diffuses across the ranks. Sometimes this tilted to the Barons, like in France and England before 1500, sometimes to the King like with the Ottomans.
For instance, in principle, a serf could petition the king, saying the local lord was not upkeeping the land and roads and had abdicated his responsibility, and the king could kick him out and appoint another lord, or dissolve the title and rule directly, or split the land and free the serfs, all of these (very) occasionally happened. In practice this usually would cause a barons revolt.
So what's the differences between chattel slavery? Didn't the carribain kill so many slaves through hard labor they had to constantly import more since they didn't expect then to survive and the usa focused on breeding them since they couldn't get any more from Africa because of a ban of some kind? And what about the house and field slaves? That's an example of class. And Europe abolished it before slavery of Africans at least became an industry staple in the motherland at least, the colonies it still happened for a while longer. And the ottomans castrated their slaves, well more than others no?
Yes, but chattel slavery in western Europe was pretty much gone by the time of Colonialism (in fact the raid on Goa rather than 1789 is a pretty decent point to divide feudalism from capitalism as economically dominant modes.)
The initial Caribbean occupation (which itself is tied to the end of the Reconquista preventing primitive accumulation in Europe.) did indeed drive the slavery of Africans (though this was already done in trade ports in West Africa)
House and field slaves seem to be the same class to me, they have the same relationship to production, just different means amd different treatment. Similar difference to a highly paid aerospace engineer vs an exploited labourer.
Ottomans mostly didnt castrate, that was reserved for harem servants and parts of the palace bureaucracy (The Civil Service being enslaved to the monarch goes back to Old Kingdom Egypt).
Also while their slavery was plenty horrible, it again differs with European slavery of early capitalism, being closer to feudal and "slave state" (really more "warrior-class") societies conception of slavery.
So peasants are tied to land by a pinky promise and chattel slavery is just awful. Well neither exist in modern society, slavery changed with the times, much like how I think property is a fluid concept then so must be slavery. There's us prison style slavery, sex slavery, wage slavery, there's the slavery that happens to migrants, and you got a few backwaters that still practice serfdom and chattel slavery that we just don't know about. Is that right or was that a bad take?
Personally I think the concept of property is fluid, it's a social construct and there's many different types of it. Private, public, personal, communal, single use, non physical, currency, rations, reparations, land, automobiles, taxes, ect. I don't have the patience to list them all. I may just have to write a very poorly worded post about it later.
Can you think of a situation when they are not mutually exclusive? Mutually exclusive means they don't intersect, can they intersect? I can think of the line being blurred or possibly being something else entirely.
Is it means of production, whose value is to amplify labor power? The only guns fitting in that category are ironically the hunting ones.
Well guns can be used to intimidate labor, so I guess they amplify labor power if by power you mean how much product they can output.
Well, they amplify violence power then, not labor. Violence and intimidation is not socially necessary labor as such
I think the original comment meant power as in political power, but you know it can have another meaning. Violence and coercion are tools used to increase production and a gun is one of those tools. A gun can also liberate when in the right hands, and it does that by the threat of killing. But what if the gun was not in the equation at all, what power would anyone have to coerce without a weapon? What authority would anyone have without guns?
I think the issue is thinking with private and personal property, it means something very specific for marxists :)
Well, that’s interesting thought experiment: can empire exist with just fisty cuffs army/police, intimidating people :) but tool use is so innate, that weapons have existed as long as humans, and certain level of class stratification will always require employed army of thugs to maintain it
Tools of the master can't be used to tear down his house or something. Is a gun not one of the tools? Also let's add public shared property into the mix with personal and private property. Let's challenge the Marxist view of property with all the other views of property. Are people property? If property is something inherent and a social construct would that always apply to humans or can we and by extension objects transcend the concept of being property? What is propertyless?
I could of not revealed my intentions. Would that of been better?
I just wanted to call out the gun contradiction on the left. And I did.
Look I agree with the fact guns have their place and it's in the interest of the left to disarm the right so they can't fight back as easily. But that political power coming out of a gun, what type of property is that gun? Would it be the same type of property depending on the wielder? And if cars are to be phased out eventually, shouldn't also guns?
I haven't had an account that lasts more than a week. I honestly just like challenging what people know and being contrarian. It's the only way you get what I think is truth out of anybody myself included. That brings me to this hot take, Marx's view on property is wrong, not abolishing private property mind you, just his definition of what property is. A gun in most cases is private property and that contradicts what he said about the workers shall not be disarmed. I might as well bring up the parallel it has to the second amendment.
I should probably state that the constitution I view it in the same way I view magna carta. Has some good bits but antiquated. The whole a well armed militia thing means to me that citizens should be armed to fight for the government. What Marx says about workers being armed means to me is the same thing but to fight the government, well ruling class. I think he saw it as a means to overthrow the capitalists, not to promote private gun ownership. If this site is gonna be so asinine about meat and cars and houses then it should make up its mind on the gun issue, either the mods should contradict Marx on gun ownership and say guns bad or admit guns are mostly private property and they don't want to abolish that specific kind of property because they think they can fight a war against the ruling class. Really I don't know, I'm just here to read shitposts and make people angry. But I see a contradiction and I'm gonna point it out as much as possible until I'm banned.
It seems to me that you are defining property differently from Marx, but using the same terms (private, personal, etc). So calling Marx wrong because youchoose to define arbitrary words differently is an interesting take.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your definitions, but I think you're misinterpreting Marx.
I always got that Marx's private property was property designated to use for increasing capital, whereas personal property is that owned by an individual for their private use.
So I think for your definition a personal gun is personal property in marx, not private.
