Interesting link… it seems like they would do well to have a section devoted to jargon—I’ve heard people talk about being against “property” before, but had never encountered a description of the distinction between that and various other sorts of rights to use and possession.
The distinction is standard in Marxism. From The Communist Manifesto:
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
[...]
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.
It does not seem like this is actually drawing out the distinction I was referring to. Or at least, as much as it is attempting to, it is associating various dubious concepts with the distinction, like “class” and “class antagonisms” and “exploitation”. But then, that passage mostly reads like word soup to me.
The worry, when someone talks about abolishing property, is that one is thereby depriving the individual of rights on a standard Lockean analysis. As these sorts of socialists would agree, it is important that the worker control the destiny of the products of one’s own work. This is identified with the natural right to property, and follows straightforwardly from the rights to life and liberty.
A “use/possession” non-property right seems to support the Lockean right to property, but only until the property is “released into the wild”—thus, presumably, someone else cannot just walk away with my computer, because I need it for my work, but I also can’t just lock it up in a closet so nobody can use it. Similarly, I could maintain the right to the farm that I work, but could not exercise the right to prevent others from farming a plot of land I was not going to use.
I think there are still some serious problems with this picture from several different angles, but it’s nonetheless an interesting notion of property.
“The modern division of labor links together most everyone on the planet in a tremendously complex, cooperative web of relationships. Let’s call stuff that people can use individually personal property and stuff that a great number of people need to cooperate in order to use means of production, and when these means of production are acknowledged as the property of individuals, let’s call them private property. Ownership of private property does correspond to the set of those who work the private property to produce wealth; instead, a subset of people have control over these means of production, allowing them power over those who do not. We communists don’t want to get rid of personal property; instead, we want to convert the means of production from private property to some public kind or another.”
The best overview of the technical meaning of “exploitation,” at least in the later Marx, can be found here. (By contrast, I think I’d need to know what you find dubious about the concept of class to better explain it, since there’s no single technical definition of class within Marxist discourse and the range of them doesn’t wander very wildly from the normal English use of the term, which I assume you’re perfectly familiar with.)
Sure, that pretty well matches both my previous understanding from my study of Hegel/Marx and what I’d written above. The slippery part of this is the distinction between “private property” and “personal property”, and exactly what qualifies as which (and who gets to decide), and what happens to my personal property when I find it has become a “means of production”.
I was not expressing lack of understanding regarding words like “class” and “exploitation” when I called them “dubious”. I heartily recommend Hegel’s description of “exploitation” (from Phenomenology of Spirit—the lord and the bondsman) over Marx’s—Marx is basically just Hegel plus bad economics.
At any rate, I’m not particularly interested in hashing out any of this stuff on this forum—I had just found it interesting that there was a notion of property amongst “libertarian socialists” that seems very nearly compatible with the Lockean natural-rights analysis (and that I had not heard previously).
Interesting link… it seems like they would do well to have a section devoted to jargon—I’ve heard people talk about being against “property” before, but had never encountered a description of the distinction between that and various other sorts of rights to use and possession.
The distinction is standard in Marxism. From The Communist Manifesto:
It does not seem like this is actually drawing out the distinction I was referring to. Or at least, as much as it is attempting to, it is associating various dubious concepts with the distinction, like “class” and “class antagonisms” and “exploitation”. But then, that passage mostly reads like word soup to me.
The worry, when someone talks about abolishing property, is that one is thereby depriving the individual of rights on a standard Lockean analysis. As these sorts of socialists would agree, it is important that the worker control the destiny of the products of one’s own work. This is identified with the natural right to property, and follows straightforwardly from the rights to life and liberty.
A “use/possession” non-property right seems to support the Lockean right to property, but only until the property is “released into the wild”—thus, presumably, someone else cannot just walk away with my computer, because I need it for my work, but I also can’t just lock it up in a closet so nobody can use it. Similarly, I could maintain the right to the farm that I work, but could not exercise the right to prevent others from farming a plot of land I was not going to use.
I think there are still some serious problems with this picture from several different angles, but it’s nonetheless an interesting notion of property.
Does this paraphrase make more sense to you?
“The modern division of labor links together most everyone on the planet in a tremendously complex, cooperative web of relationships. Let’s call stuff that people can use individually personal property and stuff that a great number of people need to cooperate in order to use means of production, and when these means of production are acknowledged as the property of individuals, let’s call them private property. Ownership of private property does correspond to the set of those who work the private property to produce wealth; instead, a subset of people have control over these means of production, allowing them power over those who do not. We communists don’t want to get rid of personal property; instead, we want to convert the means of production from private property to some public kind or another.”
The best overview of the technical meaning of “exploitation,” at least in the later Marx, can be found here. (By contrast, I think I’d need to know what you find dubious about the concept of class to better explain it, since there’s no single technical definition of class within Marxist discourse and the range of them doesn’t wander very wildly from the normal English use of the term, which I assume you’re perfectly familiar with.)
Sure, that pretty well matches both my previous understanding from my study of Hegel/Marx and what I’d written above. The slippery part of this is the distinction between “private property” and “personal property”, and exactly what qualifies as which (and who gets to decide), and what happens to my personal property when I find it has become a “means of production”.
I was not expressing lack of understanding regarding words like “class” and “exploitation” when I called them “dubious”. I heartily recommend Hegel’s description of “exploitation” (from Phenomenology of Spirit—the lord and the bondsman) over Marx’s—Marx is basically just Hegel plus bad economics.
At any rate, I’m not particularly interested in hashing out any of this stuff on this forum—I had just found it interesting that there was a notion of property amongst “libertarian socialists” that seems very nearly compatible with the Lockean natural-rights analysis (and that I had not heard previously).