I 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.
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?
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?
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?
