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.
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?
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?
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.
no. nothing can be private property :stalin-shining:
