Communist property relations - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15004410
I’m wondering if there are novel views on what property relations might overcome that of private property as it exists under communism.
I am dissatisfied with the common distinction between private and personal.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/property.htm
One of the distinctions frequently made in relation to the question of the abolition of private property, and often accepted as ‘marxist orthodoxy’, is the distinction between social property, in particular the social means of production, on the one hand, and personal possessions or objects of consumption, on the other. Possibly this distinction makes some sense in the “political” phase of Communism Marx refers to above. However, the conception is of limited value because, for a start, it is founded on the rupture of the human being into a producer on one hand and a consumer on the other, and life into work and leisure, dichotomies which lie at the very heart of the fragmented existence which needs to be abolished. The abolition of private property in the productive sphere whilst retaining it in the domestic sphere, would in fact reinforce the inhumanity of modern life: personal property being entirely for one’s own use, is without significance and therefore worthless, while social property still has significance only for the purpose of earning a living and is therefore alien and oppressive.


The only different view I’ve seen from the same article as above.
So, there is a concept of property which exists in our relations both at work and outside work, which is to do with this: once you have established, with your co-workers, the right to work in a certain way, to work in a certain job or draw on the services of others in a given way and to a certain extent, then we believe that we have a right to demand that that activity should only be terminated or transformed with our agreement. We don’t need to bring things into that.


Money violates this right. Via money, people forcibly separate other people from their life and livelihood. Money grants to scoundrels the right to debauch themselves. But money is a carrier of the consent of the community, despite itself.
...
What about use? For Hegel use is a way of taking possession of something (provided it is not already the property of someone else who wishes to use it), and has the effect of maintaining ownership. When one no longer uses something, then one has taken one’s will out of the thing and it becomes ownerless.

This concept seems to stand up. It appears to be a substantive and ethical conception of property: a thing is mine if I use it in the course of activity which is mine, that is to say, in the course of my socially determined activity. If I stop using it, it reverts to a ‘state of nature’.

In summary, it seems to me that there is a kind of concept of property which exists within the activity of working people and the ethical relations between them. Economic relations, i.e., bourgeois relations, violate this ethic and violate workers’ property. This concept of property seems actually to provide, in combination with consensus decision-making and collaboration, the basis for the organisation of social production on a global scale.

Does this sound promising? What is your take on the subject?
#15004427
In terms of Communism the real distinction between private and personal property is possession. If your need requires something it is yours until you don't. Then it will be passed on belonging to someone else. You never own anything as is given to you and you will be given something depending on your need.

However under Capitalism private property creates surplus value as the means of that property is individual rather than collective resulting in only one person profiting from that means. The collective may well require the possession of that property to live - such as a home for example. However the answer under Capitalism is rent. You are basically are a wage slave in order to live.
#15004439
However, the conception is of limited value because, for a start, it is founded on the rupture of the human being into a producer on one hand and a consumer on the other, and life into work and leisure, dichotomies which lie at the very heart of the fragmented existence which needs to be abolished. The abolition of private property in the productive sphere whilst retaining it in the domestic sphere, would in fact reinforce the inhumanity of modern life: personal property being entirely for one’s own use


I will say that this dichotomy between producer and consumer do exist under current economic relations, its not just a convenient abstract classification. We are both producers and consumers at the same time, furthermore, we can abolish private property overnight but this dichotomy won't end overnight.

Then, I disagree with this article's notion when it says that "the inhumanity of modern life: personal property being entirely for one’s own use" which to me seems like the author believe that private property is entirely for one's own use which is just false. The owner of private property don't use everything that is produced personally, that's exactly what sets them apart.

Finally, the abolition of the private property won't exactly end the notion of producer and consumer in any way, the point of abolishment is to end appropriation of surplus value, a better organization of productive forces not to end the humans' role as producers, we still will need that but hopefully a lot less labour will be required giving us much more free time to unleash the potential we got rather than wasting it away slaving for our bouergiouse overlords.
#15004440
There are ways of relating to objects in the world that don't necessarily fall neatly under the rubric of property.

For instance, the sacred relationship of native Americans to land. Does their use of the land make it property? When other uses of the land can destroy this relationship, which use should be given priority?

What is the use right of emotional attachment? I'm thinking of anything from an ancestral family farmhouse full of objects that represent memories of a family all the way to a cathedral, synagogue, or mosque emotionally invested by thousands or even millions of people.

If someone works honestly for 40 or 50 years does she accumulate some ownership right of the house she lives in, even though she may no longer be able to contribute as much?

What is the right of an artist to the art or literature he has created?

Should a legal fiction like a corporation be able to own anything?

Who owns the biosphere that makes life possible?
#15004488
Since I live in Canada and work mainly with indigenous people and groups, any Marxist property paradigm has to be necessarily anti-colonial and supportive of traditional indigenous property ownership systems.
#15004628
Pants-of-dog wrote:traditional indigenous property ownership systems.


I mostly know next to nothing on this topic, can you point out to some sources where I can learn more about these systems, Google took me to very basic shits and wasn't really helpful.
#15004645
fuser wrote:I mostly know next to nothing on this topic, can you point out to some sources where I can learn more about these systems, Google took me to very basic shits and wasn't really helpful.


Basically POD went there to recruit them for communism but they ended up recruiting him for their own agenda instead. It probably went something like this:


POD: "Hi have you got a moment to hear about communism and how the communist party of Canada can save you from oppression by seizing all the means of production?"

Injun: "Go away white man, we don't want no bibles here. Go to our casino if you want something to do".

POD: "Wait, I'm not a bible salesman! I'm selling communism!"

Injun: "commiewhatnow?"

POD: "communism. It is the salvation of all mankind from the devils of capitalism. It is the fight against the oppression of having money and owning stuff. When the glorious communist party of Canada seizes all the means of production for itself you will all be saved from the oppression of owning anything.

Injun: "the casino does pretty good, but who doesn't like to get more money? Ok I'll give you 5 minutes."

POD: "oh yes the casino will be the among the first things the CPC will sieze from the capitalists."

Injun: "what?! No, no stupid white men are going to be stealing our casino! We had enough of you white people seizing our stuff. Fuck off!"

POD: "wait! your casino? It's not owned by the capitalists?"

Injun: "yes so if you want to go seizing things that don't belong to you maybe you should go seizing the white man's stuff instead of ours?"

POD: "well I suppose if the capitalists don't own your casino, we could make an exception for you."

Injun: "you'll do more than that, go seize our land back from the white man and maybe we'll have some of your little pamphlets."

POD: "okay, so if I get your land back you will become loyal foot soldiers of the revolution?"

Injun: "yeah sure whatever. Now why don't you check out the casino and play a hand or two before you go?"
#15004682
fuser wrote:I mostly know next to nothing on this topic, can you point out to some sources where I can learn more about these systems, Google took me to very basic shits and wasn't really helpful.


This information is very hard to find, mostly because it is not on the internet.

I get most of mu info directly from indigenous people who studied their own community’s history and culture.

If I do find something, I will let you know.
#15004694
@fuser
You probably should rein POD in before he gives away any more communist party property that they have not even had a chance to nick in the first place. He'll be letting the gays keep their hair salons, the muslims keep their schools of martyr bombing, women their Avon selling and the brown people their convenience stores. By the time he is done there won't be anything left to seize and the revolution will be without a payoff for the commies. :(
#15008028
Wellsy wrote:
I’m wondering if there are novel views on what property relations might overcome that of private property as it exists under communism.
I am dissatisfied with the common distinction between private and personal.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/property.htm



The dichotomy between 'collective' (not 'private') societal infrastructure, and individual 'personal' possessions is an empirical, *inescapable* dichotomy.

This is due mostly to the objective fact that consumption, including prior selection, *has* to be at the individual, personal scale, since only the individual him- or herself knows best (typically) what their own personal needs are at any given moment. (In line with the communistic principle of 'self-determination' is this realm of personal consumer consumption.)

Of course any claimed extents of 'personal possessions' has its limits, and this definition specifically would have to be definitively defined and implemented by those of a suitable post-capitalist social order -- I see this topic as being currently unresolved since we can't just *project* our own invented definitions onto a purely-imagined future society, though the topic is certainly always worth discussing for its theoretical value.

Here's a past addressing of this topic, at the (now-defunct) RevLeft discussion board:


ckaihatsu at RevLeft wrote:
This dynamic of extent of 'personal possessions' can be summed-up as 'the padlock question' -- would people commonly use *padlocks* in a future communist society, or wouldn't they -- ? If there's no mass agreement for a *guideline* for it, people might wind up just putting padlocks on whatever 'personal property' they claim as 'theirs', without regard to 'personal absenteeism' -- maybe they'd return to enjoy those items at some later time, or maybe they wouldn't.

One possible standard, from my model, is this one:


consumption [demand] -- Individuals may possess and consume as much material as they want, with the proviso that the material is being actively used in a personal capacity only -- after a certain period of disuse all personal possessions not in active use will revert to collectivized communist property

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


This obviously depends on a mass-agreed 'time duration' standard for each and every personal possession claimed by anyone / everyone, but I admittedly have no idea *how* it could conceivably be implemented as such on a consistent basis without any apparent social means of *enforcement*, since a communistic society has no standing *state* for such matters.

Another formulation I've devised in the past is one of simply having to *watch* your stuff -- if you're not actively around something that you can claim as yours in realtime, then it's *not* yours and anyone else has full leeway to simply take it for *themselves* since you're unable to guard it. Of course this is rather lacking, too, since someone *should* reasonably be able to leave their personal possessions for some limited length of time, as for nightlife or travel, and still be able to retrieve them as their own when they return.



https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889317



---



One of the distinctions frequently made in relation to the question of the abolition of private property, and often accepted as ‘marxist orthodoxy’, is the distinction between social property, in particular the social means of production, on the one hand, and personal possessions or objects of consumption, on the other. Possibly this distinction makes some sense in the “political” phase of Communism Marx refers to above.



However, the conception is of limited value because, for a start, it is founded on the rupture of the human being into a producer on one hand and a consumer on the other, and life into work and leisure, dichotomies which lie at the very heart of the fragmented existence which needs to be abolished. The abolition of private property in the productive sphere whilst retaining it in the domestic sphere, would in fact reinforce the inhumanity of modern life: personal property being entirely for one’s own use, is without significance and therefore worthless, while social property still has significance only for the purpose of earning a living and is therefore alien and oppressive.



Sorry, but this is a decidedly *glib* treatment of the subject matter -- this dichotomy between organic-worker and organic-consumer within the same person *is* / would-be an empirical logistical fact, but it would *not* mimic the characteristics of '[social uselessness]' (personal sphere), and 'alienation' (social realm of liberated-work), that you're indicating.

This is because perhaps much of what one does in one's own personal sphere could still manage to have *non-isolated*, socially-positive knock-on effects, as in the case of any artwork / music / creativity that's then freely voluntarily shared with the larger world, as over the Internet.

And, the collective revolutionary overcoming of capitalist productive relations (class) would mean that work *could not* ever be alienating to *any* individual, ever again. People would individually and proportionately-collectively have total personal discretion as to where their liberated labor efforts would go, if at all, with the results necessarily borne collectively (less total liberated-work would result in a simpler, sparser material world, post-capitalism, while *more* total liberated-work efforts on-the-whole would yield more sophisticated materials / infrastructure and a more-sophisticated / -complex social world).

I happen to *differ* with your implied conception of a post-capitalist material economics -- people wouldn't have to 'earn a living', post-capitalism, because the *distribution* of humanely needed goods and infrastructure wouldn't be so forcefully individuating (as we're used to, under capitalism), because everyone would be liberated from having to use (necessarily-commodified) *exchange values*. Non-commodity collective production would be fully-automated mass-industrially-produced *free-access* and *direct-distribution*, entirely precluding any need for commodity-type exchanges, as through the numerous 'middlemen' expropriators of exchange-values today.

(In other words machinery would be non-privately-controlled, instead directed and tasked at the collective level to wherever organic human need remained unmet -- much could be produced just by 'pressing buttons' once the machinery was installed and automated, requiring no further human labor per batch of production.)


Wellsy wrote:
The only different view I’ve seen from the same article as above.




So, there is a concept of property which exists in our relations both at work and outside work, which is to do with this: once you have established, with your co-workers, the right to work in a certain way, to work in a certain job or draw on the services of others in a given way and to a certain extent, then we believe that we have a right to demand that that activity should only be terminated or transformed with our agreement. We don’t need to bring things into that.



This, unfortunately, is a hack's position on the issue since there's no escaping the *material world* while discussing politics and proletarian revolution -- to think that everyone would just give up mass industrial production in favor of holding hands in a circle on grassy hilltops is a *misconception* at best, and is definitely *idealistic*.



Money violates this right. Via money, people forcibly separate other people from their life and livelihood. Money grants to scoundrels the right to debauch themselves. But money is a carrier of the consent of the community, despite itself.



The social practice of money / currency should *not* be defended in the least because of what you've just argued, incidentally -- yes, exchange values *do* dispossess people from their / our life and livelihoods -- and personal political power in the world, and the elimination of money / currency should be priority #1 for any worldwide proletarian revolution.

We do have theoretical *alternatives*, one of which is the model framework that I developed, at the link earlier in this post, which shows how collective self-determination over the material world could be planned *entirely* without the use of commodification or exchange values whatsoever.

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889317



What about use? For Hegel use is a way of taking possession of something (provided it is not already the property of someone else who wishes to use it), and has the effect of maintaining ownership. When one no longer uses something, then one has taken one’s will out of the thing and it becomes ownerless.

This concept seems to stand up. It appears to be a substantive and ethical conception of property: a thing is mine if I use it in the course of activity which is mine, that is to say, in the course of my socially determined activity. If I stop using it, it reverts to a ‘state of nature’.



Agreed.



In summary, it seems to me that there is a kind of concept of property which exists within the activity of working people and the ethical relations between them. Economic relations, i.e., bourgeois relations, violate this ethic and violate workers’ property. This concept of property seems actually to provide, in combination with consensus decision-making and collaboration, the basis for the organisation of social production on a global scale.



Wellsy wrote:
Does this sound promising? What is your take on the subject?
#15008226
Pants-of-dog wrote:
Since I live in Canada and work mainly with indigenous people and groups, any Marxist property paradigm has to be necessarily anti-colonial and supportive of traditional indigenous property ownership systems.



The term 'Marxist property paradigm' is a *contradiction of meaning* within itself, strictly speaking (even though I do happen to use the term 'collectivized communist property' in my own model).

Yes, the physical *land*, equipment, factories, etc., would still continue to exist, post-capitalism, but, no, ultimately there can't be any 'state'-type apparatus in existence (to 'officially' designate land parcels), due to the problematics of having *any* kind of specialized / separatist administrative institution -- a substitutionist elitist bureaucracy.

So despite the horrific history of genocide experienced by indigenous peoples, there wouldn't be any 'exceptions' from collectivization of the means of mass industrial production, for this-or-that oppressed population, on any separate / separatist basis from the whole of humanity.

This premise presupposes that post-capitalist society would be a fully communist-type one, one that enables full individualism to the point where socio-political subgroupings, as for an indigenous population, would neither be possible nor advantageous, compared to the full self-determined 'group' of all of humanity.

I'll refer to Wilde's excellent essay on this general topic:



Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient.



https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/



---


SolarCross wrote:
@fuser
You probably should rein POD in before he gives away any more communist party property that they have not even had a chance to nick in the first place. He'll be letting the gays keep their hair salons, the muslims keep their schools of martyr bombing, women their Avon selling and the brown people their convenience stores. By the time he is done there won't be anything left to seize and the revolution will be without a payoff for the commies. :(



This is just cheap identity politics, but it does serve to reinforce my point about the need for *full* collectivization -- I'm critiquing demographic-type identity politics *from the left* / to-the-left of it, to say that the definition of communism includes the annihilation of any fixed, standing 'ownership' rights, as we're so used to seeing in our hyper-subdivided private property relations within capitalism -- where even the earth itself is commodified into tiny portions of land and machinery, for private gain.

So even the 'commie' revolution isn't for a 'commie' nation, or for any other arbitrary subdivision of the whole human population on earth -- either it abolishes private property altogether or else it's *not* a truly proletarian revolution, by definition.
#15008230
Technically a communist party would be a private corporation because not everyone can join. Good job serving a monopolistic private corporation in its greedy quest to steal all the property on earth for itself.
#15008238
SolarCross wrote:
Technically a communist party would be a private corporation because not everyone can join. Good job serving a monopolistic private corporation in its greedy quest to steal all the property on earth for itself.



No, I can't agree with this definition -- any 'party' structure *wouldn't* be equivalent to a corporation / business, because it wouldn't have the goal of making money from profit-making activities. It would be more accurate to use the term 'expansionism', as the former USSR was, for the sake of collectivization -- shifting property relations *away* from private-property ones, *to* an overall collectivist one. The expropriation / seizing of private property (means of mass industrial production) along the way would just be incidental to this paramount *political* task.

Also, the leadership of any party would just be a *formality*, for decisiveness against the bourgeois foe since a proletarian revolution requires the *mass participation* of working class people on-the-ground, bottom-up. The party can never *substitute* for working class collective activity because if that happened the party would become a substitutionist *bureaucracy* (Stalinistic), and would have to be overthrown by the working class, along with capitalism.

Here's a diagram that illustrates the dynamic / dimension of *scale* involved:


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

Spoiler: show
Image
#15008239
If you went from having no land to stealing all the land and goods on the face of the earth then you just made the biggest profit the world has ever seen. Apparently commies aren't trying to do that by mistake they are trying to do that on purpose which means that the intention is indeed to make a profit. Whatever lying they put on top of that the facts are the facts.

Communist parties are indeed the greediest of greedy private corporations, luckily they are also usually just a bunch of anti-social failures.
#15008245
SolarCross wrote:
If you went from having no land to stealing all the land and goods on the face of the earth then you just made the biggest profit the world has ever seen. Apparently commies aren't trying to do that by mistake they are trying to do that on purpose which means that the intention is indeed to make a profit. Whatever lying they put on top of that the facts are the facts.

Communist parties are indeed the greediest of greedy private corporations, luckily they are also usually just a bunch of anti-social failures.



Hmmmm, you're still missing the point -- *all* exchange values like rentier-type values (land, private infrastructure), *and* all equity values (capital investments) would no longer even *be needed*, post-capitalism, because production for social necessity (organic human needs and wants) would not have to take place on a *commodified* basis.

The process of *collectivization* means that social production (primarily factory work) would be done *collectively*, with individual self-determination over one's own participation, without requiring exchanges of commodities, or exchange values. Bottom-up centralization at the broadest scales would confer massive economies-of-scale, far greater than what's possible under capitalism, even with today's monopolistic corporate structures.

By eliminating the landscape of hyper-balkanized private property interests the whole *world* would open up to ad-hoc social organization *per task*, and specifically for unmet organic human need, instead of having to go through the realm of capitalist exchange values.

You're positing a cartoonish *caricature* of the subject matter, unfortunately, and also imputing off-base characteristics, leading you to be baselessly *dismissive* of what the communist cause is all about.
#15008255
ckaihatsu wrote:Hmmmm, you're still missing the point -- *all* exchange values like rentier-type values (land, private infrastructure), *and* all equity values (capital investments) would no longer even *be needed*, post-capitalism, because production for social necessity (organic human needs and wants) would not have to take place on a *commodified* basis.

The process of *collectivization* means that social production (primarily factory work) would be done *collectively*, with individual self-determination over one's own participation, without requiring exchanges of commodities, or exchange values. Bottom-up centralization at the broadest scales would confer massive economies-of-scale, far greater than what's possible under capitalism, even with today's monopolistic corporate structures.

By eliminating the landscape of hyper-balkanized private property interests the whole *world* would open up to ad-hoc social organization *per task*, and specifically for unmet organic human need, instead of having to go through the realm of capitalist exchange values.

You're positing a cartoonish *caricature* of the subject matter, unfortunately, and also imputing off-base characteristics, leading you to be baselessly *dismissive* of what the communist cause is all about.


I am just cutting through the bullshit to what is the real essence of communism.
#15008334
Wellsy wrote:the rupture of the human being into a producer on one hand and a consumer on the other,

What an absurd and dishonest load of nonsense. Everyone is a consumer, but not everyone is a producer. OTOH, to exist at all, consumers logically require producers. Likewise, everyone has been a child, but not all have been (or will be) parents, and the existence of children logically requires parents. Does that mean human beings have been "ruptured" into children on one hand and parents on the other? Why would anyone take such absurdities seriously?
#15008357
SolarCross wrote:If you went from having no land to stealing all the land and goods on the face of the earth then you just made the biggest profit the world has ever seen. Apparently commies aren't trying to do that by mistake they are trying to do that on purpose which means that the intention is indeed to make a profit. Whatever lying they put on top of that the facts are the facts.


This is exactly how I view British imperialism, and modern US neo-imperialism.

Both are examples of capitalism at gunpoint.

Marxism, in the Americas at least, opposes this. And if we oppose this, the logical next step is to support indigenous land claims.
#15008443
Pants-of-dog wrote:This is exactly how I view British imperialism, and modern US neo-imperialism.

Both are examples of capitalism at gunpoint.

Marxism, in the Americas at least, opposes this. And if we oppose this, the logical next step is to support indigenous land claims.

Imperialisms, anglo or not, are not "capitalism at gunpoint". No, they are protection rackets done on a very large scale. If they tangle with marxists it is because marxists present themselves as a security threat just same as jihadis. Dial back the lying, will you? You are not fooling anyone.
#15008488
SolarCross wrote:Imperialisms, anglo or not, are not "capitalism at gunpoint". No, they are protection rackets done on a very large scale.


How is capitalism not also a protection racket on a large scale?
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