Tech wrote:You only want to seize means of production that have significant social impact (or are used by multiple people?) then.
Not "abolish private property", but limit it on the basis of who works it? It seems to me that you then have individual ownership as in distributism and mutualism, but then simply have co-ops for that which is used by many.
Seizing is probably necessary at some point, but in communism that's long since passed. But private property is a concept that we created, and since we created the concept and interact with it, we have grown to see the world through it and identified it with ourselves. Again:
Marx wrote: Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.
In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.
An object, a spade or a factory belt or whatever, no longer belongs to you or the collective property of twelve people, but can now simply exist; and people themselves are free from interacting with it as an extension of themselves or someone else; thus freeing themselves to simply exist instead of being an extension of someone else.
We were speaking of being isolated in a cabin in rural Alaska. This is an attempt to gain through property what the abolition of property provides. Whereas now living in a cabin in rural Alaska necessarily still chains you to the worry and toil that comes with property, the identification of one's self with that property and its limitations, we will undo it all.
This goes off into a tangent, but this is part of the reason the definition of socialism is important. While the Stalinists will say that the Soviet Union had been socialist, I don't think this is the case. Marx plainly points out that even in full communism there is an infection of people still thinking upon the lines of property to help explain to themselves what their relation to the world is.
One does not simply have a revolution, call it complete, and then begin creating official forms of art, official forms of morality, and official lines of thought that must be in line with the way things were the moment the revolution was declared complete and a new form of material reality in action.
Instead of stifling such things one must, as Lenin conceded, allow them to grow and for
the old generation to die not knowing their own children's thoughts and reality. And this should be repeated until, as Marx suggests, the conception of man to himself and his surroundings is more fundamentally altered than our own is to feudal society.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!