The Myth of Private Property Versus Personal Property

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thepholosopher2.4 K2 years ago6 min read

I go over the communist myth of private property versus personal property. Catch behind-the-scenes posts and help choose my next video topic at:

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Transcript

The Myth of Private Property versus Personal Property

When speaking with commies, it can be difficult to discuss property rights concepts because Marxism has a unique framework of personal versus private property.

Marxists mean “private property” to be capital for the means of production, that is, equipment and resources used to provide for the needs of others.

“Personal property,” on the other hand, is used to describe that which is only used for one’s personal benefit.

But does this distinction really make sense?

And can such a distinction even be held in our technologically advanced, decentralized world?

Let’s walk through some examples to see why this communist framing tends to create conflict and lose meaning when applied to the real world.

A woman named Jane runs a photography business. She wants help designing an email campaign to promote her work and get more clients. Lisa, an email specialist, offers to help Jane for a fee.

Jane wants Lisa to use her personal laptop to set up a program and template that Jane can keep using afterward. Lisa sets up this campaign for Jane, a campaign which enables Jane to manage new lead messages ongoing.

According to Marxist theory, Jane’s laptop has been converted from personal property to private property, and now Lisa has a shared ownership in Jane’s laptop and is entitled to benefit from the laptop’s use, forever, because Lisa has contributed to the productive business use of the laptop.

Sounds insane, right? Jane paid for the laptop. Jane built up a business around her skills as a photographer. Yet, because Lisa helped on one, limited aspect of business growth, Marxists now believe that the laptop has converted to common-use property that Lisa can now continue to access and profit from, indefinitely.

As you can see, technological advancements enable the “means of production” to become much smaller and narrower than what was once thought of in the 1800s – large factories.

These days, a person could use a 3d printer in their home to start a business, create a business out of a home kitchen, or even create a micro-farm in their backyard.

The means of production can be fostered in seemingly endless ways.

And, even if someone did 99 percent of the work themselves, the Marxist view is that anyone who contributes in any way to production now is an owner and equal sharer in profits.

So, if a small-time farmer plants, waters, and grows a crop, and just wants to have a person help them pick the crop on a Saturday, the Marxist now says that the hired hand becomes an equal owner in the crops and profits, despite having contributed only a small fraction of the work.

Marxists also apply this thinking to any personal items that go beyond personal need.

If you have 3 pairs of shoes, but you only “need” 2 according to communist leadership, then your third pair becomes open to use by anyone else.

Sounds crazy, right? You cannot have security in your own possessions because some bureaucrat declares that you have “too much.”

Where this thinking truly falls apart though is when we consider the total factors of production.

When we talked about Jane’s laptop, we already assumed a cutoff from every single person who made any raw material or component of the laptop.

The millions of people who, through decentralized means, helped to produce the plastics, metals, circuitry, and wiring for the laptop are completely ignored in the production shared ownership calculation.

For people to have a true share in the means, one would expect that every single person who contributed anything to the creation of the laptop would get a proportion of profits from that laptop’s productive use, forever, if we were to follow Marxist property theory to its logical conclusion.

But we know that it’s simply not possible to pay every single person a fraction of profits every time the laptop is used.

Imagine Jane trying to pay royalties to a million people because she booked a $100 photo shoot and was using her laptop to edit pictures. She would neither have the time, nor the resources, to distribute anything meaningful across all 1 million people who contributed to the hardware and software she is using.

Some communists just hand-wave this fact by asserting that real communism rejects the use of money, but that would still fail to account for and assign productive benefit for each worker in each working situation.

This is the reason why some communists try to find a middle transitional ground with syndicalism and democratic socialism.

They know they cannot provide true shared ownership and resourcing for all contributors, so they try to compromise by having ownership and payment fall only to the local level of people working at a business collectively and directly.

However, if this arrangement is forced by government, it is now putting business ends toward a collective vote and removing the innovative element from specialists who, due to their unique insights, provide direction and create value in ways that others cannot readily see.

No matter what way you cut it, the personal versus private property distinction is an illusory one that quickly falls apart when you try to force it on all elements of production.

It only serves as a talking point for Marxists who appeal to the have-nots to get them to demand more for themselves regardless of whether they have meaningfully provided value worthy of a larger share.

The only ethical business arrangement is one where all parties consent to that arrangement.

Which means that forcing Marxist-styled collective ownership is unethical as it violates individual consent and autonomy.