Personal vs. Private Property

[Fawkes]

This may be more suited for Theory, but Politics has considerably more traffic, so....

Anyway, anyone have any good ideas or sources on differentiations between personal and private property. I was thinking that personal property could be defined as property that does not act as a means of production, but that's a pretty ambiguous definition and a problematic one.

[Broletariat]

Define property by use and occupancy rather than title and all the problems go away metinks. You frequently use your toothbrush so it's yours. The workers frequently use and occupy their workplaces so they belong to the workers. I mean use and occupancy in a broader sense too so as to avoid a co-operative Mutualist type interpretation.

[Quail]

I would define personal property as the things that someone needs to live, plus luxury items that enhance their quality of life. Private property is property that is used to generate a profit. For example, a vegetable garden is personal property in my opinion, provided that it is only big enough to feed the person/people that use it.

[B0LSHEVIK]

Dont confuse property with possessions. Property is any class of capital that can be used to generate wealth. Possessions on the other hand are just that, personal possessions.

And personal property, in terms of land capital, should be only the quantity of land one can successfully utilize without other forms of capital. So, only personal property you can have, is proportional to the amount of land you can 'work' with your bare hands.

[ckaihatsu]

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Given the end of wage labor and commodity production we might ask what would be worth *doing* with such widespread liberation and what would be worth *possessing*....

I think we'd have to focus on *use* values and "look", moment-by-moment, to see if a person is actually *using* said possessions or if those items would be better off as *public*, *communal* property. For example, if a person was an avid art collector they may *currently* have the means with which to amass an impressive private collection which could potentially give them greater enjoyment and enlightened sensibilities than an average person who *didn't* possess such works.

At the same time we *can't* just shit all over people with means who may have done *worthwhile* things with their privilege -- much of the world's current state of civilization, such as it is, is due to those more noble-minded owners of wealth who decide to engage themselves in matters of *cultural* concern (such as they are). So, by default of ownership they have become the de facto *caretakers* of cultural artifacts that are *not* in the public sector / public domain.

But we *can* ask *how much* a single individual can really *enjoy* or *gain* from their large sum of wealth, in whatever form. At *some* point the wealth has *far outstripped* its use-value to that individual and even the *owner* will admit that they have had to spread the ownership and risk around, as with "offering shares" and "going public".

As revolutionaries we're merely offering that such ownership, responsibility, and risk should be spread *even further* outward, to include *all* of society, in the *most* collective way possible, thereby creating a purely *political* society that has surpassed the need for capital altogether through its exercise of mass economic democracy, or a collectivized politically planned economy.