Property, possession, and that fucking grey area.

[Azraella]

Sure, it's a simple concept, but it is insanely complex in practice. There are legions of things that shift from one category to the other.

If you have several head of cattle on a homestead, when do they go from being possessions that you are using for health and well-being and become a "means to accumulate wealth and power"? If you use resources fairly acquired under community standards to build yourself tools and a workshop for personal use, when does that stop being a personal possession and become a "basis of industrial capitalism"?

There are other complications as well. If you build something and let someone else use it, they are gaining value from your labor. Even if you limit trades to strict labor-for-labor exchange, they owe you compensation for the portion of your labor that they are using. Likewise, if you spend years of effort in the laboratory and invent something cool, that has huge labor value. If someone else uses it, it is a fair exchange for them to compensate your labor with some of their labor.

In those examples you have a choice between allowing a fair exchange rent/royalty in violation of your absolute prohibition, or allowing others to seize the creator's labor without compensation to the creator. Maybe you can find a happy mid-ground, but that's beside the point.

----

TL;DR: How the fuck do you deal with that grey area between possession and property?

[MustCrushCapitalism]

when does that stop being a personal possession and become a "basis of industrial capitalism"?
When it starts being used for profit, I'd say.

[carlk]

Sure, it's a simple concept, but it is insanely complex in practice. There are legions of things that shift from one category to the other.

If you have several head of cattle on a homestead, when do they go from being possessions that you are using for health and well-being and become a "means to accumulate wealth and power"? If you use resources fairly acquired under community standards to build yourself tools and a workshop for personal use, when does that stop being a personal possession and become a "basis of industrial capitalism"?

There are other complications as well. If you build something and let someone else use it, they are gaining value from your labor. Even if you limit trades to strict labor-for-labor exchange, they owe you compensation for the portion of your labor that they are using. Likewise, if you spend years of effort in the laboratory and invent something cool, that has huge labor value. If someone else uses it, it is a fair exchange for them to compensate your labor with some of their labor.

In those examples you have a choice between allowing a fair exchange rent/royalty in violation of your absolute prohibition, or allowing others to seize the creator's labor without compensation to the creator. Maybe you can find a happy mid-ground, but that's beside the point.

----

TL;DR: How the fuck do you deal with that grey area between possession and property?
When you need to employ wage labor.

[reehi]

every one be remind about all matters all the place matter depend on reliability so never forget property matters any aspect discuss in agreement we should be aware all time.

[ArrowLance]

I don't really see the problem. I mean there is no need to take away a persons possessions. However there should not be exclusive rights to anything. In no way is using an invention made in a laboratory without direct compensation to its creator some sort of violation of the inventions creator. The creator was no doubt raised and kept by others labour and in the same way his labour will be consumed by others.

There should be no exclusive rights to property, that is to say there should be no property whatsoever. There is no reason to really distinguish between property and possessions as once property is done away with the status of something as a possession is no longer important. There is no reason to think that possessions need to be protected or that there are exclusive rights to those possessions as there is no real benefit to exclusivity when it comes to possessions. A possession is based on use and personal fancy and there is no reason why such a thing would be violated by another person without the concepts of property or exclusivity.

[ckaihatsu]

While I basically agree with ArrowLance's principle of 'no property whatsoever', I appreciate LC's point that some latitude of complexity is involved in material issues -- in the present-day short-term, in a potential long-term societal communism, and also from an objective consideration of raw material factors (inputs).

My quickest response is that most contentiousness over material issues could be superseded simply by implementing full hands-off automation of production, as through the use of computerization and mass industrialization. Eliminating scarcity (itself a non-distinct *blanket* term) -- as through fully open and free access -- should be the priority of a worker-collectivized mode of production, so as to satisfy the *need* and *want* side of the question.





Sure, it's a simple concept, but it is insanely complex in practice. There are legions of things that shift from one category to the other.

If you have several head of cattle on a homestead, when do they go from being possessions that you are using for health and well-being and become a "means to accumulate wealth and power"?


This kind of scenario, unfortunately, *mixes contexts*. If cattle are to be used currently, then wouldn't they either be shepherded in a pastoralist way -- thus being possessions of the owner -- or else raised in a factory-type system, and thus part of the means of mass production?

In either case the cattle are, along with the rest of us, inescapably part of the current worldwide institution of private property, and so are *commodities*.

In a post-capitalist society no one would have any individualistic interest or conceivable personal motivation to do (food) production in such a circumscribed and limited way. People would have much more meaningful things to turn their attention to and would not want to use any retrograde and inefficient methods for fulfilling basic mundane societal needs. All would have the highest-tech, largest-scale, most powerful means at their collective disposal around which to politically organize for determining the best means of automated production, so as to be done with such responsibilities as quickly as possible.





If you use resources fairly acquired under community standards to build yourself tools and a workshop for personal use, when does that stop being a personal possession and become a "basis of industrial capitalism"?


This is the best answer within the context of capitalism, of course:





When you need to employ wage labor.


But in a post-capitalist context we may actually run into the 'doctor argument', where one may validly ask how different *types* of labor are to be valued, as around varying degrees of education, training, hazard, and difficulty that may be part of one work role but not another.





There are other complications as well. If you build something and let someone else use it, they are gaining value from your labor. Even if you limit trades to strict labor-for-labor exchange, they owe you compensation for the portion of your labor that they are using. Likewise, if you spend years of effort in the laboratory and invent something cool, that has huge labor value. If someone else uses it, it is a fair exchange for them to compensate your labor with some of their labor.

In those examples you have a choice between allowing a fair exchange rent/royalty in violation of your absolute prohibition, or allowing others to seize the creator's labor without compensation to the creator. Maybe you can find a happy mid-ground, but that's beside the point.

----

TL;DR: How the fuck do you deal with that grey area between possession and property?


Since a collectivized society would generally encourage a leveling effect, we could validly ask *how far* this norm should be "enforced" in a consciously political way, and how the more self-motivated type of liberated laborer might be treated in such a social context.

If a research scientist or artist, for example, devoted much of their life-time and work to the development of something unprecedented and widely appreciated, how would that 'work product' be formally valued, exactly, and what kind of (special) compensation should that developer receive for their *particularly* beneficial initiative and contribution?

In no way could the results of those efforts be *proprietary* in a communist-type society, but from a strictly material consideration the contributor would be "wronged" if society just blithely assimilated their contribution into the public domain without some kind of appropriate formal recognition and somewhat reciprocal material compensation.

It could be argued that the developer's material sources were all from free-access collectivized society anyway, so if they did a little better than others they'd be noted, of course, but could not be materially "valued" any more than anyone else.

*I'll* make the counter-argument, though, that -- [1] -- it would be no good for the collective society's dynamism and vibrancy to discourage individualistic initiatives in favor of a mass-beehive social mentality, and that -- [2] -- there actually *could* be an equitable method by which outside-the-norm considerations could be extended to those who make outside-the-norm contributions to a collectivized society.

The advantage of a truly communist society is that the mass political process could prioritize asset and resource usage according to human need first, and then to more "long-shot" / experimental / artistic endeavors on lesser levels of importance. A surplus of material production, if so enabled, could be turned towards individualistic-type initiatives that may require and request more-than-the-norm amounts of materials / resources to use for more "speculative" projects. If such speculative projects fail to meet their goals they wouldn't be at all *destructive* to the most critical, humane needs of humanity since those would have already been politically prioritized and provided for. A "surplus" intended for speculative activities would *necessarily* have to have the requisite liberated labor on-board in order to be produced at all.

Since not all goods and services require the same amount of material inputs to produce, there will always be a "scarcity" of some goods and services -- those that require *the most* concentrated skilled efforts and naturally scarce resources to produce. These kinds of 'rare' finished goods may just be the right kind of appropriate material compensation to confer on those who make above-the-norm contributions to the public good in a communist society.


[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy

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