Argument about ownership

[RedScorpion97]

So I got into an argument with my stepmother about ownership and properties, among many other things. I told her that there should be no ownership (except for personal properties) and that everything from food to land should be distributed in a way so everyone can benefit from it. However, she said that people should own products and properties because they work hard for it. She also said that anyone, especially communists, who think ownership shouldn't exist are lazy who would rob the hard-working people. Am I missing something? How can I refute her? Or is what I'm saying inaccurate?

Please know that my stepmother (as well as my father) came from a so-called "communist" country where they were oppressed and thus, have those anti-communist beliefs in them. Also, please know that I'm still in high school and still have much to learn. :lol:

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

People can "work hard" for as much as they want (the bourgeoisie are of course notorious for all the hours of back-breaking labour they put in), without other people they could just about produce a chipped stone (and even then, that depends on the kind of chipped stone). Modern production is social, so why should anyone appropriate the results of a social process for their own personal use? Particularly if they're going to use it to alienate further swathes of the social product for themselves?

[tuwix]

So I got into an argument with my stepmother about ownership and properties, among many other things.(...)

If there is no property, there is no theft. There is no financial irregularities. There is no fraud, no scam. There disappears the greatest motive to kill. So a crime that is mostly a result of property's existence will be very low after abolishing a property. The theft, fraud and scam will just disappear.

[John Nada]

It's a "just world" fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis). The argument that hard work leads to more wealth for the worker isn't true. The flip-side of this is poor=lazy. Yet there are billionaires who's hardest job was being born, and workers slaving away in abject poverty.

Those that uphold ownership of private property the most are the ones who're lazy thieves. The worker's don't get back most of what they make at a job. Even if it appears that you're getting a fair wage, you're only on the job in the first place so the boss can tax you. This is exploitation.

Another common mistake is equating personal property(stuff you're immediately using) with private ownership of the means of production. A factory isn't the same as a toothbrush. The rich who own nearly everything are the ones with the power under capitalism. By owning the factories, mines, farms, stores, restaurants, basically everything, this gives them the "right" to exclude anyone else from the rights to that property. The worker has no choice but to go along, otherwise he or she will starve.
Please know that my stepmother (as well as my father) came from a so-called "communist" country where they were oppressed and thus, have those anti-communist beliefs in them. Also, please know that I'm still in high school and still have much to learn.None of those countries achieved communism, and fell to restoring regular capitalism. They were likely oppressed under capitalism, and now are oppressed under capitalism. It's just that the US has a more subtle way of doing it.

[ñángara]

If there is no property, there is no theft. There is no financial irregularities. There is no fraud, no scam. There disappears the greatest motive to kill. So a crime that is mostly a result of property's existence will be very low after abolishing a property. The theft, fraud and scam will just disappear.
And it's been so since there is a State: looting and pillaging in the slave society, fraud and scam in the registration of land ownership in the feudal society and exploitation of other's working in capitalism.

[G4b3n]

People can "work hard" for as much as they want (the bourgeoisie are of course notorious for all the hours of back-breaking labour they put in), without other people they could just about produce a chipped stone (and even then, that depends on the kind of chipped stone). Modern production is social, so why should anyone appropriate the results of a social process for their own personal use? Particularly if they're going to use it to alienate further swathes of the social product for themselves?

I think the argument that the bourgeoisie are always lazy is pretty fruitless. There is objective evidence to suggest that ruthlessly exploiting worker's en masse on a day-to-day basis is actually quite demanding.

[tuwix]

And it's been so since there is a State: looting and pillaging in the slave society, fraud and scam in the registration of land ownership in the feudal society and exploitation of other's working in capitalism.

Indeed. The phenomenon of state invented a property. First feudal rulers owned a whole state. When property will disappear, a state is going to do it too.

[Slavic]

I think the argument that the bourgeoisie are always lazy is pretty fruitless. There is objective evidence to suggest that ruthlessly exploiting worker's en masse on a day-to-day basis is actually quite demanding.

I agree,

I think it is more fruitful to point out the conditions that allows someone to become bourgeoisie, typically having friends and families that currently are bourgeoisie. Then present this to the myth that though hard work the working class can join the ranks of the bourgeoisie.

It is a much more striking contradiction to present then trying to quantify the amount of work the bourgeoisie does. I'm sure there are plently of CEOs and shareholders that put in 60+ hours a week to maintain their status. Attacking them on the quality and quantity of their work is silly and stinks of Protestant work ethics.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I think the argument that the bourgeoisie are always lazy is pretty fruitless. There is objective evidence to suggest that ruthlessly exploiting worker's en masse on a day-to-day basis is actually quite demanding.

Except that wasn't the argument. The argument was that modern processes of production are social. For any single person to claim they made something with no input from other people is sheer delusion. This is an important point to make, not just against open supporters of capitalism, but various cooperative fetishists, market "socialists", and so on.

The comment about the bourgeoisie not being known for back-breaking labour was an aside, but it's an aside I stand by. Not only are most details of the day-to-day operation of a modern capitalist business left to the middle strata, the foremen and managers, whatever labour of coordination the member of the bourgeoisie might preform is nothing, in terms of expenditure of labour-power, compared to what labour the workers preform.

[ckaihatsu]

One careless assumption that's implicit to this kind of argument is the idea that there's a 1-to-1 ratio of labor power per unit of material reward produced, as though modern mass industrial production is somehow like breaking branches off of a tree, and that *all* production is this straightforward.

Obviously this assumption leads right into a mindset and projection of *moralism*, as though the *individual* is somehow directly responsible for their own labor in a worldwide system of production that's [1] socially hierarchical, [2] highly technologically / mechanically leveraged, [3] exploits labor globally, for profit-making, [4] uses nation-state hegemony and the warfare industry to *maintain* the global regime of exchange values, and [5] hardly yields the worker's own labor value directly back to them as compensation, anyway.

While saying 'People should own products and properties because they work hard for it' sounds perfectly fine and unassailable, in practice it's a divide-and-conquer form of *politics* that's *foisted* on the working class since a *better* option would be to eliminate all of the managerial / administrative overhead that goes along with such a detailed and minute system of private-property 'fencing' and all of the millenia of conflicts over such.

In other words those in the working class who start by owning some *products* from making purchases with their wages may not stop there and may go on to own some *properties*, then to gain *profits* from those properties, and then, soon enough, their concerns are more with their interests in *ownership* than with their own labor-power and the labor power of others who only have their own labor power to gain from.

As owners they are part of the legacy of private property ownership as a social institution -- capitalism. At that point their life and livelihood is no longer predicated on their own *work effort*, as it may have been in their past, but instead is now predicated on the longevity of the institution of private property (capitalism), and its ability to exploit labor-value from workers.

I think we're fortunate to be living in a historical era where the mechanics of mass production are now much more accessible and apparent than ever before, thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and its inherent miniturization of the same -- every time someone accesses a webpage they're partaking from the 'commons' of socialized production, since *someone* had to create / implement that webpage, but at the same time it's hardly a 1-to-1 ratio of labor-power-to-user-benefit from that website. We might remind others that *industrial* production is basically the same, and that 'ownership' means shit since [1] no one is born with any inherent right to the earth's natural resources, and [2] the production process makes *millions* of duplicate-type goods *from* those natural resources.

The folksy 'build-your-own-log-cabin-home' assumption regarding labor power is from the century when the wilderness was all that existed.

Also, from a past thread:





The adversarial arguments used most often against the revolutionary case tend to project the following implicit assumptions:

- That all social value is reducible to realtime, one-to-one forms of 'service' labor, as what a *butler* would do. This kind of economic assumption is leveraged to produce the anxiety in others that if even just a *few* people wind up being 'slackers', relative to everyone else, then the entire 'social net' would face a crisis of value, and of value-supply.

What's conveniently *ignored* in this mindset / worldview is that many of our daily conveniences derive from *machinery* and *objects*, the labor for which was performed long ago, while each item used is merely a duplicate along with millions of others, thanks to the use of industrial mass-production techniques. So in this way social value is in *inverse* to the effort performed, since the labor provided for the production of each (duplicate) item is in actuality a *fraction* of its resulting usefulness to the end user. (Consider a mass-produced chair, for example.)

- Another assumption is that all 'services' / value to society can be reduced to rudimentary, butler-like kinds of *activity* -- that all societal transactions are made up of this genre of 'personal-service' kind of work, so that anyone who *doesn't* do this kind of work is then not-contributing value to the larger society.

What's disregarded from this assumption is that 'services' encompasses increasingly-complex types of work, especially those kinds that require extended learning, training, and/or expertise. Perhaps those who are simply 'receiving' rudimentary-type services, as for the execution of their daily routines, are then 'freed' to devote more of their waking hours to more-complex activities that produce different *kinds* of social value. (Anyone in an area of cultural production would fit appropriately here.)

Given a materially-leveraged mass production of basic items and automated services in abundance for everyone, the term 'parasite' could no longer conceivably apply to *anyone*, because, in that context, the existence of even a *large* number / proportion of people just living and not doing anything particularly socially valuable would not even *affect* the availability of options or potentialities for life-directions for everyone else, due to the overwhelming abundance of everything considered 'socially necessary'. (It would only be if someone was wantonly, willfully *destructive*, or if society, for whatever situational reality, decided that more-inclusive efforts were needed, that people could conceivably be socially sanctioned in regards to their activity, or lack thereof.)

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