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Private Property
I would like to learn more about private property, from a socialist perspective. Would anyone be able to provide relevant links or else give me a brief explanation?
Edit: Sorry, I obviously should've put this under Learning. Could a moderator move it, please?
"Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
"The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue. "
-Emma Goldman
Moved per request.
Private property in the Marxist sense specifically refers to material, commodities, buildings and the like associated with production and distribution of consumer products. It does not refer to personal effects, up to and including housing and land use, so long as their private holding does not develop an exploitative character.
I can't speak for Leninists but Anarchists tend not to have One True Prophet who answers all questions. I think most anarchists would agree with a Positive Law interpretation - that property rights are a social creation, to be changed when individuals and societies wish to change them.
Class war anarchists will tend to speak of seizing the means of production, and operating them in a democratic manner. Other anarchists make a distinction between property and possession. Property being the current abstraction of absolute control. Possession being a messy nexus of use, control and maintenance.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto" Section II, paragraph something or another.
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/cl...manifesto.html
"Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character."
