Is seizing the means of production theft?

[Kaijen34561]

I notice that all communists or socialists want to "seize the means of production" but isn't this technically theft? What gives someone the right to seize another's property that they use to make a living off of?

[Sewer Socialist]

Yes, it is theft.

Not only can we sieze the means of production, but we can take control of morality as well and/or obliterate it.

Morality is a social construct and we can do whatever we want with it. That, however, is not theft.

[Thirsty Crow]

Yes, it is theft.

Not only can we sieze the means of production, but we can take control of morality as well and/or obliterate it.

Morality is a social construct and we can do whatever we want with it. That, however, is not theft.

A much less edgy answer would be twofold. Of course, the global working class can, and we ought to seize the means of production, since the state of affairs we're suffering through is bound up with that same ownership over the means of production, exercised by both individual capitalists and state institutions. The question of "right" is settled by reference to consequences stemming from that same ownership. At the same time, once those persons using both the means of production and living labor power to their own benefit are expropriated, they could just as easily - work. If they think it's in their best interest, that is. They can also become economic migrants and flee to a region of the world where they'd be welcome still.

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Yes, it is theft.

Not only can we sieze the means of production, but we can take control of morality as well and/or obliterate it.

Morality is a social construct and we can do whatever we want with it. That, however, is not theft.

A much less edgy answer would be twofold. Of course, the global working class can, and we ought to seize the means of production, since the state of affairs we're suffering through is bound up with that same ownership over the means of production, exercised by both individual capitalists and state institutions. The question of "right" is settled by reference to consequences stemming from that same ownership. At the same time, once those persons using both the means of production and living labor power to their own benefit are expropriated, they could just as easily - work and act as part of a newly emerging community. If they think it's in their best interest, that is. They can also become economic migrants and flee to a region of the world where they'd be welcome still. Or, in unfortunate cases, they may deem it their patriotic duty to support and participate in armed counter-revolutionary groups.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

I notice that all communists or socialists want to "seize the means of production" but isn't this technically theft? What gives someone the right to seize another's property that they use to make a living off of?

Marx somewhat answers this in the Manifesto. "You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society."

Humans are always going to need 'means of production' simply because humans need to produce things to survive. But the way society has organised the ownership and control of that production has changed throughout history. 'Seizing' the means of production, for communists, has little to do with denying a small percentage of the population with the property that they control in capitalism and far more to do with broadening the access and developing a democratic control of production, distribution and services so that everyone in the world, and not just a small minority, can reap the benefits.

[(A)]

"If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first??

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?

[Freeloader]

The key word is expropriation, not really theft. At least this has become the key term which i use when i think about this issue. And that's because there's all sorts of problematic connotations with the term theft, i.e. law.

William Morris, the English socialist, i believe once wrote that - Private property is public theft.
This slogan is branded in my mind, and i don't think it would hurt to brand yourself with it too.
And also the slogan -Expropriate the expropriators, i beleive taken from Marx

The importance of the statement highlights that the private ownership of the means of production is itself a "theft", a theft from the community and the workforce.
The system of private ownership of the means of production is theft in that it takes without right . From a capitalists perspective they have the right ( and the law says they do to because its written for them) but from the communists/anarchist perspective they do not have that right, regardless of the formal laws.

So by taking privately owned land and capital and making it publicly owned you could say we reverse the theft, they stole from us so we are just stealing it back.
But if we always mean theft as taking without right, then the seizure of the means of production is not really theft from our perspective as we are in the right to do so.

The question of "the right" is central. The capitalist has no moral right to be making money from exploitation via private ownership of the means of production. But there is also a grey area. For example if somebody uses there laptop to buy and sell on eBay as a business, we don't really mean that their laptop should be taken from them and made a public laptop. I.e. the idea is aimed at large scale capitalism on an industrious scale not the "petty bourgeoisie" .

Another important distinction is between personal property and private property. The means of production are not the capitalists personal means of production, in a way that your garden fork is a personal means of production for potatoes in the back of your garden. It may be the personal source of his wealth via profit (which is via exploitation through wages), but it is generally the socialized means of production we are concerned with, of which socialists say we should socialize further via common ownership.

[Alet]

I notice that all communists or socialists want to "seize the means of production" but isn't this technically theft? What gives someone the right to seize another's property that they use to make a living off of?

We are strictly atheists. If you say that we don't have the right to steal, to harm or to kill, you imply that there has to be something Greater which does have the right to do this or the power to grant the permission - a God you can fall back upon to insist on your morality, which you don't need to justify anymore because even if we humans are insane and amoral, your God makes sense of your life. However, we don't believe in Gods; we believe in our own collective power to ruthlessly change and manipulate the world and reality, the social domain and the natural one, to our advantage. We are materialists and thus recognize that man is his own master; that, in other words, morality and rights in general are not divine nor eternal but contingent upon human practice, or social relations. Our right... derives from our conviction that you can tell us that it is amoral and we can and will do it nevertheless, that we won't experience divine retribution, and that we shall kill ourselves, if we will never seize the means of production. We don't need to answer to bourgeois ideologues: We are fully aware of our bias and our partisanship, and we don't try to be everybody's darlings. In a word: We give us the right to steal, to harm and to kill, and we don't care that it's irreconcilable with bourgeois ideology.

Yes, seizing the means of production is "technically theft" but what does this practically mean, what are the political implications of this? Theft is only a real concept within the framework of a society whose reproduction is based on private property in the first place. One cannot violate a right, if its existence is not structurally guaranteed by the social order - one cannot steal something until private property becomes a structural necessity. You prove my point, when you say that property is used "to make a living" of it. Your moral views presuppose the existence of capitalism, and you might take capitalism for granted but we don't. It is therefore completely tautological to attack communists on the basis that we violate bourgeois morality. The insistence on morality is ideological, a means that allows one to think that they are above the unreasonably immoral humans. But you are not the defender of eternal rights, you are technically nothing more than an apologist for capitalism. This is the actual practical implication of your morality, and because we want to destroy the capitalist order we consider you our enemy.

We also don't care that people make a living because they own the means of production, they might even work hard for all I care. That private property is in our society necessary to reproduce it is our problem with it in the first place. We claim that humans don't need private property in order to live, therefore we will confidently abolish it.

Bourgeois ideologues are utterly unaware of the practical meaning of their morality. But the fact of the matter is that it owes its existence to what they are trying to defend by referring to it, and this blows their minds: They cannot recognize the contingency of what makes sense of their life without committing moral suicide. We, on the other hand, do recognize their biased partisanship just as we recognize ours. The bourgeois ideologues can keep their rights. Divine morality will not help them, when the people of the ghettos and the precariat rise up.

[LeftistsAreRadical]

You can't steal something that was stolen from you in the first place.