Hey, could you please not use HN primarily for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and I had to go back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24212372 to find a post (a fine one!) that wasn't like that. That's a 20:1 ratio, which is definitely not the balance we're looking for here; the other way around would be more like it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago.

No, it wasn't.

Some of it was vaguely communitarian in non-communist ways.

> Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries

Capitalism has been displaced by modern mixed economies as the dominant economic system of the developed world for close to a century. How long it was dominant is debatable because it's not really clear where to draw the line between pre-capitalist systems and emergent capitalist systems. I tend to say early capitalist systems were around 16th C,

How do you understand that the entire world was communist until 10,000 years ago?

The natural order of the world appears to more closely resemble capitalism via the "eat what you kill" philosophy.

I imagine you are imagining close-knit tribes that would share resources freely internally. If so, would you agree that tribe members that leech off of the tribe and don't contribute were likely expelled from the group?

We certainly all do seem to have this innate fear of being abandoned by our group, so I think it's fair to say that we're adapted to avoid this outcome.

No, private property, which is a capitalist institution, has existed since prehistoric times, probably from even since before Homo Sapiens arose. Proto-property-rights are also observed in the Animal Kingdom, with principles like "first possession", where the first animal to the kill is less likely to give up the kill, and the second animal more likely to give it up, often governing animal interactions. In fact, game theory experiments demonstrate that observance of this proto-property principle reduces conflict among agents, so it's unsurprising that it's common among animal species.

Returning to humans, extant hunter gatherer groups observe property rights, both at a personal level, with their ownership of tools and clothes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2999363/

>>Moveable material property, such as tools, clothing, and valuables, is generally treated as individual property

And on the inter-tribal level, with tribes asserting exclusive control over the territory that they exploit.

Food sharing is common in hunterer gatherer societies, but almost all of it is intra-tribal, meaning to relatively close kin. Even within the tribe, such sharing is heavily biased by kin selection.

Food sharing is often very reciprocal as well, with an expectation of a return in exchange for the 'gift'. This is also demonstrated to some extent experimentally:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2930

> No, private property, which is a capitalist institution

No, it hasn't. “Private property”, in the sense in which it is a defining institution of capitalism (ownership of the means of production by an individual as marketable property distinct from. ownership of or personal jurisdiction over land), requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations. It is not something that universally existed from prehistoric times. You seem to be confusing the particular sense of “private property” associated with capitalism with the more generic concept of individual property, which is necessary to capitalism but not distinctly capitalist.

>>No, it hasn't. “Private property”, in the sense in which it is a defining institution of capitalism (ownership of the means of production by an individual as marketable property distinct from. ownership of or personal jurisdiction over land)

Modern capitalism's private property is based on exactly the same principle of exclusive control over a mass of matter as pre-modern society's private property. It is a more sophisticated version of it, that incorporates the advances of modern civilization to its enforcement and utilization, but that is to be expected with any institution as it evolves with the times.

>>requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations.

I don't know what this means. Can you elaborate?

What you are describing is not private property, but personal property.

Just a smaller scale version of private property, that is exactly what you would expect with smaller-scale society, and the form you would expect modern private property's pre-historic progenitor to take, before codes of law, and the scaling up of production with agricultural and then industrial-scale capital.

Which of your examples do you think is private property?

Personal property is private property.

The term "personal property" is mostly used by Marxists.

That is not correct, the term is used by all kinds of socialists. You may not care about the difference in general, but denying it is not helpful when discussing socialism. You're trying to refute the claim that private property (in the socialist sense) is problematic by defending private property (in the liberal sense), which doesn't make sense because these are two different concepts.

Before I address your point, I'll clarify that I want to use correct/standard definitions, not definitions only understood by small subsets of the population.

Now to your point: private property intended for personal use, which socialist ideology claims is not problematic, is the direct progenitor of private property used for other purposes, like earning an income for the owner from being rented out, or from being utilized in an enterprise that employs other people to operate the private property.

The differences between private property intended for personal use, and private property intended for business or commercial use, are completely superficial with respect to the basic principles that society operates on.