This is a blurry line as a sibling comment noted. If I want to start raising chickens on my property, do you take it away from me? What if I start selling the eggs from the hens to my neighbors, do you take it away from me then? Somebody will eventually have a more efficient production idea compared to the big government, and then they want to build it on their own property. Should their property be seized? Should they be imprisoned if they attempt it again?
All this to say: If I'm not relatively free to do what I want - barring the harm of other people - on my property, it's not really my property.
Separately, it's interesting how much further away from reality this is sounding as technology continues to improve and absorb more of GDP. When the world's largest companies deliver value by writing code on laptops, and are often started by a couple kids who think 'it would be cool if this existed,' how do these restrictions on physical property fit in? How could that be equivalently taken away from them?
No. So far what you’re describing is personal property. It’s one thing to own a toothbrush. It’s similar to make toothbrushes for your neighbors for their benefit. It’s another thing entirely to capitalize on that, making toothbrushes a vector for personal gain; making people pay more for that formerly shared endeavor, compete to provide it, engage in legal disputes around who may provide what.
> Somebody will eventually have a more efficient production idea compared to the big government, and then they want to build it on their own property. Should their property be seized? Should they be imprisoned if they attempt it again?
It’s similarly disappointing that the competition you have in mind is what it is. The goal in defining private ownership isn’t to distinguish it from public ownership! It’s to distinguish it from personal ownership. The distinction isn’t between state and people, it’s between people and organizations. Nobody should be put in prison for making a more efficient machinery of any kind. They should be blocked from either preventing other people from doing so, or from depriving others from the benefit of that improvement existing.
No, the Marxist prohibition on “private property” isn’t actually a prohibition on having an ownership interest in any particular kind of thing, even if it is used for profit. It is a prohibition on the relationship by which one has a claim on the produce of others labor produced through the use of particular property.
Now, the prohibition on that relation in practice makes owning lots of things less attractive than it is in a capitalist system (and that’s very much accidental).
> All this to say: If I'm not relatively free to do what I want - barring the harm of other people - on my property, it's not really my property.
Marxist don’t view exploitation of wage labor as not harming other people.
(1) So it's okay for me to sell the eggs from the chickens on my property, as it's not using others' labor?
(2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it's too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away?
(3) Assuming the answer is yes to the above, what if I decide to automate the work instead, so I can profitably produce eggs without using anyone else's labor? Am I allowed to accumulate wealth, considering no other labor is involved, or should that be taken away?
Probably (the “on your property” bit is pretty irrelevant here, the chickens are the relevant property.)
> (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it’s too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away?
Details of policy can vary considerably within the Marxist theoretical framework (and finding concrete examples is impossible as there aren’t any places that have really applied anything in this area of Marxist property approaches without Leninist modifications); fairly typically, in theory, the government would require the enterprise employing labor outside of the individual worker/owner (or possibly family) to be either public or collective, and contracting for labor on other terms would either be void or, I guess, might presumptively create a collective notwithstanding the surface terms. The penalty, if any, for a prohibit wage-labor contract (besides the contract itself being void) isn’t really a matter of general Marxist theory but of the praxis of the particular society in its context.
> (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it’s too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away?
Classical Marxist theory, being conceived in the 19th Century, didn’t really concern itself with large-scale, labor-free automation, but given Marx & Engels views on taxation – favoring direct, progressive, and significant taxes on income (capital and otherwise) and inheritances, as well as significant land-value taxes, etc. — it is certainly not outlandish to suggest that one Marxist position would be that you would be permitted to operate such an individual enterprise, but that as your returns from it increased in scale that they would be progressively more heavily taxed. You could, though, accumulate wealth that way, but not without constraints.
Of course, some of those limits are present in many modern mixed economies (even with the allowance for rented labor), as tax ideas advocated by Marx, Engels, and others in the same Communist movement — very much in contrast to their ideas on property — were among their ideas that saw the widest success in the developed world in the transition from the classical capitalism that Marx critiqued to the modern mixed economy that generally replaced it.
What I read from this is that I'm unfree to even own livestock on my own property, meaning that I hardly have property of my own.
> the government would require the enterprise employing labor outside of the individual worker/owner (or possibly family) to be either public or collective ... The penalty, if any, for a prohibit wage-labor contract (besides the contract itself being void) isn’t really a matter of general Marxist theory but of the praxis of the particular society in its context.
What I read here is essentially maybe and maybe. The government would take my land and/or my chickens away because I needed help with the chickens, or at the least, the employee I choose to hire after all my labor and investment will receive half my business.
Additionally and more importantly, it's not really a concern of your theory whether I'm executed or disappeared into a labor camp. That just depends on each society, so punishment can vary. (As a Russian, I think it especially eerie you don't find this problematic or view it as a gaping hole in the theory - this is why people perish in it, and the deadly conclusion seems to logically follow from your general theory which necessitates giving the state oppressive power).
One man may own a small farm to feed himself, another a small farm to make a profit. Should the ownership of the first be more virtuous than the second?
But, as I said, it can be complicated, especially if that is your goal, as can be done with anything if you so please.
But, a self-sufficient farmer with no employees is not even part of a societal economy in any modern sense. They are a mere peasant. If they are a farmer with a farm that requires no hired labor or modern technology then same thing. If they require a military to protect them and they send surplus to a feudal arrangement, they probably live in a feudalist society. If they own their land and use industrial technology and hire their own wage laborers to produce a surplus to trade it on a market to pay for all of that, they are now part of a modern economy and Marxism would have more to say about that. The latter have dependencies beyond the mere protection of their farmland, meaning the farmer now lives in a capitalist society.
The same context in which the usage was defined celebrated capitalism as a liberating development from feudalism. It critiqued capitalism as well, and certainly arrived at a moral judgment against that as a societal goal.
But in that jargon effort it didn’t make a moral point to distinguish personal versus private ownership. It expressed a set of terminology to distinguish things.
I’m not even especially intent on reinforcing the jargon. Only in clarifying when it’s being referenced outside the spirit it was defined in, so perhaps the conversation isn’t scattered around different things.
This part is understandable but disappointing. The concept of “private” property in this context is conflated with common usage but has a jargon meaning that’s been used to malign or misunderstand socialism and doesn’t help this article make its case.
Here, “private property” is being used to reference physical things owned by private individuals. But in the Marxist context in which it was used to describe/critique capitalism that’s not what it means.
“Private property” as used here refers to profit-driving ownership, i.e. the reference to “means of production”. It doesn’t refer to what would be called “personal ownership”, property which belongs to individuals for their personal disposal and discretion.
There is nothing in “natural law” which suggests that for people to be free some people should be protected to own things which allow them to extract competitive value. That’s a decision society makes, at whatever granularity.