The line is drawn by relations between people in the extraction process. As anything, it can be complicated but the starting point is very simple: wage labor. In other words, all workers should own, which is to say they should have democratic rights to the management of, the means of production.

I think you made a jump from laborers should own their own labor to laborers should own labor collectively. Democratically control of individual resources appears to be less than ideal.

I am simply saying that personal property is out of the picture. And there is no such thing as “owning labor.” There is only laborers, which under wage labor are owned for a certain amount of time. But my central point is that Marxism has no conflict whatsoever with personal property.

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.

I attempted to bridge the language from a “this appears to be lay usage, introduce a Marxist distinction” perspective. You’re outright using Marxist language and reasoning and doing a much more effective job communicating it. I appreciate your contribution. Thank you for jumping in where I failed.

I think you did a good job!

I’m confounded by moralizing an effort to define terms. Why does clarifying what “private” means in context have anything to do with virtue? Why is that the framework you think muddies the water?

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.