Also, speaking of false dichotomies, pinning this on the GOP is rather silly and plays into a false narrative. The Democratic party is just as much if not more entrenched in the halls of corporate and banking power. We live in an oligarchy (Chomsky calls it a polyarchy). They increasingly own the government and joust for the chance to assume high office.
Capitalism works best with good regulation but sadly the last several decades have been about eroding that understanding.
It’s not toothbrushes that people care about so much as their homes and jobs.
I’m not familiar with all communist countries, but the whole “can’t own property” from USSR and China probably contributes to the feeling that communism promotes no personal property.
From the manifesto:
>"The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."[0]
Ctrl + Fing for 'private property' brings up a lot more. I haven't actually read this thing, but I wanted to check because I was curious what the manifesto actually did say.
Here's the German of the last sentence in case you think it's a bad translation:
>"In diesem Sinn können die Kommunisten ihre Theorie in dem einen Ausdruck: Aufhebung des Privateigentums, zusammenfassen."
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man... (p.22)
From here[1]:
> In political/economic theory, notably socialist, Marxist, and most anarchist philosophies, the distinction between private and personal property is extremely important. Which items of property constitute which is open to debate. In some economic systems, such as capitalism, private and personal property are considered to be exactly equivalent.
> Personal property or possessions includes "items intended for personal use" (e.g., one's toothbrush, clothes, and vehicles, and sometimes rarely money).[3] It must be gained in a socially fair manner, and the owner has a distributive right to exclude others.
> Private property is a social relationship between the owner and persons deprived, i.e. not a relationship between person and thing. Private property may include artifacts, factories, mines, dams, infrastructure, natural vegetation, mountains, deserts and seas—these generate capital for the owner without the owner having to perform any labour. Conversely, those who perform labour using somebody else's private property are deprived of the value of their work, and are instead given a salary that is disjointed from the value generated by the worker.
> In Marxist theory, the term private property typically refers to capital or the means of production, while personal property refers to consumer and non-capital goods and services
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_ver...
Hmm... maybe I misread the Communist Manifesto or something, but I did not get this. In fact, you can almost feel his hatred about the whole idea of personal ownership. This even extends to marriage and having children i.e children should be raised by the commune rather than individual parents.
His distaste is not for “personal ownership” but for the distinct model of property that exists in the capitalist system, which is why he explicitly casts the Communist move to abolish bourgeois property (referred to equivalently as “bourgeois private property” and “private property”; the distinct system of property relations under capitalism) as consistent with the universal historical reality that new systems of property relations and economic systems involve destroying the prior system of property relations, e.g.,
“All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
---quote---
“The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
---end---
source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
> This even extends to marriage and having children
Viewing wives and children as part of a system of property relations, while very much a feature of the capitalist system Marx critiqued, is viewed distastefully even by many of the people who defend “capitalism” today, not just socialist critics.
> children should be raised by the commune rather than individual parents.
Where does Marx argue for this? Marx notes that the charge of destroying the family is levelled at Communists, and argues that this is hypocritical in that thr capitalist system has destroyed, in different ways, the substance of both proletarian and bourgeios families, and that what what Marxism seeks to extinguish is the hollow form of family that is left under capitalism, and not even that through any direct policy. He says that the existing family system would naturally fall away as a consequence of replacing the system of property and removing the class oppression which depends on it.
> money will become superfluous
Given your different perspective, what does he mean my this line? This one bit and the surrounding sentences is where I started to dismiss the text as quackery (compared to Das Kapital, which I did enjoy).
When hearing Marx say money will become useless, you've got to wonder what it means to have property. How do you become to posses a toothbrush if you didn't exchange money for it? Or do we go back to a barter economy?
It depends on what you mean by "raised", but after calling for the abolition of the family in the Manifesto (in whatever sense that the family under capitalism is bourgeois I guess) he says that children will be educated "on a communal basis" and will not be dependent upon their parents (since private property would be abolished). [0]
Secondly, I do not see how our current understanding of "personal ownership" escapes being "bourgeois private property". It seems disingenuous to keep implying that there would not be many radical shifts in how "personal property" would be understood under Marx's ideal communist system compared to how its understood now.
[0]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man... (p.52)
In modern mixed economies (which while themselves quite far from the Marx’s ideals are arguably closer to it than the Leninist-derived “Communist” systems that pay lip service to Marxism), it is very common, compared to the capitalist system Marx critiqued, to have particularly strong social support networks targeting children (even the US, with its generally weak, among modern developed systems, safety net, has a much stronger one for children than generally), much less unaccountable power for parents over children, and free universal public education, often obligatory with permitted substitution of approved private instruction — children are, IOW, educated on a communal and not, or at least far less compared to the system Marx critiqued, dependent on their parents.
It is important to remember that the system Marx sought to destroy and replace is the dominant 19th Century system in the developed world that he named “capitalism” not the 21st Century system that is the product of more a century and a half of changes to that system, often pushed by Marxist and other socialist critics along with other, often more moderate allies (at least, transactional allies).
> Secondly, I do not see how our current understanding of "personal ownership" escapes being "bourgeois private property".
Note that (for example, among many other prior property systems) the feudal system of property that preceded the capitalist system also was not bourgeios private propety, so what is common between that and the capitalist system is not essentially bourgeois property. The distinctive, defining element of the bourgeois property system is marketable property in means of production to which rented wage labor is applied, and it is principally that particular feature that Marx targets for elimination and replacement with control of the means of production by labor when he talks about elimination of bourgeois property.
>The distinctive, defining element of the bourgeois property system is marketable property in means of production to which rented wage labor is applied, and it is principally that particular feature that Marx targets for elimination and replacement with control of the means of production by labor when he talks about elimination of bourgeois property.
This at least points me in a direction of interest (Marx doesn't mention feudal property much in the Manifesto, but briefly reading about the historical relationship to property has piqued an interest. Surely other writings of his explore the concept more, and maybe even Hegel writes about it).
Marx in the manifesto:
>Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.
This also clears the focus a bit for me, even if I still don't have a solid position yet. I'm glad I poked the bear a little.
I'd take this comment more seriously if you cited Marx in a primary text making this distinction, and not some secondary Wikipedia defense. Note that none of the citations in your copy/paste are from Marx himself.
Also, in the definitions given above, personal property could very well be private property, in cases where it was not "gained in a socially fair manner", which seems like a highly subjective criteria.
edit: for those who are silently downvoting, keep in mind that the poster I'm responding to criticized my 'surface level' reading of a primary text (which I readily admit to) and then, rather than presenting a more thorough understanding of the text, copy/pastes a vague summary of an argument, which fails to even properly make the distinction he wants to prove.
You must have missed it. And by it, I mean the whole document. Here's an extract from one of the dialogs:
> Question 3: How do you wish to achieve this aim? > Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property
More extracts:
> What will this new social order have to be like > ... Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.
And more:
> Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain > > ... > > What will be the consequences of the ultimate disappearance of private property? > > ...
Karl Marx studied Property Law and his pamphlets before and after the Communist Manifesto were all about abolishing the personal ownership of property!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_ver...
So one thing Marx did say is that he wanted money to be "superfluous". If money would be useless, how do you get to own a toothbrush? Does that mean we either go back to a barter economy, or something like a social points system like Seasame Credit?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_ver...
And now Texas is about to try to criminalize homelessness yet again, which I thought was settled in the 9th Circuit multiple times. Maybe it's the old "let's see what horribly-insensitive laws we can pass to rile up that other side but will probably be struck-down by the courts."
Robert Martin et al. v. City of Boise
Desertrain v. City of Los Angeles
You have a bizarre filter on the world if you think Amazon sharing your Internet with your neighbours without your consent is anything like socialism.
It's about the state owning the means of production and the state is supposedly representing the people, so the textbook fairy tale goes. Of course, putting aside how evil socialist is in principle, in practice it does one better: socialism is the rule of the rich party officials over an impoverished and oppressed society. (And no, the Scandinavian countries aren't socialist.)
No, its about the people (specifically, the workers) controlling the means of production. The State is a vehicle for that in some forms of socialism, but not all. There are forms of socialism that see a role for the state but not that of vehicle of control of the means of production, and there are forms of socialism (e.g., libertarian socialism) which reject statism entirely (in fact, not only does that whole spectrum exist withi socialism broadly, the entire state socialist to anti-statist spectrum exists within explicitly Marxist socialism.)
Too many people’s ideas of “socialism” is a product of Leninist propaganda (often through the further filter of Western right-wing propaganda, which has a weird semi-alignment with Leninists in misrepesenting “socialism”.)
The 'material conditions', at least as far as socialist/communist/anarchist authors go, refers to the mode of production and the relationship of workers to the means of production. It is not 'measured' in terms of wealth, nor in terms of poverty levels.
It is also a mistake to say that socialism 'revolves' around material conditions. Marx himself took swift action to point out that people being happy and well-fed is by no means a 'socialist' society. This is, after all, assuming you subscribe to the theory of historical materialism - which several prominent Marxists today (and in the recent past) do not, at least strictly.
A corporation owning the means of production doesn’t meet the basic definitions of socialism since the workers have no power and it is only by the grace of the employer that their voices are heard if at all.
I appreciate that you love capitalism and want it to be the perfect system but it’s not, and you can’t make capitalism look like socialism by dressing it up in welfare and democracy.
Under socialism, a battery factory that invents a more efficient process for creating batteries can pass that saving directly to the workers - rather than working 40 hours a week they can work 20. Their leisure time is increased. This is the future Asimov and Roddenberry envisioned.
Under capitalism, the benefits of such technological advancements gets pissed away into market forces and accumulate with the people who need them least. For some reason we still expect everyone to either inherit money or work a job - even a pointless job - just to survive. Why? We easily have the capacity to feed, clothe and house the world's population. Let people follow their passions! Imagine how many Eisteins, Picassos and Mozarts that are being born into the world right now who will never reach their potential. What an enormously inefficient and unjust system.
In socialism, you work according to your ability to the maximum society allows, and you receive according to your needs the maximum the society can provide (ideally).
If you could work 40 hours before the process, there is no reason for you to work less than that now. Your labour isn't defined by your output in batteries, but in hours. Nobody in socialist countries worked less because of technology advancements, they just had higher outputs, like in capitalist countries. The benefit-er is the factory owner, ostensibly 'the people' but really the state/party officials. You are a person, not 'the people'. You don't benefit from it directly - that would be theft from the people.
You don't get to keep your labour because you owe it to the people, comrade. Don't be greedy with the people's resources. Who are you to take from the people? You could be sent to a gulag for re-education, and then who would stand in line for your family to get bread?