By Steven Clyde
The modern day Marxist is quite the odd figure. Depending on the day you talk to them, they are adhering to another random school of thought within the socialist/communist movement whether it be anarcho-communism[1], anarcho-syndicalism[2], Maoism[3], Leninism[4], Trotskyism[5], etc. Yet no matter how you try and debate with them, they always want to try and trip you up on one thing: property.
The idea that revolves around pretty much all these ideologies is that there is first to be made a distinction between types of property: that is personal property (consumer goods) and private property (producer goods). Second, there is an everlasting principle ingrained that private property, as a “capitalistic norm” they will say, is theft. Often times, they will go on to say that private property is “violence and murder” as well, really putting on the pedestal with your beliefs.
There are several attempts to justify this argument, one being that capitalists exploit the people they hire because they extract the surplus value[6] (the full value of their productivity in any given setting minus their contracted wage) and thus are guilty of theft on that account. When you bring up the point of “well didn’t they agree to the wages determined in the contract?” their response is often something along the lines of “people are forced to go out and get jobs or starve so none of it is voluntary.”
Arguments like this are trying to persuade you on the notion that its okay to receive whats available from others sacrifices, and that you should resent anyone who feels like you as a person should have to go out and make sacrifices just because other people do. This all tends to cultivate into a self-satisfying diatribe towards the idea that being free to make your own contracts in a free society, would be worse than if society came together to own all the means of production.
“Society”, is but of whom? Are all the people in the building I’m in a small society if we claim? What about all the people on my block? So is it really to say, that if there is a printer that adds productive value to someone in the world, that the printer is now owned by the lot of the 7.28 billion of us? But if everybody owned the printer, what would be the incentive to create a new printer? Would society then be viewed as just continents? But what about mere states? Towns? Society is subjective, and thus we must focus on the individual themselves in any situation to make rational observations.
The individual will take a broom and get productive value out of it, yet no one goes around claiming everyone has the right to other people’s brooms.
Once something is personal property as they claim, namely it’s acquired through self-sacrifice, it cannot then be transformed into another term (called private property) without changing physical form. If it’s simply something that helps another man acquire an end, whether that end is to gain more than they put at risk or to accomplish something like a small task, then what right does “society” have to deprive the individual who simply used their mind and the resources around them to make a change.
But therein lies the true problem: incentives. This is one of the most fundamental differences in how the anarcho-capitalist and the anarcho-communist view how people act; one believes that people act purposefully and use our minds to transform resources to attain certain ends and do so only with knowing that they can attain those ends[7], while the other believes that people would have these same incentives so long as they weren’t simply bound by another capitalist and exploited.[8] Continue reading “Personal vs. Private Property: Don’t Get Tripped Up By This Fallacy”
