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Comment by shornlacuna | Hacker News Reader

> [Marx] thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. At certain moments one can sympathise. But it's like wanting to ban gossip or forbid watching television. It's going to war with human behaviour.

A common misconception is that 'private property' here is to be equated with 'personal property'. Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished, or indeed that it makes sense to try and do so.

Generally speaking, the private property that Marx advocated abolishing was private ownership of land and the 'means of production', the latter being a category akin to 'fixed assets'.

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Reading that paragraph made me cringe, as it's such a basic misunderstanding of Marxism that it's the kind of thing you'd expect to read in a freshman essay written the night before after the student skimmed the first 10 lines of the Wikipedia article for "marxism" in a drunken stupor.

Fortunately the rest of the article is pretty good, and shows that the author has actually read Marx a tiny bit. Which makes the presence of the first paragraph even more confusing.

I get the impression that the author wanted to dispense with all of the usual preconceptions about Marxism right at the beginning, to inoculate the essay against the reflexive prejudice people tend to have about Marx.

The first paragraph is probably intended to establish the author as somebody who isn't crazy.

The disconnect between the majority beliefs about Marxism and its actual contents (as well as the beliefs of those who actually follow in Marx's footsteps today) is gigantic. I perfectly understand that the author felt they needed some way to bridge that gap without turning the vast majority of readers away at first sight.

Ridiculing the parts of Marxism that are thought ridiculous by people who only know the popular view of Marxism was a very purposeful technique the author used to convince such people that the author is just as skeptical as they are, so that they could get people to read their (really great, I think) article about the parts of Marx' ideas that fewer people (at least Americans) are aware of.

It worked really well on me!

You're certainly correct, he invents ideas, puts them in Marx's mouth, then knocks them down.

Then for good measure he invents ideas, puts them in Marx's mouth and builds them up.

When Marx wrote about alienation he was writing about having no choice but to spend seventy hours a week performing repetitive tasks to order in a factory owned and run for someone else's benefit, not the existential angst generated by musing over whether it would be more fun being an architect than designing ads for garden furniture.

It's probably wise to head off the common misconceptions and deal with common rebuttals up front. Otherwise the first comment on this would be "Oh yeah! Well we can't be happy if we don't even own our own wedding rings (for example)"

I've never been able to find a consistent definition of "means of production" or the distinction between "personal" and "private" property.

At what point does my laptop go from a piece of machinery that gives me access to HN to a mean of production that could make something like HN?

A way to look at it may be: Is there one community laptop or are their many laptops? A mainframe setup and limited internet constrained to university and business campuses, it becomes more like the "means of production". If there are enough laptops (or near enough) to go around, it's personal property.

But this is exactly what I'm talking about. I've never been able to get a clear answer because so many people in this camp have to take it on a case by case basis.

So if laptops are plentiful, it’s personal property. I feel it’s safe to say that most developers probably have their own laptop. So if I hire a developer to write code on my laptop (which was previously personal property) is it now private property since it’s being used as a means of production?

If so, the true distinction between personal and private property is intent which is far from satisfactory if we're defining property. So many things I own today would constantly be switching between personal and private property based on what I was trying to accomplish at that moment in time.

The difference is not intent but use. This is the same with real estate: if I own a building to live in it, that's personal property, but if I own a building to rent it out or run a business in it then it becomes private property.

What if it's my personal property is valuable as a commodity? As in, what if I want to sell my home? I'm not sure the lines are so distinct. Even if they were theoretically distinct, I doubt that a legal system would fairly make the necessary distinctions.

If you wanted to sell your home to someone else so they could live in it, that seems to me like the transfer of personal property from one person to another, probably in return for some other personal property (another house maybe, you still need somewhere to live).

Whether an actual communist society would organise housing like this isn't clear. No-one would reasonably consider Marx's writings to offer a societal blueprint, just principles from which actual details would be worked out through collective processes.

That it's never actually worked out like that suggests there's been something missing when this has been tried, but this doesn't correspond to proof that the principles themselves are wrong.

It's also sort of wrong to talk about private property in Marx's end game. It simply doesn't exist. There's personal property (your residence, clothing, non-scarce items that may, coincidentally, be used in production like a laptop or hammer). And then there's the rest. The mainframe I mentioned, in a 1960s tech level communist society, would be a means of production. It's scarce, many people need access to it to enable their work, time will have to be coordinated on it. Your laptop, even if loaned to someone else, in a world with abundant laptops/computers is still your laptop.

If it helps, software in that world is not scarce either. It's freely shared because there's no copyright or license agreements. They'd be antithetical to that world's view.

As I said in an edit to my other post: the intuition is capacity to oppress — the state or capitalists controlling means of production, in Soviet communism and capitalism, respectively. This is the motivating factor behind any such definition, given the context.

Now, if you're taking the stance of a determined skeptic, then that's like you pointing out there's no such definition of "chair". Which after all is true. (There's no predicate which separates all objects into chair and not-chair, and a simple argument demonstrates why.) Humans get by pretty well without extreme definitions.

Presumably without the antagonisms inherent in systems like capitalism, there'd be fewer armies of lawyers squabbling over the meanings of simple words like "property", inventing weird new forms like intellectual property, fighting over whether that land or sourcecode is my property, if you can shoot someone on your property, etc. We're constantly squabbling over it right now, because that's how power works under capitalism.

Copyright is a capitalist invention. It would not exist in a Marxist society. This makes your question trivial to answer: your laptop becomes a means of production when it's connected to a machine that produces real goods.

HN isn't "real goods"? You're stuck in the past.

You missed the point.

s/real goods/scarce items/g

Well, HN isn't a scarce item in one sense, namely, anybody with a computer can access it from anywhere on the planet (except perhaps North Korea).

But HN is a scarce item in another sense. If I wanted to make another one, I'd have to not only code it up, but also attract the readers that HN currently has. That would be difficult.

Copyright, along with patents and trademarks, is not a capitalist invention. It's a privilege granted by the government. Without the government close by, individuals or businesses would not have the power to enforce whatever it is they're trying to protect. In a truly free market, copyright would not exist.

Well, it would exist to the extent that DRM could enforce it.

True. I didn't think of this. However, DRM is much different than something along the lines of a patent.

Not a patent, per se, since patents require publication. But intellectual property enforcement can exist outside of legal fiat through DRM, certifications, obfuscation (perhaps a special case of DRM), trade secrets, and trade organizations (like guilds). Not to mention social pressures for creators to respect the work of others (as in comics stealing jokes).

Point being, purely private intellectual property rights exist, but usually only to the degree that they are enforced by private organizations or the societies they belong to.

Patent also doesn't distinguish by origin.

What extent is that?

All de jure property ownership, as distinguished from de facto possession, is a privilege granted, regulated and enforced by the government. In the absence of government, I'm assuming copyright could be enforced by "protection agencies" against people without adequate defence against them in the same inefficient but brutal manner as they could uphold other purely paper-based "property rights" like contracts, debt repayments and ownership of the means of production.

In fact, they'd probably get so efficient at collecting the money from those without significant resources to spend on defence they wouldn't look too hard to see if copyright had actually been violated before sending their royalty demands. It would be like the current legal system, but with more pointed weapons.

The pipe dream of "truly free market" shares one property of communism: that of being so egregiously flawed in theory as to be impossible in practice.

> It's a privilege granted by the government.

Property is a privilege protected by government to exclude other people from some set of actions with regard to some particular subject matter. Sure, that's true of copyright and other intellectual property, and intangible personal property more generally, but its equally true of tangible personal property and real property, as well.

> Without the government close by, individuals or businesses would not have the power to enforce whatever it is they're trying to protect.

That's true of pretty much all property but the smallest stores of tangible personal property.

> In a truly free market, copyright would not exist.

The definition of a "truly free market" is generally underspecified and seems to adapt to whatever is convenient to a "free market" advocates current argumentative position.

I won't claim to understand Marxism, but i think copyright is not the issue here. Unlike boxed software, web sites like Hacker News don't directly depend on copyright for their business models to work. More broadly, the whole notion of a business model is of course a capitalist invention. But I don't see why in the 21st Century we'd want to crudely tie "means of production" to atoms rather than bits. Rearranging bits can produce real value for society

When (say) people explaining Parecon are in a fairly precise mood, they say things like "scarce means of production", and make examples that explain that you're not talking about laptops or pencils, if they're sufficiently commonplace. (So under Parecon, no one "owns" the scarce means of production — or you could say it's commonly owned — but you can own your laptop/pencil.)

[Edit: the intuition is capacity to oppress — the state or capitalists controlling means of production, in Soviet communism and capitalism, respectively. This is the motivating factor behind any such definition, given the context.]

Personal property laptop: You use it on your own.

Private property laptop: Someone else uses the laptop to perform work. You retain ownership of the laptop and the product of their labor.

It's a use distinction.

Scenario: I use my own laptop to do work for someone else. Personal or private?

You still use it on your own, so personal.

Anyway, once you abolish private property, most versions of 'working for someone else' go too, so this is somewhat academic.

But, the end product belongs to the person I was working for. It's still personal property?

>once you abolish private property, most versions of 'working for someone else' go too

How so?

Well if you are just making something for someone else, that's artisan labour, which isn't really the 'production' that's being analysed by Marx.

'Working for someone else' as found in 'employment' is also something that marxists seek to abolish. Collective ownership of the means of production also means collective ownership of the product of labour. You only have 'employment' per se when ownership of capital is concentrated in private hands.

(It's not for nothing that many marxists classify the former soviet union and post-Mao china as 'state capitalist' rather than 'socialist').

Means of production more has to do with scale. Software is extremely unique as an industry in that people can truly "produce" something by themselves - all other cases of self-employment I can think of are pretty much services, which is a whole other can of worms. A tech oriented example of a means of production that Marx would want run by the state would include any cloud service or datacenter. The average person simply can't afford to start one "on their own" without outside capital.

I say if you work as a programmer using a laptop, then that laptop is a means of production. The usual formulation is that workers should own/control their means of production, so if you work as a programmer and own your own laptop, you are living in a small slice of communist utopia.

This probably is very related to how much nicer programming jobs are than most other jobs--as a programmer you are much less affected by capitalism than workers in capital-intensive industries are. I remember reading a pamphlet about the micro-computer revolution published by some British communist organization in the early 1980s. They analyzed programming as belonging to Marx' category of pre-industrial "craft" production, and predicted that there would be a push from employers to gain more control (by reducing programming to a less personalized, more commoditized activity).

I think several trends can be fruitfully analyzed from this point of view, e.g. UML-style software engineering methodologies, cloud computing, DRM, and app stores.

I guess it's if this piece of machinery is not actually yours, costs more than you can make in a decade and it's lent to you by your employer so you can code asp.net corporate system only and nothing more for ever... well, the times were different. Writing this made me think of FOSS, Linux... Imagine how would things be without it o.O

It's true that when Marx talks about abolishing private property, he has in mind means of production, but I think it's a mistake to try and explain that by making a distinction between "private" and "personal" property (a distinction which Marx himself didn't make, FWIW). The distinction ends up being a distraction, because its hard to make clearly (for reasons people in this thread have given), and, in any case, it's not really important to what Marx is saying; if you abolish ownership of the means of production (private property) there's no real point in ownership of consumption goods either (personal property). In a society in which I can only gain access to consumption goods by subordinating myself to the people who own the means of production, it matters that I have a firm hold on the consumption goods I need. But, if we were able to abolish private ownership of the means of production, I would be able to access consumption goods in some non-alienated way, so there would be no need to own them.

So I don't think it's quite right to say that "Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished"; although the important thing is to abolish private property, the natural result of that would also be that personal property as we understand it would cease to exist.

But this is still the crucial flaw in Marxism, be because some greedy bastard will control means of production either way to their own benefit, and I'd rather that be owned by a professed capitalist who is regulated by the government rather than owned by the government that then regulates itself thus accountable to no one. This was really the major flaw in Marxist systems, the fat cats were given authority to govern both the public and private sector to their own benefit, no counterweight.

That's a major point of the article. In his work you have a part in which he identifies the problems (eg Das Kapital) and another part which proposes a solution (eg The Communist Manifesto). In medical terms Marx made a good diagnosis, but a bad prognosis (as demonstrated by history).

I think it's important to differentiate them. Marx wasn't a religious prophet, you can take the good stuff and leave out the bad. Even he said in his later life that his goals could be achieved by democratic means.

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