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?
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.
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.
Anyway, once you abolish private property, most versions of 'working for someone else' go too, so this is somewhat academic.
>once you abolish private property, most versions of 'working for someone else' go too
How so?
'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').
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.
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.
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.
s/real goods/scarce items/g
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.]