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RE: A Communist Definition of Property

in #politics7 years ago

Well your first point in response doesn't negate or otherwise stand in opposition to my first point so ill begin my reply at your second point.

Private vs personal property. They can have all the resources they want, but having resources does not mean they deserve what other people produce.
to attack this statement on its own: 'Do you fundamentally reject the notions that an individual is entitled to the fruits of his labor and that one is entitled to engage in voluntary transactions?"
Wage labor is not volentary, the only choice the workers have is what slave owner to choose.
The fruit of a workers labor is what they produce, not what others produce on something they control through violence.

Firstly, you have not defined private property, you defined personal property and one could assume by private property you mean private ownership of the means of production. I just want to make sure I understand the distinction you are trying to make here.

Secondly, no one said having resources entitles one to another man's labor, simply that the two may be voluntarily exchanged; you are not taking the argument head on. Let me spell it out a little clearer and add more detail.
There are two scenarios I present whereby an individual can take ownership of a machine to demonstrate that private ownership of the machine is just. He could build the machine himself. The machine is then the fruit of his labor and is therefor his property. Alternatively he could enter into a voluntary transaction with the machine's creator and thereby be granted property rights over the machine.
You may argue that this voluntary exchange is involuntary, but unless one of the two is coercing the other there is no use of force and both individuals are free to pursue their own interests. You can not claim that one is inherently using violence in claiming the means of production, because i just presented you two perfectly plausible means by which one could build or purchase a machine to acquire ownership in a just and nonviolent manner. You may claim that holding private property is inherently violent, but the argument you present does not hold as i will explain in my response to your fourth section (where you mention the hospital children). This machine being his, he is free to pay others to use his machine and he is

Thirdly, of course wage labor is voluntary. You negotiate a wage and you are free to decide whether your labor is being valued properly and then you CHOOSE to either accept the wage, seek other employers, or accumulate resources yourself by other means. No one is placing a gun to your head and ordering you out to work for them. Again you seem to be placing the worker in this false dichotomy between accepting dirt pay or death, but this is simply not the case. Saying that workers only have a choice in which master to serve might sound cool and edgy, but the burden of proof is on you to show that humans can not live without accepting wage labor in a capitalist society.

I said this was the government.

You said, and this is what I was referring to;

All public law today is based on the principles of a “monopoly on violence”. A monopoly on violence. The social relations of the worker to the controller cannot exist without this. There is no basis for control without a monopoly of violence, so private property cannot exist without it.

This is the issue which i was addressing, you precisely made the claim that the relations between the worker and the owner can not exist without a monopoly of force and then, in a later statement, use this fact to make a half assed argument that this equates private property to offensive violence. The failing of this argument can be seen in the following discussion.

if both me and the children in a hospital respected my right to bomb them with white phosphorus on moral principle there is no need for a monopoly of force.

This analogy seems like emotional appeal and does not seem well thought out. You originally equate private property with violence by stating that private property can only be maintained through violence and then brush the fact that i presented an alternate nonviolent means by which private property can be maintained through a mutual agreement on the morality of property rights. Now i understand that you would likely argue against this by claiming that holding private property is a violent act, however the only support for this argument which you have presented for the violence of private property is the very same one which i address by proposing an alternate means by which property can be maintained. This is precisely where your analogy breaks down. In your analogy you equate an action which is fundamentally violent with one which is only tangentially linked to violence by an argument you make which does not hold.

This post is pretty long so I wont address the other comments you make because I think these issues are really the core of our fundamental disagreement and I think if we address them directly with no more shiftiness we can find some common ground.

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