Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 11, 2024, 09:16 AMKarl Marx distinguished between private property and personal property in several key ways. According to Marx, private property refers to the means of production (such as factories, land, and machinery) that are owned and controlled by a small group of capitalists, who use these resources to exploit the labor of the working class.
Personal property includes possessions such as homes, clothing, and consumer goods, which individuals use for their own personal use and enjoyment.
Your definition of personal property is oblivious to the reason that distinction materialised to begin with. Here's Marx mocking people like you from beyond the grave, from the exact same part of the Manifesto your Marx quote comes from:
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.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
The highlighted parts are the 19th equivalent of the /s tag. He ain't talking about what you use for 'enjoyment', whatever that means. He is specifically talking about pre-capitalist petty producers. Not to mention that even petty producers' property was socially owned (hence the sarcasm). But since society itself was organized differently, the use value of a family farm had nothing much to do with the world beyond the ambit of a few villages and towns ruled by a feudal warlord. Yes, Marx and others did distinguish between the two (like I've already acknowledged) because he correctly identified the usurpation of one by the other.
None of that has anything to do with what you're saying i.e the 'good' kind of property is preserved and the 'bad' abolished. These distinctions would have zero relevance in a society founded on substantive equality, where all production is already democratically managed. No one would care whether my Mexican Fender stratcaster is 'collective' or 'individual' property, and no one would have any reason to seize it from me on those grounds.
QuoteGenerally only an American idiot uses the words equality and Marxism in the same sentence. Marxists advocate for the elimination of private, not personal property. This is misconstrued into thinking Marxists want to equally distributed wealth by trolls and others.
What members of the American 'middle-class' who have latched on to radleft hipsterism in the age when the illusions which upheld the modern state are withering away to reveal it's true character of cynical impotence in the face of acute social crisis actually do - is unfailingly conflate formal and substantive equality. Men need more food than women because they are generally physically larger and stronger. Everyone getting the same amount of the same food in the name of 'equality' would be madness, not communism. Men and women getting unequal quantities of food and being equally satisfied is simultaneously formal inequality and substantive equality. Seizing the property of the rich to fulfil the needs of the poor is also formal inequality, in the service of substantial equality. Formal inequality being a fact of nature doesn't contradict the validity of substantive equality in any way, let alone disqualify it as the foremost objective of any movement claiming to represent the oppressed.
Whatever quote fragment you're thinking of where Marx disparages his rivals pointing out that communist equality is ridiculous was in reference to its cynical mischaracterization as formal/mathematical equality, not what I was talking about. And your mischaracterization of my point is likewise intellectually dishonest.
QuoteIn a communist society money is eliminated. But that will never happen. Communism is an unobtainable ideal. It is only the direction to move to, subject to the constraints of of actual material conditions.
BULL. SHIT. Communism is not an 'idea', it is the living movement and struggle for equality by the people who desperately need it to live a dignified human existence, and realise the illusions of the Enlightenment. The true heroes of 1789 like Babeuf and Marechal recognized this almost as soon as the revolution had ended.
Everywhere and at all times men were lulled with beautiful words; at no time and in no place was the thing itself ever obtained along with the word. From time immemorial they hypocritically repeat to us: all men are equal; and from time immemorial the most degrading and monstrous inequality insolently weighs upon the human race. As long as there have been human societies the most beautiful of humanity's privileges has been recognized without contradiction, but was only once put in practice: equality was nothing but a beautiful and sterile legal fiction. And now that it is called for with an even stronger voice the answer us: be quiet, you wretches! Real equality is nothing but a chimera; be satisfied with conditional equality; you're all equal before the law. What more do you want, filthy rabble? Legislators, rulers, rich landowners, it is now your turn to listen.
Are we not all equal? This principle remains uncontested, because unless touched by insanity, one can't seriously say it is night when it is day.
Well then! We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need.
Moreover, the whole point of socialism (i.e dictatorship of the proletariat, not Bernie or Corbyn) is to eliminate class society. To advocate for 'pragmatic' socialism over 'ideal' communism is just a roundabout way of saying there is no need for socialism, we just need to be better parasites and give stuff to poor people.
QuoteI have a retirement account. My retirement account is PERSONAL property. My House is PERSONAL property. There has been no free money given to me. I earned all of mine.
No it isn't and no you didn't, and the same applies to me and anyone else whose salaried labor is only possible in a globally interconnected capital system that has to subject the majority to poverty dispossession and death in order to reproduce itself (not because it is 'evil' or controlled by evil satanic elites). This is precisely what Marx was mocking in that quote. He already predicted and deconstructed people who think the house built by immigrant labor is their 'personal property' because they had a handshake with the white manager who drives in all the workers and stands around yelling at them in broken Spanish.
There are billions of people who earn money and there is nothing special about you that makes you wealthier than them. The system is the people, the people are the system. To pretend otherwise would be like attempting to treat an infection by eating large quantities of antiseptic cream.
QuoteMarxism does not advocate for brain dead, across-the-board equality. An equality where everyone has exactly the same wealth. Instead, Marxism eliminates fundamental inequalities arising as a contradiction in and from the capitalist system. A small capitalist class owns the means of production and exploits the labor of the working class. A small capitalist class makes all decisions and the mass of humanity must abide by their decisions.
Either eliminating fundamental inequalities means substantive equality, or it means 'a small class that owns the means of production' decide to calm things down by selectively ameliorating inequality in the name of 'eliminating fundamental inequality'. Which side are you on?