Property is anything which is altered with labour or created from a means of production. There is metaphysical property (like thoughts) and matterphysical property (material objects). Of the kinds of property there is personal property, that of individual use,
private property, that used to generate value
socialist property, that belonging to and working for all.
If property can be said to be a single idea, then 'property is freedom', not theft. If property were indeed theft, then we could not so much as boil water or produce fire, acts of labour and so property. To abolish property is a nonsensical academic proposition. Not even the most ardent primitivists, I should think, would ascribe to the abdication of labour.
Property which is owned or administered by a bourgeois state is still private property, for it is not decided on by the whole of society, nor is it for their benefit. Social-democracy never nationalises things for the good of the people, by their command, but to solve a problem for the capitalists which they otherwise could not solve for themselves.
What makes property socialist is not many private proprietors as in cooperatives, but a planned economy, and unions with a role in the shaping of it like we saw in the USSR and the Marxist-Leninist countries. A dictatorship of the proletariat is the expropriation of private property in the form of a government.
In the case of matterphysical property, in order for the property to be produced, some property must be consumed in the proceß. The only exception to this rule is first matter: the purely raw materials which then go into the proceß of property production. For instance, merely eating an apple does not alter it (we are speaking here from a general view, if we were to explore the biological area of property then this would not be true), and so the apple cannot be property, it is instead first matter. Cutting up the apple into slices would require the first matter of the apple, for the slices are property. To bake an apple pie, the property of the apple slices must be consumed in its production.
First matter is only a definition of relative terminology, depending on the present limits of one's concern. To return to the apple: in the previous example, the apple was first matter, yet when the consideration is broadened, the apple tree is found to be a means of production, and thus the apple becomes natural property. Likewise, if the biological study is explored, eating an apple is labour, which transforms it into the personal property of bodily energy.
The difference between feudalism and capitalism is not which type of property is dominant, for in both systems it is private property. The difference is in how property is created, and to what end. Feudalism generally relies on the employment of labour onto something for the creation of property to be used. Capitalism requires more intensive profitability to generate capital, and capitalists use this capital to retain parity with their competitors.
One last note. The revisionism which led to the downfall of the USSR and the socialist bloc was rooted in commodity production. The proliferation of commodities by neceßity led to the stratification of society. The availability of luxury commodities led to various levels of social prestige, leading to the resurgence of petit-bourgeois ideology. Once this state of affairs had been normalised through time, a new petite-bourgeoisie emerged, mainly out of the intelligentsia and the technical specialists. In his book, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, J V Stalin warned of this impending crisis.
Comments