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Comment by atom-morgan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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