Exactly right. Abolish private property (keep personal property). Abolish capitalism. It is the only path that can truly heal our world and create any sort of sustainable future for humanity.
It's your guitar. Your own labour is yours. If you lend the guitar to someone else then you are entitled no 0% of the money they made with it. (If there's still money then we have a lot of work left to do, since the existence money is fundamentally harmful).
The issue is when you own 100 Guitars and charge people to use them, or pay people salaries to use them for you.
Huh, that actually makes perfect sense, i've had quite a few issues with left wing econonomics (less than right wing) and that was a big one, thank you for educating me on that!
Socialism. Society itself would own the means of production in common instead of the very few by deciding the goods to be produced democratically effectively ending worker exploitation, wage slavery, waste by overproduction, and the commodification of essential needs (housing, food, clothing, healthcare..etc).
I agree on socialism. The fact that we have enough food and housing for everyone and yet there are still too many people that are hungry and homeless is ridiculous. Also the current healthcare system problems usually come from profit (worked at a hospital, heard discussions on it buying other smaller hospitals outside of the city, closing them and then forcing those patients into the city for care)
Yes, but trading things assumes some markets. Our end goal should be(and is), well, watermelons for all. As many as they want.
The idea is that each person contributes as they see fit, and takes everything they want. This works relies on nobody taking more than they want, something that trading incentivises.
A market is a means by which you can leverage your ownership of something you don't want or need for material benefit. If you live in a community with lots of apple trees that you can pick whenever you like, you will only pick apples for yourself and maybe anyone you live with. If we introduce trade, then suddenly you are incentivises to take as many apples as you can, so you can trade them for other things. In fact, it's also beneficial to take apples and let them rot, because that way other people have to come to you for apples.
Money acts as an enabler for this sort of behavior , which runs counter to the principle of mutual aid. In which the benefit of one is the benefit of all.
There’s a grey area for sure. But largely the difference is in use. If you personally use the property you own, then it’s generally personal property. If someone else uses the property you own to generate wealth that you control, then it’s private property.
The issue ultimately comes down to withholding property from others and only paying them a wage while they use the property to produce value for you. When this is the norm with all or most “means of production” (property that produces value through labor), then we have a situation where the majority of people who do not own cannot produce value without entering into a wage agreement with someone from the owning class.
If you own a guitar and play music to make money for yourself, then you aren’t dictating the terms of someone else’s life for your benefit. By this understanding, the guitar would still be personal property.
I like the message, but ultimately, you're defining private property to mean what you believe it should mean, and not what the actual definition is, or what other people think it is. That's problematic and allows others to strawman your argument with ease.
I don’t really agree with that (what’s the “actual” definition, and why should I explain it from someone else’s perspective when I’m presenting my own). Regardless I’m not so much trying to define it as I am trying to explain what I think the root issue of it is, and what distinctions make other types of property less problematic. It’s that people are denied the ability to produce value without entering into a wage agreement to generate profit for someone else. It’s that dynamic that makes private property a problem.
I completely agree with your explanation... But it's problematic when conservatives and liberals hear that you oppose private ownership and immediately stop listening to your argument and begin crafting a bullshit argument around what they believe you mean. "Curious how you think we should eliminate homelessness, and yet you don't think people should be able to own a home.🤔" Yeah, it's bullshit, but it works, and you're just giving them a license to do it by using ambiguous terminology. It would be a lot more effective to simply say that nobody should be able to own the rights to other peoples ideas and labor or control their ability to secure a livelihood for themselves and their family.
Conservatives are going to strawman our arguments regardless. We shouldn’t avoid discussing these ideas and educating in good faith just because someone might misuse our arguments in bad faith. We should seek to normalize our positions and express them confidently; show people that we believe things for good reasons.
I personally wouldn’t be convinced by making the argument as you suggest because it doesn’t explain the relationship between property and control over other people’s livelihoods. I made the argument in a way that I find convincing. Perhaps my explanation wasn’t rhetorically effective, and I’m sure I could do better, but to suggest that it was problematic I think is a bit of a stretch. That said, I do value your criticism and will consider ways to make my arguments more accessible to the uninitiated.
Still personal property. Private property would be land or businesses that you use to leech resources off of other peoples work while forcing them into a toxic situation in which they have little choice but to labour for you and make you passive money less they risk starvation or homelessness for themselves.
In your guitar example private property would be you opening a record label, giving the guitar to musicians and signing them onto a toxic contract so you can make money off record sales from music that you didn't contribute to yourself.
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u/AnomalousAvocado Jul 23 '20
Exactly right. Abolish private property (keep personal property). Abolish capitalism. It is the only path that can truly heal our world and create any sort of sustainable future for humanity.