Tuesday, October 24, 2023

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Posted by Kevin Kim at 10/24/2023 09:00:00 AM

4 comments:

Charles said...

Ah, yes. I see that people still don't understand the difference between "private property" and "personal property."

(Not trying to start a political argument or defend Marx, I'm just saying that a lot of people misunderstand that concept.)

October 25, 2023 at 10:01:00 AM GMT+9
Kevin Kim said...

I'll bite. What's the difference? I assume you see a disanalogy between Marx and Uncle Klaus in the image. To me, the concepts of "private" and "personal" at the very least overlap.

October 25, 2023 at 11:56:00 AM GMT+9
Kevin Kim said...

A quick online search also shows some disagreement as to what the two terms mean within or outside of Marxist theory. One definition accords with my own (admittedly vague) perspective: it's more of a Venn-diagram thing, with private property being a subset of personal property. If you're on my land, you're on private property, but since I personally own the land, it's also my personal property.

The definition I'm talking about stipulates that private property refers almost exclusively to land and "real property," and it says personal property includes land.

October 25, 2023 at 12:04:00 PM GMT+9
Charles said...

Sorry about the belated reply. It's been a busy day. A busy week, actually.

Without getting too far into the weeds, when Marx talks about "private property" he is essentially talking about the means of production. That is, the capitalist class owns the means of production and exploits the working class in order to enrich themselves. "Exploitation" here means that workers work for the capitalists and receive a wage in return, but this wage is not commensurate with the value of their labor; the discrepancy goes into the capitalists' pockets and increases socioeconomic inequality. (In Marxism, the "middle class" is a myth that the capitalists feed to the working class to keep them from realizing that they're all getting screwed by the capitalists.)

This is not even close to what most people think of when they hear the words "private property," so the confusion is understandable. I also don't expect everyone to have even a passing knowledge of Marxism (as an academic, of course, I am required to pass qualifying exams in Marxist theory as part of the leftist indoctrination we all have to go through before we get our professor's cards). But whoever put together this meme was ignorant, lazy, and arrogant. The ignorance is obvious: They have no idea what "private property" means in the Marxist context (incidentally, I don't think there is really any disagreement within Marxist theory about what this fundamentally means, although different people may describe it in slightly different ways). Laziness: They never bothered to do any research or learn more about what they were criticizing. Arrogance: They assumed that their interpretation based on no research was correct and acted as if they had come up with a zinger.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't criticize Marx. But we should have at least some vague idea of what we're talking about before we do so--otherwise we're just going to look stupid.

So much for keeping this brief. Apologies. I'm tired, getting over a cold, and suffering from a massive headache. It's made me a little cranky.

October 25, 2023 at 8:46:00 PM GMT+9

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