this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Woah woah woah there! I'm not stealing. I just really need that toothbrush, badly, and I can take it from you and I don't have to pay you for it. I should give you some money maybe, but I'm certainly not legally compelled to, so I won't. Didn't you read anything you wrote?
Look, you are arguing a strawman, how many times do I need to repeat that personal property is not determined by needing something more or less then someone else, but by actual usage?
But sure, if you urgently need a toothbrush, and I am not actually using mine, you can have it. Totally free.
Cool. I'm going to need your car too.
For what is is worth, I looked up personal vs private property, and it seems that the actual distinction isn't usage, it's portability. So, you would have a right to your toothbrush, car, and money, but your home, business, or farm would not belong to you. So if I wanted your house, I could reasonable make a claim that I needed it and "take" it from you. (Although it can't technically be taking since you don't have any ownership, and very few "rights" to the house.)
So, let's follow that up with a question.
How hard are you going to work on maintaining or improving your home, if you know that someone else, who can't live in their home because they didn't maintain it, can just make a claim on your home, and have a reasonable chance of getting it?
The system you're describing doesn't make everyone free of economic violence, it forces everyone to be serfs for one giant entity (the country).
While you're reading up on Marxism, and personal vs private property, go ahead and read up on what a strawman is, because you've accused me twice of building a strawman without merit, and I have doubts that you genuinely understand the concept.
Sorry, but I am using my car 🤷♂️
Can you link to that definition? Because portability is definitely not the distinction between private and personal property. Usage is.
What follows is a pure strawman argument, because when you are using your house it is personal property and can not just be claimed by someone else.
I know perfectly well what a strawman argument is, and you have been doing it here the entire time. You must have extremely poor reading comprehension if you think I ever claimed anything of what you have been arguing against here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_versus_private_property
If that description of personal property does not work for your individual consensus, please provide one (that is testable) for the purpose of this conversation.
That definition (in the subsection about political theory only) seems fine, but it says little about how to practically determine ownership of personal property. The commonly agreed method to do so is "regular usage", as I have been repeating here many times over...
Who is commonly agreeing to this? What counts as "regular usage"? I regularly use the toilet at work. Would it become my personal property?
The various people that have developed this political & economic theory on which for example the definition on the Wikipedia page you linked is based on. This is literally something that has been discussed in detail for over 150 years now.
And yes, you as an employee of a company would become a co-owner of that company, and therefore the toilet would be partially yours, but obviously not exclusively.
The word "regular" appears 0 times I the article I linked. What did you read?
I already said that the Wikipedia definition lacks the crucial detail about how to determine when something counts as personal property. But look it up yourself, there are entire books on the topic.
Any specific books or resources you might recommend?
https://anarchism.pageabode.com/book/b-3-why-are-anarchists-against-private-property/#secb31
Thank you. Long document, and I'm working through it.
Question so far though...
I have a house in my possession, I live in it, and I regularly maintain it. I'd like to go live in a different, nicer house. How do I do that?
The document also states that a person has a right to their labor, so if I work on my house and improve it, or just really stop it from falling into disrepair, how do I access the value of that labor when I no longer need the house, without forcing economic violence on the person thst possesses it next?
Where is the limit on what I can possess? Am I allowed to walk in the woods regularly and claim I possess it? What is the difference the walls and a roof that I possess as my house, versus the woods that I walk through?
You look for a nicer house that no-one seems to be using and ask the neighbors if it is indeed free to move in and then you just do it if no one has any serious objection.
The second question is a bit harder to answer and not directly related to personal property as a concept. First of all, when you personally no longer need the house it de-facto has no value to you any longer, hence the question is a bit moot. But of course when it is part of a relocation, where you might, or might not move, or might decide to rip out the floor that you placed in the old house to move it over to another one etc. then it is perfectly feasible that you talk with the person that has shown interest in your old house about some sort of deal that both sides benefit from. In the end you can only win in such cases, as an empty house quickly falls into disrepair and loses most value anyways. In some cases the neighbors might also chip in to compensate you instead, as they don't want an half broken house in their neighborhood. And when your house is part of a cooperative housing project, there might also be a general prior understanding between you and your co-owners that they will compensate you fairly when you leave the housing coop. So tl;dr, it depends.
Land ownership is generally not a thing... it's a logical fallacy that you can "own" land (and many countries around the world already recognize that), so at most it would be the garden around your house, or the agricultural field that you regularly plant on. If you regularly use the forest productively, you might earn certain usage rights, like the right to collect mushrooms or do sustainable logging, but that wouldn't extend to the forest itself or the land it grows on. Personal property is limited by what you can as a human realistically use in your everyday life, but of course there is also associative ownership, like being part of a worker owned company or a cooperative housing project.