Property is a term surrounded by many problems, paradoxes and misunderstanding. We come from a place and time when "property" wasn't a thing. Now it's one of the main pillars on which our social organization is built. So here's a short post explaining what it is. And what it does.
source: YouTube
Let's start with the distinction expressed in the title of this post and explain the difference between private property and personal property. The latter is as old as mankind and describes the things we own for personal use. That's your house, your car, your books, your DVD's, your toothbrush, and so on. In short, personal property is stuff we own for use and has a use value. Private property on the other hand is stuff we own for their exchange value, stuff that's exclusively made to be exchanged for a profit. All things, all commodities have both, use value and exchange value, and the difference is made by who owns them. This starts at the very beginning of every production process, with labor. Labor has use value to make things that are useful to us, but under capitalism it also has an exchange value as we sell our labor for a wage, and capitalists buy labor to extract its surplus value to make a profit.
The relationship between commodities and money is what makes the difference here. For us, the working class or proletariat, we sell our commodity (C) of labor to earn money (M), which we then use to buy more commodities (C). We travel the C-M-C circuit of commodities and money. The capitalist class however travels the M-C-M circuit. They buy with money (M) the commodities (C) in order to make more money (M). That means that under capitalism everything's produced in the first place to make money, for its exchange value, and not for its use value. Your clothes have a use value, but they were produced for their exchange value; they started as private property and ended up as personal property. Everything goes from private to personal property. So why is this post titled in the reverse, "Personal To Private"? Stay with me, we're getting there.
First I want you to stand still and think about the implications of what I've just described. It explains so much about the paradoxical world we live in, where there are more empty houses than homeless people, where we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people and hunger still exists. The simple fact is that we do not produce food in order to feed people; we produce food to make a profit. We don't make houses to house people, but to make a profit. If we did produce food for its use value instead of its exchange value, hunger would be nearly eradicated. Let that realization sink in: we-do-not-produce-food-to-feed-people!
Capitalism incentivizes capitalists to cut costs wherever they can. For them labor is a cost, so they'll use any legal (and sometimes illegal) means to pay as little wages they can get away with. This process inevitable leads to the crisis of overproduction we experience under capitalism; workers can't afford to buy most of the stuff that's produced with their labor. That's why there's too much of everything! Have you any idea how many unused mobile phones there are in the world? In England alone there's an estimated 55 million mobile phones lying around: Brits have 55,000,000 unused mobile phones lying around, research finds. Anyhow, we're getting to the point of this post; how does capitalism react when the flow from private property to personal property is interrupted by workers' inability to afford the commodities they've produced?
"You will own nothing and you will be happy." That slogan caused an uproar when it was used by the World Economic Forum as part of "The Great Reset". But it's exactly the trend we've been on since decades. If capitalists can't sell their products, because they don't pay enough wages for their workers to buy them, they'll just keep the products. It's that simple. They'll keep the products and instead of selling them, they'll rent them out. It's their perverted version of an "access economy" that is to replace the "personal property economy". Young people can't buy their own house anymore and many will be convicted to renting their entire lifes, robbing them of the chance to build some measure of personal wealth. We don't buy DVD's, Blue Rays or CD's for our music and films, we subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify. What used to be our personal property is increasingly becoming private property of capitalists which we can temporarily use for a fee. See? Personal to private. In the end we will own nothing and capitalists will own everything.
The tragedy here is that in many cases an access economy is great. I don't have to own a DVD as long as I can watch the movie I want when I want. As long as I have access, everything's peachy. And with access instead of owning, lots of waste and resources are saved. It's only that the way we're getting there is screwed and will keep us dependent and enslaved to the owners of private property. Last thing: socialists have no problem with personal property, all they want is to abolish private property and bring an end to producing stuff purely for exchange value. Watch the below linked video for a deeper dive into this process of disowning the masses under capitalism.
Why You Don't Actually Own Anything Under Capitalism
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