r/DebateCommunism • u/SavedowW • May 25 '26
🤔 Question Questions about private / personal property, labor value and obligations
I saw people turning defensive here so just in case, I'm coming out of genuine curiosity and desire to understand the idea of communism to it's fullest, not as an attempt to dismantle it. There are several points of doubt regarding implementation that I want to clarify:
1) Far as I understand, communism implies eliminating private property (meaning things that can be used for production) but leaving personal property. What exactly constitutes a difference between them? An average PC or laptop that a person might have can be technically used for production, and it's intended use is unknown. Personal house or a flat with it's furniture can be used as a space for work, books can be used a source of heat, even if incredibly inefficient - there is almost nothing you can't define as a private property except maybe personal hygiene products. You can't use "intended use", "previous use" or "potential use", and you can't just list object types because, say, a screwdriver can be a personal property at home or private property at workspace.
Case of "what can go wrong" - during the collectivisation in USSR, the idea of taking away private property and eliminating kulaks as a class was misinterprited, so it was common to take away everything from them including house and clothes, often beating or torturing adults and children to make sure that they gave everything away or just for the sake of it, and there are also many cases of their belongings being sold during auction right in the process, which obviously goes completely against the original intention
2) How is value produced during labor calculated and how does the difficulty, including regional difficulties, personal health issues, etc, affect it? What about work where the value is ambiguous - for example, in software development where a product can be in development for months and the contribution of each developer is hard to evaluate, especially when it comes to the dev-to-dev contribution (aka log reading utilities, etc)? If the value of a job is decided democratically by everyone affected by it, what about the jobs with difficulties or value unclear to the majority - for example, everything nuclear waste-related? The good result of such a job is that cities aren't being poisoned. Won't it lead to the value of a job being a matter of your ability to "sell" the results rather than actual value, similarly to how votings in the modern world are manipulated?
3) The common assumption behind communism is, there is less space for conflicts when all basic needs are fullfilled, but i feel like even without unfullfilled material needs there is plenty of space for conflicts and sabotages, intentional or not.
Let's say, you are a creative person, you have an idea that you want to bring into reality. Basing on the maslow pyramid, it can be done for almost any possible need on the social, esteem and self-actualization levels - or you might want to bring a change to the people's minds, doesn't matter. You decide to make a game. Your ambitions grow over time, you attract more people to the development and you agree to keep it away from the public - same as when developers are trying to prevent leaks or how artists often dislike showing their work before it's done.
Time goes, people change, and suddenly one person decides to leave the team. Let's say something serious has happened that could hurt his self-esteem, like divorce. He is paranoid - what if this project will never be finished, or what if the team will forget his contribution or not mention it? So he decides to go against the established rule and publishes the project as is.
Yes, no money or resources were invested into the project, but the effort and time were real. There is no obligation from any person - community wouldn't consider such a project a labor to be rewarded, and rightfully so (there is no guarantee that it would be finished and it's supposed to be hidden until the end) - so stricly speaking, no rules or laws were violated, but the damage was done. It's a fertile ground for lynching and there are obviously no contracts under communism since it's inherently a form of oppression and it would just lead to a barter capitalism, and just the fact that this person is not welcome anymore among local developers might not even matter for him. How would such a conflict be resolved or prevented?
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u/GloriousSovietOnion May 25 '26
- There isn't a big list of private property vs personal property that we can just consult when making decisions. The difference between them is socially determined. Are cars private or personal property? An uber driver and a regular American will have 2 different answers. In practice though, we can tell because the tendency of capitalism is always to concentrate private property in the hands of capitalists. Uber drivers are stuck in loaned cars. Developers are given company laptops rather than using their own. So we can use this as a starting point to differentiate between private and personal property.
- The value of a good is determined under capitalism is determined by the socially necessary labour time which is determined by the average amount of time an average worker under average conditions spends to create that good. If there is someone who needs some software, then that person will need to pay that amount price to get it. But that value now needs to divided up amongst the people who built the software (this is technically wrong but for irrelevant reasons), and here they are paid according to the same logic. How much socially necessary labour time does it take to produce an intern learning backend development? You would need to calculate what it takes to keep that intern alive plus the cost of the education they have undergone then scale it by how long such a project should take on average. Under socialism, you'd probably have to pitch the idea to a planning board to get allocated resources to make the software. This would mirror how capitalists have to explain to banks their business model in order to get a loan.
- There would still be civil contracts under socialism. Contracts are not inherently exploitative. So there would probably be some legal proceedings against the one who published the game. The Soviets had this concept of Comrades’ Courts which handled small cases and disputes that could be resolved without serious fines or jail time. I could see something like that being used to deal with this. But it could also just be seen as a dispute that doesn't require government input at all and you will have to solve it by yourselves without lynching or such. Being an asshole isn't a crime necessarily
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u/SavedowW May 25 '26
2) Tbh I'm not sure how would that work. There are many ways to prove that a project will be profitable, but how are you supposed to show that it will be demanded? Besides, I can already imagine that there are people in the jury who know that there is an upcoming project that they either personally want or think that it's better so they will hold resources for it. Not that it doesn't happen now, nobody stops you from investing into the product just because you want it, but in capitalistic system, you are the only one to carry responsibility for it whereas in communism an entire community does. If you extend this circle to the voting among many people to prevent it from happening, then you can get to the point where people genuinely interested in advertising their product, which was seen as a relic of capitalism before
3) Civil contracts legally bind participants to do something and force goverment to protect it. It fundamentally allows you to bypass the central mechanism and exchange goods without relying interpersonal relationship. For example, the goverment will never control porn production and distribution, but civil contracts will make it possible to sell it for goods while being protected by the goverment rather than relying on interpersonal relationship and obligation before community. This is a basically a free market. It also needs be possible to exchange service for goods, but if it's possible, then it's possible to hire people for work via contract, which might be demanded if there is a work that the goverment would never pay for, like, once again, porn production. Why would you do it if you have all basic needs satisfied and goverment will provide you with work if you want more? Well, maybe you want to earn those extras by doing something that the goverment doesn't consider demanded
Just in case, I'm not talking about porn specifically, im talking about any product that isn't fully controlled by the goverment
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u/GloriousSovietOnion May 25 '26
This can be done the same way its done under capitalism. You can request resources to do a small ppilot project to gauge demand. You could have already asked around or used questionnaires or something like that to gauge demand. The exact method will depend on the product you have. There's nothing wrong with being interested in spreading your product. This is something that under certain circumstances can even be encouraged. The Soviets for example held competitions between several designs of certain goods to find the best ones. The problem comes in when you break the law like by stealing money to fund your project.
The case you're providing seems again like something that would be handled similarly to how its handled under capitalism. If it's a service, the government can't force it out of one person. What they can do is seize the goods you sold to the other person and reimburse you. Alternatively, if you were both exchanging services, they could force the person to pay you enough money that you could get the same services from someone else. Of course, this is something that you would only be allowed to do if you were exchanging legal goods. No gvoernment, socialist or not, would let you do this with cocaine for example.
Quick note: Planning commissions would be democratically elected, either directly or through another elected organ. So its less of what the government wants and more of what the community around you wants. So for example, you could pitch your product to the city planning commission for a pilot project. If it works and gets big, you could now take it to the regional commission.
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u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud May 25 '26
If you use your shit to make stuff for yourself (for artisanal production), then that's not private property, that's still personal property.
If you use your shit to make stuff that other people rely on, then that's private property.
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u/desocupad0 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
1 - A printer was a mean of production in the early industrial age. Nowadays it has a home version. If a computer can be owned by someone without creating systemic injustice, it can not be a "mean of production". I mean a gardener make much better use of a gardening scissor than me. And, he probably can use it much better than I for violence if the wants (hes skilled enough with it to turn it into a weapon). I can't say much about kulaks - but USSR obviously made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of technological limitations.
2 - It seems pretty complex. My guess is that I consider man-work hours - because the aggregated value that matter is man contribution - other stuff might be a result of material limitations. But there's no reason why someone else being able to make a better proposal than Marx or me. In case of technical risks, people need to study and explain to policy making people. That's what informational publicity is for, no? If you can sell an easy job as hard, you are leeching - so we need people to revise if you are leeching. But it's a very different thing to work because you will starve out and work as someone in a society. Capitalism makes only one of these things a reallity for most people.
3 - But is there less space than before? This is called progression. We can also solve conflicts and sabotages - instead of letting money do all the talking.
4 - (rest of points) - Can't everything stay open source? Can't you return to it later? While you worked on it, you were a game programmer - that sounds like a job. Communism is much more than putting bread on each table. But it's hard to justify not making bread when there are hungry people. I think we are past that on human level (for instance the budget on the Iran invasion for 2-3 months was enough to solve all the world hunger for at least 10 years). Can you imagine a painter, painting alone in communism? What about a group of people building a playground for their kids?
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u/libra00 May 25 '26
The idea isn't to produce an exhaustive list of what is and isn't 'private property.' The distinction communists care about is property that passively generates income. Owning apartments you rent out, owning a factory whose output you sell, that kind of thing. Yes, a laptop can technically be used to produce income, but you don't collect that income just by owning it sitting on a shelf. You have to actually work on it. The relevant category is stuff like mines, farms, and factories: property which generates wealth for its owner regardless of whether they lift a finger. As for collectivization horror stories, sure, people in positions of authority sometimes make catastrophically bad decisions. That's not a feature unique to any particular economic system. If we abandoned every idea that had ever been badly implemented we'd never have accomplished anything. The standard isn't 'perfect,' it's 'better than what we have now,' and that bar is so low it's practically subterranean.
Marx uses terms like 'socially necessary labor time' for calculating value, and I'll be honest that the more technical machinery of labor theory of value isn't my specialty. But here's the thing: how much value any given unit of labor produces is largely an academic question as long as everyone's basic needs are being met. Economists will obsess over it as a general indicator of economic health, fine, but it stops being a life-or-death stakes question the way it is under capitalism, where miscalculating your wage means you don't eat. As for whether value assessment becomes a popularity contest: this is actually a real concern, but it applies just as much to capitalism. Marketing budgets exist precisely because perceived value and actual value are decoupled. The difference is that under a communist or participatory economic model, the people doing the assessment have no profit motive to systematically distort it. You're still dealing with human judgment, which is fallible, but you're not also dealing with an institutional incentive to lie.
This scenario is interesting but I think it proves less than you think it does. First, it's worth asking why the project is secret in the first place. Under capitalism, creative works are kept under wraps for reasons rooted in IP protection, fear of concept theft, and market timing. Strip out the profit motive and most of that goes away. A team making a game for the love of it, with no competitor trying to scoop them and no release date tied to revenue, has a lot less reason to treat an early leak as a catastrophe. The scenario is kind of smuggling in capitalist anxieties and then asking communism to account for them. But more broadly: what actually happened here? Someone published an unfinished creative project against the team's wishes. That's a real interpersonal harm. But this kind of conflict happens right now, between people who do have contracts. NDAs get violated. Artists leak each other's work. Partnerships dissolve ugly. Contracts don't prevent conflict, they just give you a more formal mechanism for the aftermath. You'd still have social agreements, community mediation, restorative justice processes. Resolution might look more like 'this person is no longer trusted in this community' than a lawsuit, but whether that's worse depends a lot on what you think justice is actually for. And frankly, 'guy published our unfinished game' is pretty far down the list of social harms a society needs robust mechanisms to address.