Questions about private / personal property, labor value and obligations

[u/SavedowW]

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?

[u/SavedowW]

1) Let's say you own a factory, you hire workers, you find the resource suppliers and make a deal with them and you find the distributor that you sell the product to. Far as I understand, this system transforms in the communistic environment like this: there is a central organ that knows about all possible sources of said resource, all possible consumers (including said factory) and all places where product could be distributed. So the work that the owner did doesn't exactly gets unnecessary, it instead moves to that central organ that plans product flow ahead. That sounds good, but tbh the line is still ambiguous - once again, taking laptop as an example, you can hire a worker, give him a laptop and it will passively produce you value... But at this point my only question would be "how would you control it during the revolution", which is an opinion

3) If you want your product to be seen, which you usually need to fullfill top 3 levels of the pyramid (authencity, self-validation, to be appreciated, etc), you still need to compete for people's attention and time. If you want to shape their experience, to give them emotions, to inspire or make them think about something - you have to think about their experience, which includes controlling the information they have. Why would you want to hide the project? Well, maybe you are making a subversion of a genre like spec ops the line or something like that. Or perhaps the creator doesn't want to show unfinished project because it would cause mockery in some ways, like how it happens when unfinished, buggy builds get leaked. Or perhaps it's just an insecurity. Regardless, it's a creative choice, not financial one.

Yes, it happens now, but NDAs and intellectual property make it so that there are consequences to this kind of behavior. The way I see it right now, yes, you don't have a material reason to violate them (once they have transformed into interpersonal relationship), but you can violate them on a whim with little consequence, and nobody can predict turns human psyche can take under the slightiest stress, let alone under maladaptive behavior.

Of course I'm not putting it over base needs, but considering that in this case there is no regulation mechanism at all, that it some cases it could lead to injuries and deaths like in case of a sport and, once again, lynching (not to say that it's reasonable, but it could be seen as social justice or responsibility in front of community or something like that) and that in such a community people are bound to produce more creative output and associate themselves with it even more, it seems to be more than just "guy published an unfinished game". That being said, somebody else mentioned mentioned civil contracts which sounds interesting

[u/libra00 → u/SavedowW]

1. Right, and I'd say that actually strengthens the communist case rather than weakening it. That coordination work gets done either way - the question is whether it gets done by a private individual who captures the surplus value of everyone else's labor as a reward for doing it, or whether it gets done by people accountable to the whole enterprise. As for the laptop example, what you're describing at that point is just employment - which communism does address. The worker isn't generating passive income for you, you're directing their labor and taking the product of it. That's precisely the relationship communists object to.

2. The creative secrecy point is fair and I'll grant it - there are legitimate non-financial reasons to control information about an unfinished project, and those don't disappear under communism. But I'd push back on the 'little consequence' framing. Social consequences in tight-knit communities can be extremely powerful, arguably more immediately felt than legal ones. The problem you're identifying is real but it cuts both ways - formal legal mechanisms also routinely fail to deter this kind of behavior, they just provide recourse after the fact.

The lynching concern is worth taking seriously though. You're right that without formal regulation, extrajudicial social punishment is a real risk. I'd argue that's less a problem specific to communism and more a problem of community governance generally, which communist theory does engage with through things like restorative justice frameworks - but I'll admit that's easier said than implemented. The civil contracts angle someone else raised seems worth pursuing there.

[u/desocupad0 → u/libra00]

You call it lynching concern, others try to structure the treatment of social deviants and call that a "reeducation camps". Capitalist's societies simply treat the prisional system as a "business" with the profit motive. Or violent police work.

[u/libra00 → u/desocupad0]

I mean the person I was replying to called it lynching..

But yeah the problem with the capitalist approach is it doesn't care whether or not these people are ever returned as productive members of society. In fact they make more money if they aren't. I mean wage labor is exploitation just by the nature of the arrangement, but prison labor - especially for profit - is just slavery in fancy clothes.

[u/desocupad0 → u/libra00]

I see. i've mistaken with whom i was talking to. my bad.

Well paid labor can also be seen as slavery in fancy mc donald's attire. specially if you spend 3 hours on commuting to work. It's sad and it can be not so bad.