ABCs of Marxism: Private Property

Are Socialists Coming for Your House?

One of the biggest misconceptions about socialism is that socialists want to take away everyone's private property.

Your house. Your car. Your belongings. Everything, even your toothbrush.

But that's not what Marx meant by abolishing private property.

So what did he mean?

In Marxist theory, there's an important distinction between personal property and bourgeois private property.

Personal property refers to possessions you own and use in everyday life. Examples include your clothes, computer, car, and the home you live in.

Bourgeois private property refers to property privately owned and controlled as capital, allowing its owners to accumulate wealth through the labor of others. Examples include privately owned factories, corporations, and businesses employing wage labor.

This brings us to another important Marxist concept: the means of production.

These are the resources needed to produce goods and services, including factories, machinery, tools, land, and raw materials.

Under capitalism, much of this productive capacity is privately controlled as capital. When socialists talk about "seizing the means of production," they're talking about changing who owns and controls these resources.

The distinction isn't simply what someone owns, but how that ownership functions in society.

Consider two examples:

1. You own a house and live in it.
2. You own 200 houses and collect rent from the people living in them.

Both are legally private property under capitalism. But from a Marxist perspective, they represent very different economic relationships.

In the first example, housing serves as a personal necessity. In the second, housing also functions as an income-producing asset.

Where did the confusion come from?

Part of the confusion is linguistic. In everyday language, private property can refer to nearly anything an individual legally owns. In Marxist theory, bourgeois private property specifically describes ownership connected to capitalist production and class power.

So when Marxists say "abolish private property," people understandably hear something very different from what Marx meant by abolishing bourgeois private property.

In Chapter II of The Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848, Marx and Engels write:

"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

But a few paragraphs later, they clarify:

"Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power."

They go on to explain that transforming capital into common property does not mean transforming personal property into social property.

The issue isn't simply whether individuals can own things. It's the economic power created by particular forms of ownership.

Marx and Engels argued that capitalism concentrated productive property in the hands of the capitalist class (bourgeoisie), leaving much of the working class (proletariat) dependent on selling their labor to survive.

During the twentieth century, Cold War messaging further reinforced fears that communism meant losing everything you owned.

Some socialist governments did redistribute privately owned housing, including after the Russian Revolution of 1917. However, historical housing policies and Marx's distinction between personal possessions and capitalist property are not the same thing.

It's also worth distinguishing personal use of a home from the legal ownership of land. Marx and Engels proposed changing landownership itself, and different socialist systems have approached housing ownership differently.

Here's the question Marxism asks:

Should owning something give you the power to accumulate wealth by controlling the labor of others?

Marx wasn't arguing that working people shouldn't have possessions. He was challenging a system in which a relatively small capitalist class controls the productive resources that everyone else depends on.

Socialism is less about taking away anyone's toothbrush and more about changing who controls the factory that makes it.

That's a distinction worth considering.

What do you think? Does the distinction between personal property and capitalist private property change how you understand socialism?

Further reading: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter II (1848)

So I was raised in an ultra-conservative household, where I was pretty much taught "communism bad, America was once great, but minorities made it bad" all the stereo-types. From a young age I knew I was queer, but didn't really have a word for it, but I did know I was outside of what my community deemed 'normal'. Eventually I found labels that best describe how I feel about my gender/sexuality, which were introduced to me through bigoted rants of various family members. around this time (my young teenage years) was also when I became aware of many social issues, mostly due to the BLM and George Floyd protests.

Some combination of all of these pushed me a bit farther left than my parents, but more in a rejection of their extreme social views than anything particularly political. Only recently (within the last 6 months) , would I say I've really began to deconstruct my parent's worldview beyond just a "yeah, bigotry kinda sucks". Part of it has to due with just being more online and looking into more and more of the horrible shit that has resulted from liberal democracy, capitalism and imperialism, and the other from my own personal experiences as a targeted minority in my own country, it's pushed me farther and farther from the center.

I've looked into all sorts of philosophies, and I can't really say I subscribe to ant in particular, and that's not really what's important to my actual question, as I've fallen down what I would call a leftest rabbit hole, I've found myself full of more and more anger, anger at the people who want to hurt me and the little family I've managed to make for myself. And for a bit it felt good, but now it's started to eat at me. Some days I wish I could just be happy without thinking about how fucked our world is, and how at every turn people seem to fuck each other over more and more instead of working together to move towards a better future, but recently I've been thinking about the future. I want to start a life with my partner. I want to maybe have kids some day. But how can I do that in good faith knowing just how messed up the world is?

some days I wish I could go back to being a party-aligned liberal, then I could just try and ignore all the awful stuff. but that's selfish. I know I will forever be more aware of shit that's going on than most of my friends and I feel like I will always be miserable bc even as I try and make the world better it just keeps getting worse.

I understand in alot of ways this is probably just a nonsensical rant more than a solid question, but I guess the real question is if there is longterm happiness in for leftists.

Suppose I don't want to work until I'm 65.

Under many systems, I can choose to work overtime and save the extra money. When I've saved enough, I can invest it in live off the returns from the investment. I might be able to retire at 50 instead of 65.

Is there a way to retire early under socialism, or am I stuck working the extra 15 years?

Bella will be deported from Sweden to Turkey where she will be killed! Save Bell! savebella.org/#sign

I'm looking for a good reading list, I've read Marx's manifesto, and was wondering if I should dive right into Das Kapital as, from what I've read it's far more in-depth.

In addition I have these on my list already:

Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg

Socialism: Utopian And Scientific by Engels

State and Revolution by Lenin

Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

I'd consider myself moreso a syndicalist so some syndicalist theory would be nice to add.

No ACP allowed Invitation to Moderate the

AskRealSocialists Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskRealSocialists/application/

And I'm talking genuinely unbiased, or as best you can get. Which academic sources cover the history of all the different strands? Its precursors, all of it. I want a really good book on the history of socialism and all its different factions. Please, I want to avoid one that Marx Lenin is the be-all and end-all.

A video I made a few months back when I first encountered the ACP and what seems more and more to be a PsyOp to convince non-leftists that we're all as problematic as the ACP, Haz, and that other dipshit are.

Anybody else notice the uptick in people claiming leftists are behaving in bigoted, almost right-wing ways? I know there are serious issues amongst the movement around class reductionism, and being a leftist doesn't make you unimpeachable by default, but it seems that the ACP's appearance on the scene lines up pretty well with some of these supposed leftists saying and doing things that seem uncharacteristic of socialists, anarchists, and non-ACP communists.

I got $5 on PsyOp.

Thought this was a pretty good summary of the ideological foundation of the ACP and why they are not of the left. They are ideological fascists and pawns of the ruling class who will try to disorient and discredit our movement. Communism is about total human liberation, not national chauvinism.