“The modern division of labor links together most everyone on the planet in a tremendously complex, cooperative web of relationships. Let’s call stuff that people can use individually personal property and stuff that a great number of people need to cooperate in order to use means of production, and when these means of production are acknowledged as the property of individuals, let’s call them private property. Ownership of private property does correspond to the set of those who work the private property to produce wealth; instead, a subset of people have control over these means of production, allowing them power over those who do not. We communists don’t want to get rid of personal property; instead, we want to convert the means of production from private property to some public kind or another.”
The best overview of the technical meaning of “exploitation,” at least in the later Marx, can be found here. (By contrast, I think I’d need to know what you find dubious about the concept of class to better explain it, since there’s no single technical definition of class within Marxist discourse and the range of them doesn’t wander very wildly from the normal English use of the term, which I assume you’re perfectly familiar with.)
Sure, that pretty well matches both my previous understanding from my study of Hegel/Marx and what I’d written above. The slippery part of this is the distinction between “private property” and “personal property”, and exactly what qualifies as which (and who gets to decide), and what happens to my personal property when I find it has become a “means of production”.
I was not expressing lack of understanding regarding words like “class” and “exploitation” when I called them “dubious”. I heartily recommend Hegel’s description of “exploitation” (from Phenomenology of Spirit—the lord and the bondsman) over Marx’s—Marx is basically just Hegel plus bad economics.
At any rate, I’m not particularly interested in hashing out any of this stuff on this forum—I had just found it interesting that there was a notion of property amongst “libertarian socialists” that seems very nearly compatible with the Lockean natural-rights analysis (and that I had not heard previously).
Does this paraphrase make more sense to you?
“The modern division of labor links together most everyone on the planet in a tremendously complex, cooperative web of relationships. Let’s call stuff that people can use individually personal property and stuff that a great number of people need to cooperate in order to use means of production, and when these means of production are acknowledged as the property of individuals, let’s call them private property. Ownership of private property does correspond to the set of those who work the private property to produce wealth; instead, a subset of people have control over these means of production, allowing them power over those who do not. We communists don’t want to get rid of personal property; instead, we want to convert the means of production from private property to some public kind or another.”
The best overview of the technical meaning of “exploitation,” at least in the later Marx, can be found here. (By contrast, I think I’d need to know what you find dubious about the concept of class to better explain it, since there’s no single technical definition of class within Marxist discourse and the range of them doesn’t wander very wildly from the normal English use of the term, which I assume you’re perfectly familiar with.)
Sure, that pretty well matches both my previous understanding from my study of Hegel/Marx and what I’d written above. The slippery part of this is the distinction between “private property” and “personal property”, and exactly what qualifies as which (and who gets to decide), and what happens to my personal property when I find it has become a “means of production”.
I was not expressing lack of understanding regarding words like “class” and “exploitation” when I called them “dubious”. I heartily recommend Hegel’s description of “exploitation” (from Phenomenology of Spirit—the lord and the bondsman) over Marx’s—Marx is basically just Hegel plus bad economics.
At any rate, I’m not particularly interested in hashing out any of this stuff on this forum—I had just found it interesting that there was a notion of property amongst “libertarian socialists” that seems very nearly compatible with the Lockean natural-rights analysis (and that I had not heard previously).