• davel [he/him]
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    14 months ago

    Private property isn’t as supportive of capitalism as it initially seems.

    Private property is the very foundation of capitalism. The capitalist class owns the means of production, and the working class must sell the only thing it can—its labor—to survive.

    Classical laborists (e.g. Proudhon) and their modern intellectual descendants (e.g. David Ellerman) argue that the positive and negative results of production are the private property of the workers in the firm.

    They can argue that all they like, but the facts on the ground are that the capitalists own the private property, and the state enforces that ownership though its monopoly on violence. It’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, usually in the form of bourgeois democracy, and occasionally, in times of crisis, in the form of fascism.

    • J Lou
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      14 months ago

      Private property rests on the principle of people getting the fruits of their labor. In other words, private property appropriation has a labor-basis that capitalism denies. Capitalism violates the very principle behind private property by giving workers 0% joint claim on the positive and negative fruits of their labor

      “Property is theft!” – Proudhon

      The employment contract is what really enables capitalist appropriation.

      I agree with your critique of capitalist liberal democracy

      @socialism