What do we mean when we use the term “private property”’ in our current capitalist system? We aren’t referring to people’s personal possessions — homes, clothes, cars, etc — especially the necessities of life. We mean that the institutions and corporations that control the goods and services that people need are held and owned privately by a few people, or the owning class, for their private gain. In the hunter-gatherer stage of human existence (“primitive communism”), all was owned in common by the entire band or tribe, the food that was hunted and gathered was distributed to all – or nobody would have survived. With the development of agriculture, the ability to store surplus food set the conditions for one class dominating another. This surplus and the labor of the workers who toiled to produce it was controlled by an “owning” class. The first private property was slaves, one class of human beings owned by another who profited from this brutal form of enforced labor. The exploitation of slave labor was the base on which class society developed, and throughout history has been at its root. Only the elimination of private property can end the class system and its various forms of exploitation.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 22:43:54 +0000
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