this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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You're getting a lot of flak (rightly), but I figured I'd actually give you a right definition so this can be a growing opportunity: If you own a resource and you use that resource to produce profit, that resource is private property. If you're not making profit, it's only personal property. Farm for your family? Personal property. Farm where you give the output to your community? Personal property. Farm where you sell the yields? Private property.
Ok, so exploitable land (a means of production) can be owned for the exclusive enjoyment of an individual in a socialist economy. Got it, thanks.
Yes, exploitable land can be owned by an individual in a socialist economy. If you're growing food for your family, then that's just one family the state doesn't have to feed. If you're growing food for your community, then that's several mouths the state doesn't have to feed. If you're hoarding or selling food (or in one very famous historical case, burning it out of spite), then you are monopolizing a resource that could be feeding people, and the state will intervene, whether by buying your land back from you, taking it from you, liquidating you as a class, or some other solution to be determined by the state in question - there is no one size fits all blueprint to socialism.
I know I was being snarky, but I do appreciate the context. The monopolizing bit clarifies it for me as something that you may own but if found to be monopolizing the resource to a detriment of the community, that is not acceptable. So “own” isn’t really used here to mean entitled to, but something that you may possess as an appropriation while acting in good faith.
"Or some other other solution to be determined by the state in question"
Gulags, generally speaking
I literally said "liquidating you as a class" as a possible retaliation. "Gulags" is not a gotcha, if you hoard or destroy food during a famine you are committing murder and you need to be stopped for the good of society.
By the way, the US prison population today is higher than the Gulag population of the entire Soviet Union at its peak. I'd sure as hell rather see gulags full of reactionaries and food-burners than full of drug users and the chronically unemployed. I'm curious, why do you prefer the latter?
Well being worked to death and/or being strait up shot tends to keep those numbers down. And how many of those "hoarders" were quite literally starving but they had a tiny bit on hand? And how many more were in there for "anti-soviet behavior" instead of anything related to hoarding or destroying food.
Gulags, concentration camps and the like are definitely a "gotcha" as much as a "gatcha" can exist.
Tankie apologetics 101:
it blows my mind the lengths that online rightists will go to to defend literally burning food during a famine. Why?
What percentage of the harvest was lost to the destruction of grain?
Yes, people who burn food during a famine should be rehabilitated, and prisons were the method (that doesn't work) that people thought was effective to that end at the time.
And what of people who steal food during a famine, like the bolsheviks?
You're right, it's so fucked up that Stalin stole all those poor Kulaks' grain and put it in a big swimming pool so that he and his cabinet could swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.
Are there Kulaks in the room with you right now?
The soviets took enough grain from Ukrainian peasants to induce widespread hunger and death. But let's blame 1% of the peasantry who had already liquidated as a class.
People should steal food from hoarders to redistribute it to starving peasants actually.
If youre talking about grain quotas they stopped taking grain out of the region and started importing food when they realized there was a famine.
I agree, but the quota on kulak liquidation led to starving peasants being targeted.
After millions of people had already starved to death. A minor but necessary bump in the road toward industrialization, I'm sure.
It wasn't necessary. They could have foreseen the need for an independent commission to verify the numbers that local officials were reporting. They could have cracked down harder on sabotage of planting and harvesting and the mass slaughter of livestock by kulaks.
Industrialization was necessary. If they didn't push hard for industrialization we might all be speaking German right now. They cut it close to the wire and the mistakes that they made resulted in mass suffering. But there were no more famines with the exception of post ww2 after that famine, in an area that previously frequently had famines, because collectivization worked once the kinks were worked out.
Rapid industrialization at the cost of millions of lives was only a necessity because Stalin insisted on Socialism in One Country.
Had proletariat revolutions not failed elsewhere, especially Western Europe, there would be no need for such a haphazard and reckless transition.
Okay but how was the soviet union to create a global proletarian revolution? They had to work with what they had.
You could ask Trotsky but Stalin had him murdered 🤷
I've read Trot stuff and found their arguments unconvincing in this context. Global proletarian revolution is something we all have to exercise agency over, if youre in the soviet union you can't just rely on everyone else spontaneously uprising, you have to plan for that not happening. And it didn't happen, so...
In reality the party takes the food you've grown for your family and gives it to urban centers, and if you resist you catch a bullet.
Want to add on that there is another distinction which I think is slightly more accurate. Personal property only denies use to others through the details of use by the owner, private property prevents others from using resources that the person using the property isn't directly using through threats of violence.