Riedquat wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:34 pm
Draco Dracul wrote: ↑Wed Jan 05, 2022 8:01 pm
A)Private property serves to concentrate control in the hands of the few and historically the state at the behest of the rich has over ridden the property rights of the poor and minorities.
B) A significant portion of the left are anarchists, who absolutely despise the state because it serves to protect the private property rights of the rich over the well being of the poor.
C) Private property rights are what the rich use to treat people as minions. If private property was abolished in favor of communal ownership automation would actually happen faster than it is because everyone would benefit from it.
You're looking at the extreme case on one side there and conveniently ignoring the other. In both extremes the average person gets thrown around from side to side with few rights, his or her home being someone else's to order them out of if it's convenient, and generally screw them over. All you're doing in either case is concentrating more power in the hands of the few.
The rich can abuse private property rights. A strong left-wing government can abuse communal property rights (they end up being "government property rights"). In either case it's all very nice for a small number of people thank you very much, everyone else be damned. Everyone having their own bit that's their's, that's necessary to reduce exploitation or abandonment.
Maybe it was not clear in the post you're responding to, but I'm an anarcho communist. I think all governance should be in the form of direct democracy. The "government" in this case is not a small group of people, elected or otherwise, but the collective consent of the governed.
Everyone having thier own bit that's theirs is the opposite of how the shift to private property has actually played out. It's how 400 people wound up with more to thier names than half the world's population. And historically the protection of private property has been used to prevent land reform, such as when the US overthrew the Guatemalan government at the behest of United Fruit or who even after apartheid ended in South Africa the majority of land is owned by the white settlers.
And again I want to emphasize from my perspective the vast, vast majority of people do not have a shread of private property and instead sell thier time to the people that do.
What benefit would there be from automation in a left-wing communal society? The state would have less need of the people and less incentive to do anything for them. Just as in the right-wing one the rich have less need for them now that they can even further monopolise. Automation can be a useful tool but it's also something that, like many tools, can and will be used heavily by those at the top, whoever they are, to wash their hands of dependence on anyone else. Less reliance on large numbers of people is dangerous for large numbers of people.
In a direct democratic society with communal ownership less reliance on large numbers of people means more free time for those people. If productivity per person doubles there is no reason to not just have every person work half as much. Or if more luxuries are wanted, you can scale back the work time less to give people more goods.
A just society need not fear idle hands.