One of my pet peeves is the "a toothbrush is possession not property" discourse that has been entirely sustained by poorly skilled ancoms somehow failing to land easy blows on ancaps online.
It's just not an honest accounting of the concept of "property" or its usage.
It's just not an honest accounting of the concept of "property" or its usage.
In practice it's an incoherent and arbitrary distinction that inevitably sets off an endless array of quibbles and incredulity from those who haven't drunk the koolaid. Ot amounts to unnecessary gatekeeping "you must embrace this clunky alternative definition to be an anarchist".
What extremely online red anarchists are *trying* to do with the distinction is break apart forms of ownership that by some quality of their character risk compounding into runaway wealth hierarchies and those that do not. But there is ultimately no easy line to be drawn.
And of course we're anarchists -- we don't want runaway compounding accumulation forming wealth hierarchies! But the mistake is in thinking that the solution is demarcating a class of things that do this and thus individuals should be barred from owning. That's just awkward.
It's a fundamentally marxist and un-anarchist kind of analytical framework. The marxist goes "oh, owning capital is problematic because it has unique economic characteristics that..." the anarchist can cut straight to the core issue: "sharp wealth hierarchies are bad."
Marxists waste all this time creating historically contingent and iffy analytic structures just to say "your boss is stealing labor value from you, and thus he's bad" whereas the anarchist can just say "your boss is bad by virtue of being a boss, the power relation itself is bad"
The problem marxism has is that it's all so terribly historically contingent -- their concept of "capital" is explicitly about an 1800s industrial factory mass commodity production context. Which isn't timeless and so things break down in weird ways. Is a laptop capital? etc.
Never mind that "collective ownership of the MOP" is poorly defined in a lot of ways, risks turning micro-nationalist, and collective social organization never magically made anything less oppressive... we just don't need the conceptual schema to recognize outbreaks of power.
So the notion that there's one class of objects that can be owned without problem and another class of objects that should never be owned (except sometimes in the very problematic sense of being owned by a collective/nation) is just a dead end and red herring.
The way out is to just use "property" the way normal people use it, but to also say that we'll studiously search for and resist any emerging power relations. And in terms of property norms this will look like very different things in different contexts.
c4ss.org/content/41653
c4ss.org/content/41653
Because there is no magic bullet that will diagnose every conceivable situation or dynamic by which power relations can take root. And attempting to find such simplistic evaluative schemas risks going overbroad & beating people up for gifting a coffee as interest on a laptop loan
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