Morning Comrades.
I have been looking forward to writing about this one for some time especially considering how much time I spend going on about this topic in real life but let’s take a few steps back to align this properly.
Continuing along the thread of this week in regards to root cause analysis and greed there are two parts to this dispatch. For one, we will distinguish between the definitions of property within the marxist thought and before we get into that a few more random, food for thought, words.
The creation of property, historically, needs to be thought about in two distinct periods. 10-12’000 years ago our species transformed from a hunter / gatherer society to an agrarian society - very simply put, someone, somewhere figured out how to grow food instead of hunting for it and that involved putting a “fence” around a plot of land to do so. Said proverbial fence illustrated ownership and with that came a while new set of ideas and thus responsibilities and actions, constructs and ideas that frankly are at the root of all bullshit we have to endure today. Again, simplified, very. The second epoch is the establishment of property as a reality in “modern” European times, roughly speaking starts around the time of the Black Death ( around 1346-1354 ) from which most, if not all ills of hierarchical fuckery comes from as we know it today. This period is also referred to as the study of the “commons” and as far as this little person goes is one of the most important fields of study.
No matter what injustice you can think of it can easily be traced back to the above, especially once the connection between the idea of ownership and the creation of hierarchical structures that entirely enforced by violence is made. This is precisely the reason why Marx and Engles dedicated so much work towards the idea of property and came to the most radical, yet logical conclusion in the Communist Manifesto:
“the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence:
Abolition of private property.”
but more specifically:
“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.”
And yet, this is traditionally the point where anti-communist work latched on most easily and this has its bootlickers convinced that we are here to take away your shit. Well, shit, that’s not it, and this is why we will not get into what the above actually means. The core of our revolution.
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