Originally Posted by
Stavros
Perhaps we can agree that communism is the natural condition of mankind [you mean that when Ugg and Grunt first crawled out of the primordial ooze feeling peckish and Ugg snared a frog for dinner, he noticed Grunt looking at him enviously and was confronted by the choice of sharing or not, realising that if he didn't then Grunt might try and take the frog from him by force, or that Grunt might starve and then he'd be left alone, or that by sharing on this occasion then Grunt might share the fruits of his labour subsequently, or that by sharing neither would have enough and they would both starve? Well the frog is Ugg's property. It is the fruit of his labour, although there is no rule of law to uphold property rights, and the land on which it was found has presumably not been claimed by Ugg. So I suppose I'd say that at this stage, we have a sort of hybrid, where property is literally up for grabs, but sharing, or perhaps bartering (part of a frog now, in the hope of a return favour later) is on the radar; but what if they both find a frog? if their frogs are of equal plumpness then all we have is the acquisition of property rights by each, absent the application of force by either to denude the other of his frog. The scenario can be sliced and diced a number of ways, but I rather doubt that Ugg, if he is initially the most successful scavenger, is going for any length of time to apply the principle of 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'],...[everything belongs to everyone? so if we were in the same room together right now, and I walked over to you and started to remove your watch and car keys, you wouldn't stop me?].
I am puzzled by your ignorance, as you do reveal yourself to have a sound intellectual background -there is a wealth of evidence on the lives of others for whom private property has little or no meaning, not all of them pre-literate 'stone age' tribes in the Amazon basin -island communities in the South Pacific were led astray/corrupted by missionaries, merchants and traders, by the military -yet the evidence shows they did not covet belongings and shared -I was even told by someone from Tonga a few years ago that they still help each other to other peoples things -cigarettes, to take one trivial example. In the Middle East, there was a mis-conception by early European and American travellers who complained they were being robbed by the Bedouin when the bedouin merely took what they believed was theirs, not sharing the European concept of private property -even the rustling of sheep/horses/goats/camels is seen as part of economic recycling rather than theft. As in A hustles goats from B, C hustles goats from B, A hustles goats from C... Marx was not the first to argue that capitalism has turned everything into a commodity that can be bought and sold, and which must therefore have an owner, but he did describe in withering detail how men and women who had once owned their own tools and even in the harsh conditions of feudal production had their own plot of land to farm, end up centuries later owing nothing, tied to a machine performing tasks that could be and these days often are being performed by robots. The point being that it was difficult for merchants and traders to deal with non-capitalist societies until they integrated them into the 'modern world system' to borrow Wallerstein's term -in some cases the local people were exploited by traders precisely because the concept of ownership was not strong, and barter appeared to be a good deal; this seems both the positive and negavtive pivot on which early relations between traders and first nations in North America turned, until the only 'solution' to people who did not want to become part of a market-led society was genocide.
[You are too kind, but I don't see why your descriptions of Bedouin, etc. are any closer to the State of Nature - the natural condition of mankind, as you put it - than are mine. They're just different ways that different societies developed. So when you say that 'communism is the natural condition of mankind', I take you to mean that in the State of Nature everything is held in common. I agree that there are societies where that has happened, but I cannot see why that is any more natural a development upon climbing out of the primordial sludge than Ugg deciding that the frog he found is his. Take another example: studies of very young children suggesting that they sometimes share when there is no obvious gain to them in doing so. On the other hand, any parent of young children has witnessed in them the urge to acquire and to accumulate. I'd suggest that urge is even stronger where fundamentals such as hunger are at stake: if Ugg reckons he'll starve if he shares even a morsel with Grunt, then Grunt is on his own. A little further down the evolutionary tree, Ugg might start to consider the benefit to him of delaying satisfaction of his hunger by giving Grunt some frog, in return for Grunt's assistance slaying a sabre-tooth tiger. A primitive trade, if you will. Or maybe they'll Bedouin it up, who knows? ]
I don't wear a watch, and would not be pleased if you entered my home helped yourself to the things I value most, but that is not what the debate on private property is concerned with.
