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I've seen many discussions in socialist and Marxist thought about two different kinds of property: private property and personal property. Usually the demarcation between these is given by example: personal property includes things like a video game console or a set of plates, while private property includes things like a tractor trailer, an aircraft or a railroad. Socialists and Marxists use this distinction to differentiate between things that should retain individual ownership and things that should have common ownership.
Digging a little deeper, it seems the difference between private and personal property is its function. Specifically, from what I can gather, private property is used to generate revenue and create value added, while personal property is not.
I have to admit that I don't subscribe to this method of classification. There are two primary issues I see with it.
My first issue is that the classification seems too fluid to be useful. Cited examples of each are often on the extremes--obviously no-one buys a single stuffed animal for purposes of making money, and no-one buys an entire railroad just for leisure. However, there are plenty of things in the middle, and plenty of things whose uses change.
For example, if I on a car and I only use that car to go on vacations, this distinction would label my car as personal property. But if I go into business for myself and use my car to deliver products or offer rides, I'm using my car to earn revenue, and it suddenly becomes private property. Video game consoles may seem like an obvious example of personal property, but if I use the console to stream games on Twitch and I get paid for that, my console is now a means of acquiring revenue. Does that make it private property?
It seems to me that determining whether any given item is private or personal property would require a complete audit of the owner's life, and regular audits after that to determine if anything has changed status. There doesn't seem to be any simple rule to determine that something is always private property or always personal property. Of course people can't be trusted to self-report the differences, especially if reporting private property means that property is going to be confiscated, and the overhead for a government to do so seems unreasonable--not to mention a egregious violation of all sorts of rights.
The second issue I see with this distinction relates to the meaning of value. Examples of private property seem to be tied very closely with the idea of value added specifically in terms of money, even though more abstract definitions I've seen do not mention money.
For example, a factory is used to produce a product, which is then sold for money in our current capitalist system. Railroads are aircraft are used to transport products, and that service is exchanged for money. And even in the examples of fluid classification above, I talked about items being used to make money.
What about value added that is not strictly tied to money? To me, the biggest example of this is labor--especially since a core tenet of Marxism is the labor theory of value. Food in my kitchen might be classified as personal property, but if I buy healthy food in order to improve my strength and endurance, I can produce better labor and make something more efficiently. This adds value to the thing I'm making by improving my labor. If I buy an engineering textbook and use it to become a skilled engineer, my skill will help create a better machine--that's also value added through labor. In such cases, is the food in my kitchen or the textbook I bought private property, or is it still personal property? In either case, why?
One can take this question to its limit by noting that human labor is needed to create anything, whether or not it's sold for revenue. Because labor drives value in this economic system, our labor should be classified as private property and given over to common ownership. Do we thus lose the right to work as we choose, and are we to be forced to only work in roles ordained by common need? If so, how can personal property exist at all, if it's not needed for the common good of the people?
This post is not meant to attack anyone's beliefs, nor am I implying that our current system is a perfect system. I simply don't understand the utility of the distinction between private and personal property. I'd be happy to read other people's thoughts for and against it--there might be something to it that I'm missing.
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[Last updated: 2022-06-17]