Cooking the Books 2 – Lord Desai’s retort
The Times’s obituary (4 August) of the economist Lord Desai who died at the end of July recounted the following anecdote:
‘“Marx wasn’t against home ownership. In fact he owned his own house,” Desai insisted when challenged about his own two properties. What Marx was against, he added, was using property to exploit workers. “Marx had no objection to the ownership of consumer durables”.’
The person who challenged him was being silly as nobody can seriously think that the ‘common ownership’ and ‘abolition of private property’ that socialists such as Marx advocated meant the common ownership of personal possessions. As Desai pointed out, Marx was objecting to the ownership and use of productive resources to exploit workers by the owners appropriating as theirs a portion of what workers produced.
As the Communist Manifesto put it:
‘The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. (…) Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations’.
As a lecturer and author of a number of books on Marxian economics (even if he didn’t really agree with them), Desai could also have referred his challenger to the passage at the end of the penultimate chapter of volume I of Capital:
‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: ie, on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production’.
In other words, socialism (or communism, the same thing) means that everybody would be able to ‘appropriate products of society’ as their ‘individual property’ to use or consume. Everybody would be able to take from or make use of what society had produced, according to their individual needs.
Actually, ‘property’ is probably not the best word here. Individual ‘possession’ would be better. ‘Property’ is a legal as well as a sociological concept and it can be doubted that a socialist society would need a formal system of regulation to protect what one person had taken from society for their use from being taken by somebody else. After all, why would somebody want to take someone else’s food or clothes or mobile phone or whatever, when they could simply go and get it from a distribution centre or order over the internet? It is also possible to imagine that people wouldn’t need to possess a whole range of consumer durables but could borrow them when needed from a local tool library.
Housing raises a different question, if only because people normally want to use the same living place for decades. Today, a house or flat, for those who own or who are buying one, is not simply a personal possession that they use but also a financial asset. Obviously that aspect, and so the sort of individual legal ownership we know today, would not exist in socialism. Everybody would be guaranteed an exclusive place to live in for as long as needed but we can imagine it being more like ‘usufruct’ as the agreed exclusive ‘right to use and benefit from a property’ without owning it.
