Private Property in the Means of Production

It refers to the economic form of property in which the means of production are owned by private persons. “Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals.” It is a product of development of the productive forces of society to a certain stage. It is both a basic hallmark of an exploitative society and, at the same time, a progress in human history compared to the previous primitive social property.

Private property in the means of production arose at the end of primitive society and was based on the emergence of the social division of labor and the development of productive forces, especially the use of metallic tools in production. The development of the productive forces brought about by the improvement of tools enhanced man’s capacity of reshaping nature, and the family thus became the basic production unit. The emergence of the social division of labor has furthered the development of commodity exchange, which also accelerated the development of private property.

In the process of historical development, there have been successively three main forms of the private property in the means of production: slave-owner property, feudal property and capitalist property. These three forms of property are also the big private properties. By comparison, small private property, which never preponderated, i.e. individual property based on individual labor, was present in above three major phases.

The commonality of all big private properties is the ownership of the means of production by the exploiting class and its control of the production process and the appropriation of the results of labor, the difference being only in the mode of exploitation and the degree of appropriation of the results of labor. Under the slave-owner property, the slave-owner had complete power over the personal freedom and working conditions of the laborers (slaves) and even life-and-death power, and appropriated almost all the results of the slaves’ labor. After the subsequent feudal property replaced slave-owner ownership, the feudal lord’s personal control over the laborers (serfs) was weakened, but the serf’s personal dependence on the feudal lord remained. When capitalist private property replaced feudal private property, the capitalist completely lost his power of personal control over the laborer (worker) and appropriated worker’s labor only through employment. In the employment (wage-labor) relationship, the worker sells his labor-power to the capitalist, while he is rid of, free of all the objects.

In fact, capitalist property in the means of production is the capitalist form that combines workers with the means of production. The capitalist’s appropriation of the means of production and the unpaid appropriation of the surplus-value of the workers through the relations of wage-labor is the basis of the entire capitalist economic relations. It is the highest and also the last form of private property in the means of production.

However, with the high degree of marketization of modern economic development and the high degree of socialization of the development of productive forces, private property in the means of production has developed from its traditional form to its modern form. This includes the nationalization movement and the “state economy”, the democratization of capital and the shareholding system, the managerial revolution and the separation of the property and control of capital, and the deformation of capitalism and the separation of the relations of property, of ownership, of domination and utilization of the means of production from the enjoyment of their benefits, to name but a few. In general terms, the capitalist private property in the means of production seeks to adapt to the requirements of the development of the socialized productive forces and to alleviate the contradiction between capitalist relations of production and the socialized productive forces by constantly increasing the degree of socialization, i.e., by sublating itself (Aufhebung). On the one hand, it has furthered the unprecedented development of the productive forces of society; on the other hand, it has led to the over-concentration of social wealth, with the vast majority of social wealth concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which constitutes a minority of the population of society. “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.” The theory of the proletariat and “the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”