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Quote by Pyotr Kropotkin

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The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

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Pyotr Kropotkin

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“In principle the human productive community may be constituted in either of two ways. First, it may be consciously regulated. Whether its scale is that of a self-sufficient patriarchal family, a communistic tribe, or a socialist society, it creates the organs which, acting as the agents of social consciousness, fix the extent and methods of production and distribute the social product thus obtained among the members. Given the material and man-made conditions of production, all decisions as to method, place, quantity and available tools involved in the production of new goods are made by the /pater familias, /or by the local regional or national commissars of the socialist society. The personal experience of the former gives him a knowledge of the needs and productive resources of his family; the latter can acquire a like knowledge of the requirements of their society by means of comprehensively organized statistics of production and consumption. They can thus shape, with conscious foresight, the whole economic life of the communities of which they are the appointed representatives and leaders in accordance with the needs of the members. The individual members of such a community consciously regulate their productive activity as members of a productive community. Their labour process and the distribution of their products are subject to central control. Their relations of production are directly manifest as social relations, and the economic relations between individuals can be seen as being determined by the social order, by social arrangements rather than by private inclination. Relations of production are accepted as those which are established and desired by the whole community. Matters are different in a society which lacks this conscious organization. Such a society is dissolved into a large number of mutually independent individuals for whom production is a private matter rather than a social concern. In other words, its members are individual proprietors who are compelled by the development of the division of labour to do business with one another. The act by which this is accomplished is the exchange of commodities. It is only this act which establishes connections in a society otherwise dismembered into disparate units by private property and the division of labour. Exchange is the subject matter of theoretical economics only because, and to the extent that, it performs this mediating function in the social structure. It is of course true that exchange may also take place in a socialist society, but that would be a type of exchange occurring only after the product had already been distributed according to a socially desired norm. It would therefore be merely an individual adaptation of the distributive norm of society, a personal transaction influenced by subjective moods and considerations. It would not be an object for economic analysis. It would have no more importance for theoretical analysis than does the exchange of toys between two children in the nursery, an exchange which is fundamentally different in character from the purchases made by their fathers at the toy shop. For the latter is only one element in the sum of exchanges by which society realizes itself as the productive community which it really is. A productive community must express itself in such acts of exchange because only in this way can the unity of society, dissolved by private property and the division of labour, be restored.”

Private PropertyDivision Of LabourSocialist SocietyExchange Of Commodities
Book:Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development
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“That the Open Society cannot exist without extensive individual property rights that clearly identify endowments and freedom to employ them does not imply that all resources, much less all decision-making, is to be privatized. Whether privatization is the best way to make resource decisions depends on the nature of the resources and the moral norms of a population. Consequently, it is mistake to claim that the Open Society requires 'full liberal ownership rights' over the maximally large range of resources. This merits emphasis: that robust individual property rights are required for the Open Society does not entail that expanding the sphere of private property is always friendly to the Open Society.”

Private PropertyPrivatization
Book:The Open Society and Its Complexities
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“Indeed there is a strong general cases, founded on the legitimacy of a considerable degree of egoism and self-referential altruism, and connected with what I have offered as the basic case for rights as the essential device for securing areas for the free pursuit of happiness, in favour of some private property. This is one point among many where our grounds for dissatisfaction with at least the cruder forms of utilitarianism have practical consequences. If we see the good for man as happiness, conceived as a single, undifferentiated commodity, we may also suppose that it could be provided for all, in some centrally planned way, if only we could get an authority that was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently intelligent, and also one that we could trust to be uniformly well-disposed to all its subjects; and then the natural corollary would be that all property should be owned by all in common, collectively, and applied to the maximizing of the genral happiness under the direction of this benevolent authority. But if we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit.”

Private PropertyUtilitarianism
Book:Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
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“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 a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so, that is just what we intend.”

CommunismPrivate Property
Book:The Communist Manifesto
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“The form of family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as the economic unit of society. The central link in civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.”

CapitalismExploitationMarxismPrivate PropertyClass StruggleMonogamyHistorical Materialism
Author:Frederick Engels
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“The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, “This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.” Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people — who have been neither able nor willing to sell, and who have received none of the proceeds of the sale — will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, “So perish idlers and vagrants!”

CapitalismPropertyAnarchyPrivate Property
Book:What is Property?
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“John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.”

WealthPovertyResistancePrivate PropertyAnti Civilization
Book:Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
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