Does anyone know if under strict communist regimes there was a crime of stealing? Wouldn’t that indicate recognition of private property?
Also, was charity encouraged or recognized under communism?
Yes indeed there was a crime of stealing, against the state.
I believe there was no such thing as charity.
Several points of confusion here, which I, as the resident outed Bolshevik, shall attempt to clarify by taking you out back to be shot – I mean, putting my $.02 in.
Firstly, Russia and Eastern Europe (as well as Cuba, North Korea, and China) weren’t Communist. But that’s another subject; here it’s only a quibble.
When Marxists talk about private property, they mean only the means of production and distribution. Personal belongings don’t enter into it at all. So it would still be possible to steal something from someone else.
Stealing from society would also be possible, since under socialism/communism the means of production would belong to society as a whole, but the question of what that entails is something only future generations living in that kind of society would really be able to determine.
Interesting. This implies that something can be either a “means of production and distribution”, or a “personal belonging”, but not both, does it not? Is it always that clear cut?
Let’s say I’m an artist named Mark, living in a Marxist world. I have a computer at home that I use to read online comics from the Net. So far, so good. My computer is a personal belonging. The network that serves the comics to me is a means of distribution, and logically then belongs to the State.
But, inspired by the lack of decent comics out there (however one defines “decent” in this world), I decide to make my own. I add the required capabilities to my computer and its connection. The computer is now a means of proiduction, and logically belongs to the State. Do I have to sell/give it back? When I resume reading, does the computer revert to being a personal belonging again?
I suspect that in this case the artist would need to get a separate comics-prodution computer from the State…
At that point, it would be your societal duty to put down your mouse, pick up a gun, and say, “Hey, communism sucks.”
Pretty much, yes. Means of production, in general, implies machinery, et al, that is used to provide basic goods and services on a mass scale for people as a whole. Food, housing, clothing, that kind of thing.
The factory that made your computer equipment is a means of production. Your computer, on the other hand, is used purely for creative purposes and is not.
This whole “belonging to the State” thing is a distortion as well. It’s not like the State owns everything and decides what It wants to do with what It owns regardless of who works there.
The point, really, is that workplaces are highly undemocratic, subject to the whims of someone who claims the space and machinery as his private property and who has nothing to do with the actual physical running of things.
By taking that ability out of the bosses’ hands, and making the decisions regarding what to make, how to make it, how much to make, and all the other day-to-day decisions the prerogative of the people who work on the floor making things, the means of production are no longer private property.
I always thought the point of communism was that everyone is equal and that everything is fair. So if you want something, you can have it. Why bother stealing?
Very true, Mouseeduck, although your premises are a tad oversimplified. The point of the OP, as I understood it, was to ask how there could be something called “stealing” in a communist society if there was no private property.
I only say it would be possible to steal something, inasmuch as there would still be personal belongings. Not that I think it would actually happen, both for the reasons you state and that if someone had something you weren’t able to get for yourself given its uniqueness for some reason, you’d be comfortable with that fact and didn’t see the need to deprive someone else of their possessions just to satisfy your own envy.