Then you bring people in for work. Becoming an employer changes things, because people are not machines, personal and social problems are posed, which is why there are work laws and statutes to regulate the thing and protect employees.
Still pondering, without relating to any highminded philosophical book, for the moment. Dude :) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Well for one, private property is the normal state of things. Always existed, only in danger when no rule of law, or by abuse.
No. You'll have to argue that a bit more than simply stating it. Indeed, one of the first large States, Egypt, had everything owned by the Pharao. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
"Always" is a very long time. And I would point out that in most cultures, the notion of individual private property does not actually exist, because the individual is wholly subsumed in the clan or family.
Additionally, very often in European history, peasants didn't actually own most of their stuff - they rented it from their local nobles.
That's not so much "means of production" but private property you bought with your money. Period.
You can shout that there is no difference between capital goods (means of production) and consumer goods until you go blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of the world makes that distinction.
Land has, throughout most of European history, either been owned communally or held in fief from one's feudal sovereign. Agricultural implements have been variously privately and communally owned, but certainly weren't usually bought and sold on open markets the way they are under full-fledged capitalist systems. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Freemasons), even the proto-capitalist craftsmen in the cities worked in guilds, which communally owned the means of production, and did so essentially since the dissolution of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
(None of which, of course, means that these constructs were in any way egalitarian or remotely similar to what most Marxists would understand when they say "communal ownership" of the means of production. They just weren't capitalist in any sense of the term that my dictionary recognises.)
Employing people to produce goods for third parties is a relatively recent invention - it used to be that most work was done either for oneself (as, e.g., with subsistence farming, an activity that used to take up more than 90 % of all economic activity in pre-capitalist societies) or on commission. This only really changed once industrialisation made mass output of cheap, standardised goods practical.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
