Tim Pool vs. Karl Marx on Personal and Productive Property (UNLOCKED)

Tim Pool is confused.

Tim Pool said something dumb.

I know—stop the presses!

But in this case the dumb thing he said was at the intersection of a couple of interesting subjects and it feels like a teachable moment.

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If you aren’t familiar with Pool, he’s a podcaster who first rose to prominence for doing sympathetic citizen-journalism about the Occupy Wall Street protests. He’s since done a 180. He promotes some fairly odd conspiracy theories—think “Plato was the founder of the Illuminati”—and he continues to affect a “skater punk” persona as he approaches middle age, but as far as I can tell he has the day-to-day politics of a suburban Republican who owns a small chain of car dealerships. He’s hostile to labor unions, he likes tax cuts, he regards “wokeness” not as minor irritation but a terrifying menace, and he supports Donald Trump.

Unsurprisingly, then, he’s not a fan of Marxism or socialism.

The other day, he posted this to his 1.9 million Twitter followers:

There are basically three things going on here:

First, one very minor criticism of the meme. The Marxist tradition of reserving the phrase “private property” for “private property in the means of production” is unhelpful. I think we should just say “private property in the means of production” or, if that’s too much of a mouthful, “productive property.”

Most speakers of ordinary language understand “private property” as a term that encompasses both toothbrushes and factories and it’s counterproductive for us to insist that they unlearn this and adopt less intuitive language to even understand our categories—before we try to persuade them of our underlying substantive position. Better to say, “personal possessions aren’t the kind of private property we want to take into collective ownership.”

But none of this means that “[t]here is no distinction.” The fancy way to put this is that instance of private property in the means of production is one subset of the larger set of instances of private property. The set of instances of personal property is a also a subset of that larger set. And they’re clearly not the same subset! Toothbrushes are in the set of instances of personal property but not they’re not in the set of instances of instances of private property in the means of production.

Second, the argument being gestured at with that “at what scale” question commits the Continuum Fallacy. This can be neatly illustrated by thinking about his own head. Notoriously, he always wears a beanie when in public. If he ever took it off, we would find out whether or not he’s bald.

Thinking about this more precisely, there are three possibilities:

1. He’d take off the beanie and we’d see so much hair that we’d all confidently classify him as “not bald.”

2. He’d take off the beanie and we’d see so little hair that we’d all confidently classify him as “bald.”

3. He’d take off the beanie and we’d see a borderline amount of hair. Maybe we wouldn’t be sure, or some of us would think he was bald, some of us would think he wasn’t, and some of us would be on the fence.

Reflecting on that third possibility a bit more, we should notice that it would be crazy to even think you had an answer to, “Exactly how many hairs have to be on Tim Pool’s head for him to count as not-bald?”

Seriously. Imagine someone giving a clear, confident answer. “Exactly 9,839 hairs is the cutoff. If you have 9,838 you’re bald, if you have 9,839 you’re not.” You wouldn’t find this plausible—and not because you thought they’d picked the wrong number.

This gives rise to the Sorites Paradox, which involves a clash between two strongly held intuitions. It doesn’t seem like (in this example) one hair more or less can make a difference, but it also seems like there has to be a cutoff point somewhere. To illustrate this point when giving talks, I’ll often pick bald member of the audience and ask people to start with that guy’s head, add a hair, add a hair…and by applying the “one hair more or less doesn’t make a difference” principle a jillion times, get to the claim that he’d be bald even if he had a full, lush head of hair.

Different thinkers have different solutions to this problem. Even philosophers who specialize in paradoxes often regard the paradoxes about vagueness as the most difficult and intractable. But one thing pretty much everyone can agree on is that you’re making a very basic mistake when you conclude from the existence of gray areas and hard cases that there’s no real distinction (or no clear cases on either side of it—e.g. factories and toothbrushes).

All of which is to say:

There being no precise answer to ”At point point does [first thing] become second thing?” just doesn’t support the idea that there’s “no distinction.”

I could just leave this there—I want to keep these occasional Mid-Week Bonus Essays much shorter than the regular Sunday essays—but I want to make a final point here because I think it’s actually politically important.

Pool’s example about the office and the camera hints at a different (though related) issue—overlap. In some cases, instances of property ownership might not be borderline between personal and productive property but just clearly fall into both sets. Unlike a traditional taxi company that provides drivers with the cars they use at work, Uber relies on drivers makusinging their personal vehicles double as means of production. Or, take an example from G.A. Cohen’s masterpiece Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a certain kind of old-timey garment factory might make workers bring in their own sewing machines. (As Cohen points out, far from this somehow empowering the workers, surely one of the first demands when they formed a union would be for the company to take over the task of purchasing and maintaining the machines—if it’s true, Cohen says, that such workers have nothing to lose but their chains, the responsibility for the machine is “one of those chains.”) And of course the computer I’m using to type this up is just my regular personal computer.

So there’s clearly an intersection between the two sets. Is that a problem for the sort of view Pool regards as “f*cking r*tarded”—that there is indeed a politically important distinction between personal possessions and private property in the means of production?

I don’t see why. As far as I know, the first appearance of the distinction is in the Communist Manifesto, where Karl Marx and his nominal co-author Engels respond to the charge that socialists want to take away property by saying they object “not to property generally” but to “bourgeois property.”

What does that mean in terms of a political program? Marx doesn’t expand on the thought there, but plausibly:

Socialists generally support property rights in personal possessions and generally don’t support property rights in the means of production. If you don’t see why I’ve added generally to both of those, start thinking about examples. Surely, even if the wealth sitting in someone’s bank account isn’t being invested in business ventures, we think it should be taxed to support giving everyone healthcare and housing! Speaking of housing, would any socialist support the right of a wealthy man to own 12 homes, not to rent any of them out but to spend one month a year in each of them? Or would we be OK with redistributing some of them to people who currently have 0 homes?

Conversely, any non-egregiously-authoritarian socialist presumably supports private ownership of laptop computers on which working writers will continue to make their living in a socialist society—at least assuming we’re thinking of a stage of socialism that falls short of a completely marketless moneyless Full Communist utopia where “making” a living is no longer an operative concept because consumption is no longer linked to work. (Even in such a society, though, I hope there are still privately owned laptops or the equivalent thereof that people can use to write articles criticizing whatever continues to seem not-utopian to them.)

So presumably not all personal property should be sacrosanct and not all productive property should be collectivized. As such, no otherwise-plausible socialist principles should lead us to view the existence of overlap as a source of insoluble dilemmas. It’s generally unreasonable to mess too much with personal possessions—and the more personal they are, the more this holds (e.g. toothbrushes). But it’s bad for democracy and material equality to leave productive assets in the hands of private owners, at least when we’re talking about big ticket items like factories. Surely, as with any interesting distinction, there are borderline cases and judgment calls. An office built into Tim’s home should probably stay Tim’s property. Ditto for his camera. But the giant tech platforms relative to which Tim and myself are both tenant farmers?

Yeah. We should nationalize those.