Private property is private ownership of socially necessary means of production, the products of labor and all the things that dominate the productive life of the individual and classes. Private property is a social power based on the property rights, which ultimately determine the productive relations of society.
Property as an economic category is always bound up with definite objects and things, since without an object of acquisition there cannot be any ownership. Natural objects, whether they be the gifts of nature or the products of human labor, make up the material content of property. However, the concept of property cannot be reduced merely to its material content. A thing as such is not property unless people enter into definite relations with one another with regard to it. (N. Kolesov, Social Property in the Soviet Union, 1961/2; bold added.)
Private property relationships arose when the division of labor developed in such a way as to increase labor productivity, which made it possible to create a stable storehouse of surplus products — more than what was needed for the survival of the community. Some individuals discovered that they could increase the store of surplus products by using the surplus to get others to work for them. Private property relations crept imperceptibly into the daily life of people. Individuals became enslaved in a compulsory labor system. The division of society into masters and slaves became the first great economic-class division based on private property. The reproduction of a permanent store of surplus products and the ownership of the surplus product by a non-laboring class became the foundation for all forms of private property.
The emergence and growth of private property relations split society into contradictory classes, led to creation of the state (armed bodies of men, military) and created antagonistic development from one mode of production to the next. The owners of the means of production and surplus products under private property became the ruling class, which created institutions to enforce its will and ownership rights.
Private property has taken different forms throughout history. Slave property of antiquity was private ownership of the slave by a master and/or class of masters. Feudal private property was based on land ownership as the primary form of society’s wealth and the serf who worked the land of the nobility, his “lord” and “master.” Capitalist private property is the bourgeois mode of commodity production, where most of society is compelled to sell its labor ability to the owners of means of production for wages. Capitalism rests exclusively upon competition between the laborers for wages.
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