Personal Property - Personal Versus Private Property

Personal Versus Private Property

In political/economic theory, notably socialist (including anarchist) philosophies, the distinction between private and personal property is extremely important. Which items of property constitute which is open to debate.

  • Personal property is part of your person and includes property from which you have the right to exclude others (e.g., televisions, cars, clothes, etc.)
  • Private property is a social relationship, not a relationship between person and thing according to Marx (e.g., factories, mines, dams, infrastructure, etc.). In capitalism there is no distinction between personal and private property.
  • To many socialists, the term private property refers to capital or the means of production, while personal property refers to consumer and non-capital goods and services.

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Famous quotes containing the words personal, private and/or property:

    Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.
    Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

    You and I ... are convinced of the fact that if our Government in Washington and in a majority of the States should revert to the control of those who frankly put property ahead of human beings instead of working for human beings under a system of government which recognizes property, the nation as a whole would again be in a bad situation.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)