Private Property, Natural Right, Collaboration

In the popular American imagination, Private Property is a Natural Right in Capitalism, but not in Marxism. However, the superficiality of that comparison is indicated by passages in which, on Utilitarian grounds, consistent with his entire system, Smith allows for the abolition of private property if it the maintenance of it is a threat to the General Good, whereas Marx plainly asserts the inalienability of one's own Labor. Furthermore, an examination of the origin of the concept of Private Property in each system confirms the reversal of the popular judgment. For, in Smith's Empiricist tradition, notably in Hume's analysis, the concept of Self, and, hence, of Private Property, is an artificial, albeit useful, construct, i. e. is an Epistemological analogue of friend Rousseau's concept of a property-less 'state of Nature', in the context of which the building of fences is a conventional modification. In contrast, following Kant and Hegel, Marx derives the concept of Property, and, hence, that of its status as a Natural Right, from that of the natural process of Labor. At the source of the confusion of the popular image is, perhaps, the misunderstanding of the concept of Collaboration, from which Marx derives that of Collective Property, as antithetical to that of Individual Labor, rather than one in which the latter is sublated.