RE: A Communist Definition of Property
On point one: The fact of the matter is that he’s referring to the capitalist class that owns the Means of Production (MOP). As he points it out, five wealthy individuals “own more wealth than the bottom half of the population of the world.” This statement is not a meaningless factoid but a statement of our reality as it is today, the concentration of capital. These five people managed to accumulate capital and PRIVATE property into their hands while weeding out competition. This was bound to happen when selfish greed, generated by the system and is not INNATE in humans, kicks in to perserve the individual at their peak and kill off any potential threat. Competition to a single capitalist in the long run makes no sense since it will harm more than help them.
On point two: First of all, rarely, if ever, do most capitalists ever expand labor into making a machine. Nonetheless, most inherit it from their ancestors, and their ancestors either enclosed farming lands to farming units or worked with the government to kill of the guilds in the city already producing the commodity at hand. What you are thinking of is a petit-bourgeois (“small” capitalist) and we rarely have any of those today.
Even then, does the owner work exponentially harder than his worker? The answer is no, for if the capitalist could we wouldn’t need jobs in the first place. Moreso, without the worker, the capitalist would go out of business as they have no one to operate the MOP. The worker is lifeline, the Force of Production, for the MOP and the capitalist, the second they revolt is the second you make concessions to not lose it all.
Truly in the worker’s case is it hard to survive in this world since ‘tis nye-on impossible for them to acquire the MOP without loosing an arm and a leg. And, nonetheless, to even have any leverage as an individual worker on the table with capitalist who has many other people waiting to take their spot eargerly for less. Their two choices are death and wage-labor. The former is meaningless since ‘tis a dead-end that extends not the person’s life and the latter an alienated life where someone produces something only to get a check to continue on struggling.
On point three: I refer to Anarchyhasnogod’s points down below. I think he covered it well enough. Plus some of my response in point two can easily bleed into this point here.
On point four: Again I refer you to read Anarchy’s points, but this time I have something to say.
The monopoly of force is first and foremost guarneteed by the state and protects the ruling class, that being the capitalist class. The state protects the ruling class since the ruling class controls the functions of the state in a way that gurantees their survival and surpresses the working class in a way that their class consciousness is murky and a revolt would be a net-negative. Also if they were equal in fighting power, then Anarchy’s points would still remain.
On point five: Again you conflate capitalists with petit-bourgeoisie (“small” capitalists if you had forgotten already). The workers’ only bargaining chip is their labor power, to which capitalist has capital and MOP to threaten back with. (Again the choices are death or wage-labor for the worker, the real choice being the latter since that continues their existence and won’t starve or die that easily.) Also the capitalist has to exploit the worker of their surplus value, value created that is more than socially necessary to produce a commodity. Otherwise, they cannot get any profits nor can they continue to live on in the market economy where time is of the essence.