This article deals with the age-old question, “If there is no private property, what about my toothbrush?”

I am certainly glad to inform you that you get to keep your toothbrush. And your house, your Xbox, your car, and even your iPhone (which still exists under socialism because capitalism doesn’t make iPhones, workers do). These things are not what is meant by “private property,” although, admittedly, the name can definitely confusion.

These items, generally, function as “personal property,” and they include everything that you bought for personal use with the money you made from your hard work. These objects have what we call “use value.”

What differentiates private property from personal property is that private property is bought with the specific intent to make a profit off of it. This is what we call “exchange value.”

In this way, something can have both use and exchange value, depending on the context. If I have a chair that I bought for $150 and it’s at my dining room table, that chair is my personal property and is valuable to me for its use value. If I buy that chair and rent it out for $20 a day, that chair is my private property and is valuable to me for its exchange value.

We seek to abolish the private property aspect of society, which would help to eliminate exploitation of the working class.

Currently, someone who was born into a rich family and buys a dozen houses to rent out is allowed to exploit others on the basis that they were born rich. As a result, they can live freely because their entire life is paid for by others’ hard work. The landlord, through rent, literally extracts your labor value for profit simply because they have a paper that says they own the house. They don’t contribute to society like workers do by creating value. They don’t build the houses, they don’t clean them, and, in most cases, they don’t even provide the electricity or heating/cooling. They don’t create any sort of value through work. Yet somehow, they are allowed to profit off of your work- the value that you create and are paid for- when you take that value given to you and give it away to the landlord. In this way, the company you work for exploits you by not paying you a fair wage, and then basically pays another portion of your check to your landlord. You worked for that money, neither the CEO nor the landlord did. Why should they earn the profits?

So, not only does the CEO take part of your labor value without actually contributing to the labor, but your landlord also takes a chunk of the value you create as rent. Society is taking the value you create and giving most of the benefits to your boss and your landlord, while you only get to keep a small portion of whatever is leftover from your hard work. That is, whatever is left after insurance and retirement savings if you can afford them, which are wholly unnecessary under socialism.

People who work should be able to decide what they want to do with the value they create. Let’s say you make $4,000 from working. What do you want to do with that money? Pay the rich CEO who doesn’t do any work for their money? Pay the rich landlord who doesn’t work for their money? Probably you would rather pay for food, from people who make it, and electricity, from people who make it, and commodities, from people who make them. Most working class people would, rightfully, rather chip in to help those who can’t work, and protect the people in their own society rather than to some rich, exploitative capitalist who hoards the money that would’ve gone to benefit their own societies otherwise.

Under socialism, with so much money saved from not being exploited by CEOs, landlords, and companies, you would probably even choose to give much of it to local taxes that actually benefit your city and your families. You would make much more than you do under capitalism even after increased taxes, and these taxes would actually drastically improve your lives and communities rather than fund the politicians’ paychecks and foreign militaries. Your hard work would actually help improve your life and the lives of others in the community – and the community’s hard work would improve your life as well. No more extracting value from the workers and no more wealth hoarding. Our work should benefit us, the working class, and nobody else.

The next article, “About Classes” explains a bit more concretely what separates the workers from the landlords and CEOs, and why it is important in our struggle.