One of the more unfathomable concepts from the extreme Left, such as with Anarcho-Syndicalists, is that your property is only yours if you are personally using it exclusively, and that someone else can claim control over that property by using it regardless of whether they have your permission. That is it a product of your labor, in this view, is an irrelevancy.
“Personal property” and “private property” are the same moral principle: the right to own and control what you earn and create.
The socialist distinction between them is an evasion, and a way to smuggle in the idea that you have a right to your toothbrush but not to your factory, your house but not your rental property, your garden but not your farmland. But property isn’t defined by size, scale, or who benefits from it. It’s defined by the act of creation and voluntary exchange.
If you till the soil, build a machine, or invest in an enterprise, the product is yours by right. That’s what property is: the material extension of your effort, your mind, and your choices. Once you surrender that principle, you don’t abolish “exploitation” you merely transfer ownership from the individual who earned it to the collective that didn’t. You hand every right of production and distribution to bureaucrats, who will decide what’s “fair,” which means whatever serves their power.
You can’t separate “personal” from “private” any more than you can separate breathing for yourself from breathing for the group. Once you concede that ownership is conditional, and that you may keep only what others approve of then nothing you own is secure, not even your toothbrush.
To deny private property is to deny the individual. To deny the individual is to deny morality itself.
By this logic, a factory worker who makes a toothbrush has the same lack of right to the toothbrushes that are made as the toothbrush factory owner since neither are using the toothbrushes for their own personal use. In contrast, by exchanging their labor for wages, the worker trades one thing that is theirs for something else that becomes theirs which is more valuable to them, just as that labor was more valuable to the factory owner than the wages they paid the worker.
