byork
"An example of private production is anything made by an individual."

Well everything's made by an individual, isn't it?

JKJ, definitely not! Not since the Industrial Revolution. Nearly everything is made by cooperative effort of many workers - social labour - be it on a production line or through a coordinated series of teams, each producing components that eventually are manufactured into the finished product.

I'm only trying to find out what would be an example of something that was "things privately produced but not the kind of private ownership of things produced socially that occurs under capitalism"?

Even if someone made a meal or a chair at home, wouldn't they always be involved in making "things produced socially" because of the inputs or materials produced by other people?

A few thoughts on social versus private production

It is a bit of a continuum. An example of really private individual production would be a hunter who makes and uses his own spear. No one else contributes to the production of the spear. The hunter makes his own cutting tool and collects the tree branch and then proceeds to fashion the spear. Although it should be pointed out that the game caught with the spear are shared with members of a family unit who in turn provide fruit or what have you. Furthermore, it was quite common for hunters to rely on stones traded with other regions because of the lack of suitable local ones.

An individual or private production process can produce for individual use or for trade. The producer can produce all the inputs they need or they can rely to some extent on inputs purchased from other producers. Where producers are buying and selling on the market we are seeing a division of labor and production at the social level. Each individual is relying on others. They are no longer a single operation.

The next stage is when each production process is highly social so that individuals tend not to be able to say they as individuals produced anything on their own. At most a machine operator could say they produced a particular component But generally people just contribute to a process. What is important here is that if the means of production are taken from the capitalist they cannot be handed back to individual workers like hand tools could. They can only be owned by the workers collectively

Here are some thoughts on social ownership of the means of production that help to distinguish it from mere state ownership.

Social ownership requires a perfectly achievable change in "human nature" based on new conditions that both require and encourage new behaviour. The carrot and stick of the market place is replaced by work being its own reward. Work becomes a satisfying and self-affirming activity and each of us contributes their best efforts to achieving good economic outcomes. Work and our relations with others are no longer at odds with our wellbeing and there is a general culture of mutuality where we do the right thing in the knowledge that others are doing likewise. An important negative feedback mechanism in this new culture will be that the majority will nip negative behavior in the bud rather than run away from it as they do at the moment.

Reaching this new stage of human development will of course requre quite a struggle. Initially the revolutionary order cannot do without the old business types and they would be keen to entrench themselves and the old ways of doing things. They would be joined (or replaced) by revolutionary leaders who were always just careerists or have acquired a taste for bossing or simply decided the masses could not be relied on. Balancing this must be a revolutionary movement of the masses that resists these "capitalist roaders" while transforming themselves and the way things are done.

The balance of forces in the case of the 20th century revolutions in places like Russia and China was decidedly unfavorable to such a transformation. They were in very backward countries. There was little or no modern economy nor a large, modern and educated working class ready and keen to revolutionize the way they work and produce. Instead you had peasants toiling in the fields, on construction sites or in front of machine tools, where cadres had to decide everything.

A response to Jardine K. Jardine

If someone makes something for their own use with inputs they have purchased, that is not a social production, it is personal consumption. This could be a chair made with purchased tools and timber or a meal prepared from ingredients purchased at the grocer.

Where people in a socialist society wish to engage in domestic individual production for the market place this can be a problem because market relations engender capitalism. It can be temporarily tolerated, restricted or prohibited. Ultimately, socialist relations would win out because (1) large scale production with inputs the individual cannot afford will provide a cheaper and better product or (2) the individual would be happier using socially supplied facilities and simply earning a wage.