When productive activity is conceived of as purposive activity thru which humans appropriate nature, satisfy their needs and develop their powers, production and consumption form a unity, and are integrated in one so-called 'production process'. On this view 'production not only produces an object for the individual but also an individual for the object'. It is the role commodity exchange has come to play which has started to divide the whole integrated process into four separate ones: production, distribution, commodity exchange and consumption. This disintegration is said to lead to a specific mode of production in which a ruling class exercises power 'by virtue of its ability to expropriate surplus labor from the producers of commodities'. The workers' social interdependence is then transformed into an individual dependence of each worker on the owner of the means of production. (The ensuing alienation may be defined as 'the transformation of human productive activity into a commodity'.) It is worthwhile to note that property in the means of production and subsistence is no capital per se. When the property right stays with the immediate producer, it is not. It is 'only under circumstances in which the instruments of production and subsistence serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the laborer' that the instruments of production and subsistence become capital -- it has been argued. Since private property exists only on this view where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals, and since it is believed that this inevitably leads to the exploitation of other people, it should be manifest that private property in this sense cannot be abolished too soon. It should, then, be abolished if, and insofar as, property in the means of production does entail exploitation and subjection of other people (not as an analytical but as an empirical truth), and if its (empirically) necessary condition for existence is indeed the nonexistence of this property for the immense majority of society. In that case the argument for private property in instruments of production becomes self-defeating.

It is confusing (and good only for ideological purposes) to use the phrase private property in the limited sense of property in the means of labor in a society in which capital has been accumulated. And it is not right to call its antithesis simply "social property" because there remains the property of individuals which is not responsible for capital accumulation and which is not used to exploit other people, even when it is property in land or in means of production (which, by definition, must not be labeled "capital"). It is more accurate, then, to use another distinction proposed, namely that between 'passive' and 'active property'. According to this distinction 'passive property' is 'property for acquisition, for exploitation or for power' and 'active property', property which is actually used by its owner for the conduct of 'er profession or the upkeep of 'er household. The underlying presupposition of this terminology is, however, that property must be either a means of labor or an 'instrument for the acquisition of gain or the exercise of power'. Just as in the previous doctrine great emphasis is placed on production, so property must always have a function on this view. Altho the meaning of production and function may be stretched so much that it encompasses all 'life-creating and life-affirming activities, including the material as well as the mental, emotional and esthetic aspects', this is tantamount to draining these terms of all practical significance. (Unless it is 'practical' to confuse the common people by equivocation, and to play upon the much narrower meaning the words have in everyday language.) If just enjoying nature, and the beauty of the land in all privacy, is no form of production, and has no function, we had better stay where we are, for the exclusive emphasis on production and function is then the product of a doctrinal idea we certainly need not run away with.

Not only can the meaning of production and function be strained, but we have seen that the meaning of property itself, too, has been stretched so much as to include the right to a kind of society. Property as co-ownership in society's produce is, then, explained as the individual's right 'not to be excluded from the use or benefit of the achievements of the whole society'. This may mean the equal right 'of access to the accumulated means of labor' or the right 'to an income from the whole produce of society, related to what is needed for a fully human life'. As regards the former right, 'the means of labor' are society's capital and its natural resources, but the difference between natural resources and those means of labor which are themselves also a product of labor (of the labor of a particular living person or group of persons, that is) is thus entirely neglected. As regards the latter right, basing people's right to an income on their needs, rather than on what they deserve, may be justifiable from a doctrinal point of view, such a justification is incomplete and becomes obscurely anthropocentristic (and unusable), when it is made to rest upon the need of a 'fully human life'.

Those interested in the ownership of the means of production have but too often only thought about this ownership in purely materialistic terms. Yet, there is also an 'idealist' aspect of this kind of ownership, or of the ownership in things other than people's bodies and natural resources. It is the ownership of the means of production as instruments which enable individuals or groups to effectively present their ideas to the general public and to promote certain causes among those they could never reach in another way. If these instruments should not be called "means of production", they are means of communication. In a modern information society property in these instruments is at least as crucial for a 'fully human life' and for a freedom from exploitation as that of the means of production. These means of communication are 'systems or vehicles for the transmission of information', such as television, radio, newspapers and books. Altho it has been argued that the form of these media has more effect on society than the contents they carry, little imagination is needed to see, hear and read what happens, or is likely to happen, when all these media are owned by one or a limited number of private citizens or governmental agencies, especially when this is reality in the region or country where one lives. Since every such citizen or agency has 'er or their own traditions or ideology, these traditions or this ideology will be explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, present in what and how the owner broadcasts or publishes, or allows to be broadcasted or published. Where the means of communication have exclusively fallen into the hands of the state (that is, one or a few state officials) or in those of one or a few private individuals, the tastes, preferences and judgments of every worker and nonworker, of every employer and nonemployer alike, become subject to the same totalitarian manipulation or spiritual exploitation. The material aspect of owning the means of production may be important in theories of property, it definitely does not justify a one-sided emphasis; neither in theory nor in practise.