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Yet physical property rights are also a fiction, which have only existed for a couple hundred years out of the thousands of years of human history. Up until the 1700's ish, all property was defacto owned by the king.
There is nothing stopping the Viking a'reaving up your coastline on his long ship but social pressure and the monopoly of violence; property rights are not physical law.
That said, if you want to argue the socialist de-commodification of all human endeavor, I won't stop you. That shit would be tight, if it could be made to function.
Bruh, there were laws against theft as far back as humans have records (i.e. Hammurabi's code). Private property absolutely was a thing, believing in socialism doesn't magically change history to match your worldview.
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I pretty sure the concept of "theft", meaning one non-king taking property owned by another non-king, has existed in every significant polity since before the invention of writing, so this claim makes no sense. There's numerous references to it in the Mosaic law, for example, which clearly predates 1700. I'm pretty sure Hammurabi had stuff to say about it as well.
I'm hardly a socialist, but it's hard to make a case that scarcity is better than non-scarcity, all else being equal.
What is with this thread?
I mean, yes, but theft was defacto fine up until the birth of the modern state, because you could just roll into town and kill whoever you wanted, enslave the rest, take there shit to birke or wherever and sell it then go back home to be raided yourself.
The thing that makes a crime a crime in practice is not the law, it is the certainty of consequences.
Edit: Also I AM a socialist, I'm arguing devils advocate/ what is rational in the current model.
"plunder" and "theft" are easy to distinguish, because one happens within a community, and the other happens between communities. The idea that you owe obligations of mutual good-faith to those you live with that are not owed to strangers or foreigners is a pretty common one throughout history, and it seems pretty defensible to me. The fact that social groupings didn't recognize property rights outside their community doesn't imply they didn't recognize them within the community. Similarly, when laws were invented, people recognized that they applied within the communities that enacted them, and were not universal to the whole world. Law does depend on enforcement for much of its validity, but more than that it depends on a concept of justice, which starts out localized and moves to the universal, rather than the opposite.
But then couldn't I define my community as limited to my family and excuse myself for stealing from everybody else?
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I've been arguing philosophy around intellectual property for over a decade and this is pretty standard in a space with thinkers like The Motte. Some of the biggest fights I saw among AnCaps were around Intellectual Property. This look a little familiar?
It's an issue like abortion, it gets at the very foundation of philosophical concepts that the vast majority take for granted. Like most things people come up with post hoc justifications for what they want, the smarter the person the more clever the reasoning.
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