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by calibraxis 4478 days ago
As I said in an edit to my other post: the intuition is capacity to oppress — the state or capitalists controlling means of production, in Soviet communism and capitalism, respectively. This is the motivating factor behind any such definition, given the context.

Now, if you're taking the stance of a determined skeptic, then that's like you pointing out there's no such definition of "chair". Which after all is true. (There's no predicate which separates all objects into chair and not-chair, and a simple argument demonstrates why.) Humans get by pretty well without extreme definitions.

Presumably without the antagonisms inherent in systems like capitalism, there'd be fewer armies of lawyers squabbling over the meanings of simple words like "property", inventing weird new forms like intellectual property, fighting over whether that land or sourcecode is my property, if you can shoot someone on your property, etc. We're constantly squabbling over it right now, because that's how power works under capitalism.