Private property is not determined by its owner, but rather its function. Ordinary people can own private property, such as land which is taxed or rented out, means of production upon which people are employed etc. It is a fact that the Venezuelan state owns private property, and also that they employ people in exchange for wages. This is no different at all to what Apple or GM does in the United States.

It is also possible for society in general to act as a capitalist. The way Marx and other Socialists use the term "private property" is perhaps different to its modern meaning. Proudhon writes,

>There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.

Most people would describe government owned property as public because all citizens are allowed to have a say in the management of the property, not just some of them. This doesn't mean day to day management, but its ultimate distribution. In your proprietor/possessor dichotomy, the citizenry is the proprietor - the government, the possessor.

Not a good comparison. Manager and Owner would be a better example than lover and husband.

> Most people would describe government owned property as public

Yes, because they are using a public/private dichotomy which makes a lot of sense distinguishing kinds of ownership within capitalism, but has nothing to do with the socialist use of the term, where “private property” is a central feature of capitalism, and it's alternative (when it concerns the means of production) is not something which exists in “pure” capitalism.

> because all citizens are allowed to have a say in the management of the property, not just some of them

And this is exactly why many schools of socialist thought see centralized state control, even in a democratic state, as generally private property; the particular workers whose labor is applied to the means of production have their control so diluted by other parties that the control is almost as completely alienated from them as in the case where they have no ownership.

>And this is exactly why many schools of socialist thought see centralized state control, even in a democratic state, as generally private property; the particular workers whose labor is applied to the means of production have their control so diluted by other parties that the control is almost as completely alienated from them as in the case where they have no ownership.

That's interesting to me, because a situation where the workers whose labor was applied to the means of production retain complete control seems like private property to me.

A situation where the control of property is held by an agent of the commons doesn't seem private precisely because the commons includes people that have no ownership from applied utility. Essentially, it's as if no-one's labor has been applied at all and in those cases the resources belong to the public.

> That's interesting to me, because a situation where the workers whose labor was applied to the means of production retain complete control seems like private property to me.

How? Within the socialist personal/social/private typology, not the capitalist public/private typology? The two are completely unrelated systems of categorization, which unfortunately share a name (but not the meaning denoted by the name.)

A democratically run company is still an owner of private property, the fact that citizens have a say is irrelevant to the idea that property is privately owned. This is evident in the case in which the State is an actor on the global stage and defends its private property from other nations; whether that be land or means of production.

>A democratically run company is still an owner of private property, the fact that citizens have a say is irrelevant to the idea that property is privately owned.

Yes, I agree - however, the fact that ALL citizens have a say is not irrelevant.

The case you're talking about is one where the State acts in its capacity as an agent of the citizenry, similar to how a manager can hire, fire or sign contracts within the bounds set by the owner or owners. It doesn't mean the manager owns any property, simply that he as an agent of ownership is currently in possession of it.

> A democratically run company is still an owner of private property,

In the capitalist public/private sense, yes; in the socialist personal/private/social sense, this is social not private property (specifically, cooperative social property.)

The sense of “private property” opposed by socialism is not at all the sense which is opposed to “public property”.

When I say "company" I mean such an organisation as which employs wage labour to further the accumulation of capital; such an organisation could not exist under a Socialist mode of production, at least in my understanding. This is because it is firstly not wholly the "property" of the workers in general, because accumulation of capital requires exploitation and value added through M-C-M'; a cooperative still sells produce, so in my view this makes it inadequate for Socialism. Perhaps something like mutualism would better describe such an arrangement at the scale of a society.

It is entirely possible for people to create a super-capitalist, an image reflecting bourgeois nature, within a cooperative establishment.

> How is state-owned property considered private property?

In Marxist theory, “private property” has a particular meaning: the means of production alienated from the particular workers whose labor is applied to them. In Marx’s specific theory, in the socialist stage of the Communist project, ownership by a state controlled by the proletariat makes such property no longer private not because it is owned by the state, but because the productive resources are controlled by the workers. But in the broader Marx-inspired movement and socialist using the same terminology (outside of Leninism and it's descendants, which not only accepts this but replaces democratic control with the direction of the vanguard), there is some controversy on this point, and many view state control as to removed from the immediate workers to eliminate the privation which is why socialists characterize such property as “private”.