Personal Property, economic relations that pertain to individual members’ appropriation of material values for fulfilling their individual needs. In its social and economic content, personal property under capitalism and under socialism are totally different in principle. In a bourgeois society the personal property of the exploiter classes is a kind of private property (see Ownership). Why this is so is, first, because its source is the appropriation, without pay, of the surplus value created by hired labour thanks to private capitalist ownership of the means of production; and, second, because the exploiter classes can always convert some of their personal property into private property and use it to exploit hired labour. The labour of the working people in the capitalist countries is the source of their personal property. The amount of personal property owned by almost all the working people is limited by their wages (see Wages under Capitalism), which are, in turn, limited by the cost of labour power. Constantly rising inflation in the bourgeois world and the policy of the imperialist states of raising income taxes, freezing wages, etc., result in a further decline in the real incomes of the working people and limit the size of 269 personal property they possess. However, personal property under socialism radically differs from private property: personal property cannot be converted into capital and used as a means of exploitation. It implies primarily the ownership of consumer goods which satisfy the individual’s requirements. The source of all personal property is the individual’s contribution to social production. All other conditions being equal, the amount of personal property one possesses depends upon the development level of social property. The implementation of the principle of distribution according to work, which in the main determines the amount of personal property, leads to an increase in the scope of social property. The right of every person to work realised in socialist society guarantees their material prosperity, while the steady increase in the efficiency of social production provides a sound foundation for the systematic increase in the amount of personal property people possess and for the rising living standard. The personal subsidiary small holding of a collective farmer which is maintained by the labour of the collective farmer and his family, and which is a source of additional income, is a specific type of personal property under socialism. Personal property and the right of inheritance are protected by the state. As society advances towards communism the needs of the members of socialist society for personal consumption goods are met more and more fully. The share of goods that further expand the individual’s cultural and spiritual horizons increases steadily as a part of his personal property.