I can afford rent, groceries, and utility bills.

It’s when you can’t afford those things that the society based on force comes into focus with perfect clarity.

What is the force or violence I used to attain and maintain ownership of this property?

The force or violence is what is used to enforce the property rights that you purchased. If I went to your property right now and claimed it as my own and started using it, what would you do to stop me? What tools are available to you to prevent that? The deed of ownership to that property is just a proxy for the violence.

Its fine, everyone starts from somewhere.

The fact that all property relations rest on violence or the threat of violence is intentionally made invisible by the ruling class under capitalism. This is done through propagation of ruling class ideology in education, movies, television, radio, newspapers etc. Marxists refer to this as the superstructure And that is a whole other rabbit hole… It comes in many forms, but within a society you will hear familiar arguments about why poverty exists alongside opulence, why poverty and its manifold problems are the result of individual moral failing or lack of proper work ethic etc. These are typically nebulous ideas that change over time to whatever will best allow the status quo to persist and they intentionally ignore the basis of these problems and their root cause within the organization of production within our world (the social basis of production). In the USA prior to the civil war, convoluted ideas of race science were created to support and justify an unjust system of chattel slavery and racial caste, for example. Today, emphasis is placed on individual moral failing: poor work ethic, drug addiction, lack of religion, or other vague but incorrect ideas that are often have their root in racism, ableism, sexism, classism etc. Typically ignoring that, for instance, some of the richest people in the world don’t work, use drugs with abandon, lack religion etc.

If you live in a well developed capitalist country, particularly in western Europe and the US/Canada, your “comfortable” lifestyle is created and maintained by violence in a number of ways, both historically and currently, domestically and abroad. All political economic systems rest on the authority of the state to maintain property relations through the state-sanctioned use of violence. When someone is evicted, for instance, the constable or sheriffs will show up and forcibly remove a tenant. Contracts are upheld and property itself is legitimized through the state, and so the state is able to set the terms of what type and means of acquisition and ownership are allowed. If they are not, or the state finds them illegitimate because it challenged their authority, then it can be met with violence (jail, beating, dispossession, displacement, ostracism, execution, to name a few current & historic means). Marxist-Leninists and other types of communists rightly point out that this is a feature of all states, and nearly every observed society, but they also point out that this violence has a class character that is determined by the social relations that underpin the dominant mode of production (i.e. the state is a device of the ruling classes to maintain the current order and subject the other classes to the current system) They seek to abolish this class system, and hopefully all oppressive systems with it… but that is something the current ruling class will resist, and so creating a political system where the oppressed classes use the state to repress the former ruling class (capitalists, landlords, petit-bourgeois reactionary types, etc) and maintain the ruling position of the working class in order to build a world without class domination and without opression

Capitalism itself is an exploitive and extractive system. You are correct to point out your boss steals from you the full value of your labor for their own profit, and this level of exploitation may seems benign or relatively acceptable if you have a comfortable life, but it is still violent and your relationship with your boss also ignores the bigger picture. Outside of your job there are much more oppressive arrangements within that system and many people are homeless, living in poverty, hungry and sick, despite an abundance of labor and resources to stop all of these social ills. People in the “developed” economies mostly have that “development” at the expense of highly violent and exploitive methods that extract wealth and labor from others. western europe, the us, and others typically spent the past few hundred years pillaging the rest of the world and groups of people within their own borders as well.

Colonization and imperialism are imposed upon the world with great violence, and then once that order was set up, it was maintained in a transformative process that had to adapt to changing conditions and social movements that sought to break its control. None of this was non-violent on the part of the imperialists, but it has changed into a more abstract or indirect form through financial instruments, debt, or large clandestine efforts to shape governments abroad. Their relationship is still extractive and violent and imposes poverty, famine, war, and displacement on people throughout the globe. If you are in a comfortable job in a developed western nation, it is more than likely that you either benefit from this violence directly or indirectly. If you are in a country that is a willing subject to US imperialism, a junior partner, then often your lifestyle has come in the form of a bargain, where your political and economic system were shaped by the United States in exchange for favorable terms: but without it would be subject to violence or sanction.

It’s ok! I’ll try to add a bit to what other already said, in simple terms. I’ll respond to punctual questions in another comment.

I’ll talk about two important ideas here: historicity and collectivity. This whole mode of thought is very complex and there is no shame in feeling overwhelmed at first and not getting it with just some short online comments. Marx took thousands of pages to develop all these ideas, and others still had to develop them further.

One important thing to keep in mind during an analysis is that, although things simply pop up on our mind when we experience them, that is not the case in reality outside our head - your land didn’t just pop up into existence the way you experience it right now. Sure, you simply bought it from another person, but that’s not where the land started existing. Assuming you are from the US, how did a piece of land in America become a market product in the first place? To understand that, you have to look into history. Way back then, someone had to take the land away from others (natives) using force and then keep it from getting taken away by others also using force. The state was created by these situations: as a mediator of ownership of the newly explored property. How is that mediation put into practice? To see it, let’s bring it a little closer to yourself: what would happen to you if, instead of buying the land, you simply got into it and said it’s yours? Best case scenario, you’d be dragged away by cops - that is, the state would use force to mediate property rights. Unless you have an army to fight the state, you are not keeping that land.

So, since things in reality develop through historical processes, it is wrong to not consider those in your analysis, you won’t get close to thinking something that is objective (ie. that exists outside your head).

Also, just reflecting about oneself and your own personal experiences will hardly deliver a correct analysis. The world is collective - everything around you and inside you were made by a long chain of producers scattered in space and time. Failing to add this consideration into your analysis won’t get you close to reproducing reality correctly inside your head either.

Hope this helps! Try the “primitive accumulation” chapter of Capital, it’s towards the end and will give you a great picture of all this, as it describes the political events that gave birth to English capitalism. It’s not a hard read, as it is not abstract as the initial chapters are. Then come back and tell us what you think 😄

If you’re feeling adventurous, read the introduction to Grundrisse, although that one is more complicated. The book lays down a lot of Marxist ideas, and also describes the method of analysis Marx used to reach them. My two comments were based on these two, respectively.

Would the “society based on force” in play here be that I am being forced to work to afford and enjoy these necessities?

Kinda. You’re buying it in the first place because you don’t have a property to produce it yourself, which is also the reason we work, as there is no other way of getting what we need to survive. That’s also why you pay rent.

Think of this: who owns the food before you buy it, or who are you buying it from? How is it produced? Why can’t you just take it, and what happens if you do?

My point is: violence is inherent to property. Property can’t exist without violence or the threat of it.

And that the ideal society would be that I shouldn’t have to work to have those?

In Marxist communism, the question of what is a perfect society doesn’t matter, is counterproductive and should be repelled. The point is not to design a perfect society, but to develop the progressive forces of capitalism (the tools which develop scientific advancements, education, production capacity…) and get over the regressive forces (current relations of property, mostly). Communism will develop from capitalism, not made of thin air by a fairy. According to Marx himself, the initial stages of communism will be hardly distinguishable from capitalism, save for the property relations. Which brings us to:

I get that this is probably moving towards the more well known stance of “the workers should own the means of production”. Is that the case?

You should know what that means beyond the slogan:

You see, european and american capitalism started as progressive force, in the sense that it brought about a material development never before experienced in history. Now, we have the potential to do much much more than we currently are, but the way the system works gets in the way and keeps us from doing better. Just look at cars and climate change - why aren’t we ditching fossil fuels faster, if it’s for the surviving of the human race?

In Marx’s analysis, in the beginning stages of a form of society, their relations of property, specially the property of the means of production (land, tools, education), act as a progressive force, developing the productive forces (workers and their abilities, mostly). With time, these productive forces become too developed, and what once was a rocket launching society forward now becomes a cage that won’t let it go any further. These overdeveloped productive forces then dissolve the previous relations of property and a new relation of property arises, one that is based on that overdevelopment. Then rinse and repeat.

Science and productivity are now too developed for capitalism, which now ceases to be a factor of progress and becomes an impediment for further development. The natural next step of a society to progress is to abandon the current relations (who owns the land, tools, machines etc) and organize new ones based on the fact that workers are much more educated and we can now produce absurd quantities of useful products if we ditch the production of useless ones for financial market reasons (do you know the amount of energy humanity wastes mining bitcoin? 😬).

There’s also the fact that the planet is dying and big companies won’t let us do anything about it or else they’ll lose profits, so that is another situation in which capitalism has become a cage and not the rocket it once was.

I recommend reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, which consists of Marx dunking on a communist party of his time. He exposes all these ideas much more eloquently than I can.