If you wanted to sell your home to someone else so they could live in it, that seems to me like the transfer of personal property from one person to another, probably in return for some other personal property (another house maybe, you still need somewhere to live).
Whether an actual communist society would organise housing like this isn't clear. No-one would reasonably consider Marx's writings to offer a societal blueprint, just principles from which actual details would be worked out through collective processes.
That it's never actually worked out like that suggests there's been something missing when this has been tried, but this doesn't correspond to proof that the principles themselves are wrong.
Well if you are just making something for someone else, that's artisan labour, which isn't really the 'production' that's being analysed by Marx.
'Working for someone else' as found in 'employment' is also something that marxists seek to abolish. Collective ownership of the means of production also means collective ownership of the product of labour. You only have 'employment' per se when ownership of capital is concentrated in private hands.
(It's not for nothing that many marxists classify the former soviet union and post-Mao china as 'state capitalist' rather than 'socialist').
The difference is not intent but use. This is the same with real estate: if I own a building to live in it, that's personal property, but if I own a building to rent it out or run a business in it then it becomes private property.
> [Marx] thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. At certain moments one can sympathise. But it's like wanting to ban gossip or forbid watching television. It's going to war with human behaviour.
A common misconception is that 'private property' here is to be equated with 'personal property'. Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished, or indeed that it makes sense to try and do so.
Generally speaking, the private property that Marx advocated abolishing was private ownership of land and the 'means of production', the latter being a category akin to 'fixed assets'.
Whether an actual communist society would organise housing like this isn't clear. No-one would reasonably consider Marx's writings to offer a societal blueprint, just principles from which actual details would be worked out through collective processes.
That it's never actually worked out like that suggests there's been something missing when this has been tried, but this doesn't correspond to proof that the principles themselves are wrong.