The first reaction to this radical idea ( Abolish private property.) was that it would find little resonance with the British working class, a large number of whom have bought their own homes and seek to get a better life through the acquisition of more property – cars, comfortable domestic furnishings etc. However Marx anticipated this reaction. He pointed out that he was referring to ‘bourgeois property’, and property relations not the hard won property of the worker. For Marx the bourgeois defence of their property was at one and the same time a defence of their power, and was riddled with hypocrisy.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
Bourgeois property relations come about, as Marx says above, through dispossessing others, and then inventing a legal code to justify this robbery.
In the 18th century the imposition of bourgeois property relations on the labouring poor came about by the seizure of common lands. For example, in Scotland the highland clearances removed crofters from the land and turned the highlands into sheep ranges. This was done through force. In England common land was parcelled up and given to big farmers. Legal documents were provided to defend this robbery.
In North America the native inhabitants thought that private property was an absurd inversion of reality. The inhabitants were secondary and the land was primary. So as European settlers knocked in some wooden stakes to make a claim on native lands, the US government gave them deeds that made the robbery legal. This is going on today in Palestine, and in the Amazon.
The ultimate prize that the bourgeoisie gain from transforming pre-existing property relations is the creation of capital.
