Abolition of private property
Categories: Home -> Political Science
Last updated: 2026-08-26
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism
For Marxism, the abolition of private property does not mean stripping individuals of their personal-use goods (such as their clothes, their house, or their furniture). What Marxism seeks to destroy is private property in the means of production: factories, land, machinery, technology, and financial capital.
The Marxist position
Marx and Engels held that private property in the means of production is the legal basis that allows the bourgeoisie to exist and, therefore, the extraction of surplus value.
Under their logic, if an individual or group has a monopoly on the tools needed to produce wealth, it can force those who do not have them (the proletariat) to sell their labor power in exchange for a subsistence wage.
The Marxist solution is the expropriation (theft) of these means so that they become collective property (administered by the State in the socialist phase, and by a stateless society in the final communist phase).
By socializing the means of production, exploitation, social classes, and the anarchy of the market are theoretically eliminated, giving way to a centrally planned economy.
The refutation of the Austrian School
The Austrian School of Economics attacks this proposal on two fundamental fronts: the economic impossibility of organizing society without Private property and the moral implications for human Liberty.
The Economic Calculation Problem (Mises’s critique)
In 1920, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) demonstrated that abolishing Private property in the means of production makes socialism a system that is logically impossible to sustain. His argument is a relentless deductive chain:
- If there is no private property in the factors of production, there can be no exchange in the market (no one can sell or buy what they do not own).
- If there is no exchange in the market, free prices cannot form.
- Prices are not arbitrary numbers; they are the most efficient information-transmission system that exists. They indicate which resources are scarce and which are abundant.
- Without prices, a central planner is blind. He has no rational way of knowing whether it is more efficient to build railway tracks with steel or with titanium, or whether a field should be used for wheat or for soy.
- The abolition of property destroys the economic thermometer, inevitably leading to massive waste, chronic scarcity, and productive collapse. For more data see -> List of Collectivist Catastrophes
The inseparability of economic and political liberty (Hayek’s critique)
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), in The Road to Serfdom, warned that separating political liberty from economic liberty is an illusion. Whoever controls all the means of production controls all the means of human subsistence.
If the State or the collective is the only employer and the only owner of resources, dissent becomes impossible.
There can be no freedom of the press if the government is the absolute owner of the paper, the printing presses, and the servers.
Abolishing capitalist private property requires concentrating a coercive power so colossal that it leads, inevitably, to totalitarianism.
The violation of self-ownership and natural law
Deepening an Austro-libertarian perspective (with roots in the Natural Law (IusNaturalism) of John Locke (1632-1656) and developed by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995)), private property is not an invention of the State that can be repealed, but a natural right derived from self-ownership.
If each individual is sovereign owner of his own body and of his mind, he is logically owner of the time and of the labor he invests in transforming nature.
To deny the right to own the fruits of one’s own labor (private property) and to accumulate them (capital) is to affirm that the community, or the State, has a superior property right over the individual.
Under this moral prism, abolishing capitalist property is not an act of liberation, but a direct violation of the non-aggression principle and a modern form of slavery.
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism
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