Ownership Relations

Marx and Engels believed that the communist economy would be a marketless economy, based on collective ownership of the means of production. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx-Engels Reader, 1978) Marx and Engels characterised bourgeois private property as ‘the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few’ (p. 484) and suggested that the proletariat, as the new ruling class, would ‘wrest, by decrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie’ (p. 490). They also assumed that socialisation of the means of production was a prerequisite to many desirable changes in the economy and society. To them economic planning, which they advocated as a new coordinating mechanism for future society instead of the market mechanism, was possible only under collective ownership. They also believed that collective ownership would enable changes in the distribution of income. Finally, the institution of collective ownership was for them a precondition for the creation of a classless society and the elimination of the state as a political power in the second stage of communism.