The problem of private property for the young marx

Abstract

Through his study of the utopian socialists, and especially of Proudhon, the problem of the perversion of the social community by private property became quite clear to Marx: if private property – and the split between private interest and general interest originating from it – it is not a necessary development, but an incidental one, it can be subsumed. This article aims to demonstrate how, in search of a Rousseauian republicanism and a critique of bourgeois liberalism, Karl Marx flirted with the communists’ critique of private property. We discuss Proudhon’s critique of private property and five articles Mark wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung: the article against the Kantian Hermes, the controversy with the socialist Moses Hess, the reply to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, the critique of the resolutions of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, and the “Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood”.