That all “Western Culture” developed and flowered in the soil of “private property” is a historically acknowledged fact. In this sense the whole technological and scientific culture of Europe and North America owes its very existence to private property as an indispensable condition sine qua non. No sensible Marxist has denied or denies this. On the contrary, the theory of Marxism has, in all fairness, always valued the historically progressive role of private property and has stressed its advantages in comparison with the prebourgeois, feudal type-class forms of the social organization of human activities.

Both Marx and Engels began their careers precisely as the most radical theoreticians of bourgeois democracy, as the most determined defenders of the principle of private property, which in their eyes at that time coincided with the principle of full and unconditional freedom of personal initiative in any sphere of life, whether material or spiritual. In his capacity as leader of revolutionary democracy, the young Marx even opposed the idea of a socialization of property. Marx rejected communism as a theoretical doctrine, for to him it seemed to be a reactionary attempt to galvanize the “corporate principle,” the ideal of Plato.

This, essentially, is the position of the young Marx. This is not the position of a communist nor of a Marxist in the modern meaning of the word. It is simply the position of a sensible and honorable theoretician. It is precisely for this reason that Marx in 1842 did not turn to a formal analysis of contemporary communist ideas (they were indeed quite naive), nor to a criticism of the practical attempts to implement them (they were quite feeble), but rather he contemplated a theoretical analysis of the conflict within the social organism which spawned these ideas and the elucidation of that real demand which expressed itself in the form of ideas such as Utopian socialism and communism.

Marx became convinced in the course of this analysis that the conflicts actually observable in France and England were, in essence, necessary consequences of private property; they were already present implicitly in the very principle of this private, individual kind of property. For this reason, then, Marx accepted communistic ideas as a necessary phenomenon in the development of private property, notwithstanding the fact that these ideas remained for him as unacceptable as previously, so far as representing a “positive program.”

Although “communism as such is not a goal of human development, is not the form of human society,” nonetheless, this very communism is the “next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future.”

His basic thesis, which is still being developed in abstract-philosophical phraseology (that of Hegel and Feuerbach), consists in the following: a simple, formally-legal “negation of private property,” and the establishment of social property by the wealth that society has already created, is in fact a necessary first step, a first stage on the road to social progress. To take this step, this political legal action, people are pushed and compelled by the antinomy of this very world of “private property.” And the breadth and keenness of this antinomy increases in the same degree as material and spiritual life develops.

The real problem, which the communist movement must solve after performing its immediate task, is directly dictated by the antinomies of private property. After the revolutionary conversion of private property, as a means of production and a boon to culture, into “social property,” this social property must then, in turn, be converted into the property of each person, of each separate individual. In the social context, this question coincides with the abolition of the division of labor among individuals, a concept inherited from the world of “private property.”

In regard to the individual, the problem of his all-around development and his conversion into a “totally” developed individuality must be confronted. The political revolution is viewed here as a condition to be fulfilled whereby society will then find itself with the power to face itself, and moreover, to really accomplish the gigantic task of creating a society without government, without currency and without any other external mediators for relationships among men.

It is easy to demonstrate that the mature Marx maintained, and defined more exactly, his critical relationship toward that “crude and thoughtless communism,” which still bore the marks of its violent origin out of the movement of private property and because of this was still, to a large degree, contaminated by moral and theoretical prejudices (see, for example, documents that describe Marx’s fight against Proudhonism, against the “barracks communism” of Bakunin and Nechaev and so on).

It is also obvious that the mature Marx, and after him Lenin, never, even in a single phase of his theoretical writings, viewed the act of turning private-capitalistic property into “state” property as the highest and final goal of the communist movement but only as a first, although necessary, step toward creating a society, without government, without currency, without forcible-legal forms for regulating man’s vital activity, and without any “alienated” forms of human collaboration. In other words, the goal is the conversion of formally collective property into genuinely collective property.

From this viewpoint, the question of building a communist society amounts to the converting of each individual from a one-sided professional — from a slave of the division of labor system — into an all-around personality, a real master (proprietor) of the material and spiritual culture created by all mankind. Under the conditions of private property the opposite tendency is stronger; it moves toward a governmental, monopolistic form of “collectivization” of property and the duties of directing it.

The forces of market elements inescapably doom individualism to one-sided professional specialization, to professional “cretinism,” as Marx expressed it. Therefore to counteract this tendency, a monopoly of leadership of socially important affairs is given over to professionals. This, taking place independently of the will and desires of individuals, represents a tendency toward “total government.” Thus the ultimate goals of these two movements for the organization of social life turn out to be directly contradictory.

Therefore in summary it seems that Marxist communism in the twentieth century is the only rationally based doctrine that is strong enough to offer people a real earthly ideal. There is no rational doctrine opposed to communism but only an absence of one. Therefore reasonable people must choose now between Marxism, some form of social pessimism or salvation in the form of a transcendental religion. I, personally, prefer communism which opens to humanity a real, albeit difficult, road to a future here on earth.

— Э.В.Ильенков, From the Marxist-Leninist Point of View (1967)