Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Private property is capital, and capital is accumulated labor, but private property also places the two concepts in conflict with each other since property extracts labor from the worker to the benefit of the owner. Communism is the abolition of private property as presently constituted. Its goal is to fuse the role of the laborer with that of the owner. If an asset cannot be owned collectively, communism will destroy it. Marx acknowledges a “crude communism” which would extend the principle of abolishing property to the abolition of marriage, replacing it with a “community of women” (133). These communists argue that sexual envy is part and parcel of the system of greed that places human beings in endless competition with one another. Since the poor already lack property, a switch from marriage to communal sexuality would just confirm their status under capitalism.

Marx rejects this argument as a false equivalence between fundamentally different kinds of relationships. Whereas labor and capital are necessarily communal, marriage is an interpersonal relationship rooted in nature, and sexuality is the clearest expression of humankind as a “species being” (134). The fulfillment that partners find in one another is similar to the fusion of laborer and object.