Commies All the Way Down

September 18, 2020 Robert Higgs

As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, “The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” So when one refers to progressives and other avowed enemies of private property rights as commies, one is not being unfair. Just because the progressives do not attempt to destroy private property rights in their entirety or all at once, but here and there and little by little, their objective in effect is ultimately to wipe out private property root and branch. In brief, those who work ceaselessly to move toward the ultimate goal of communism would seem to be fairly characterized as commies.

Written by Robert Higgs

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.