Note 989 — Chapter III · : MARXISM
R. (Robert) Richards translation
Engels in his preface to the Manifesto admits that one of its objects was “to announce the inevitable and imminent downfall of bourgeois property.”
Nowadays, however, it is more usual to characterise the aim of collectivism as an attempt to abolish the wage-earning class—abolition of property being simply a step towards that. This is how Labriola writes in his Essai sur la Conception matérialiste (2nd ed., p. 62): “The proletariat must learn to concentrate upon one thing, namely, the abolition of the wage-earner.”
It is well to remember that such is also the aim of the Associationists, the co-operators, and the Radical Socialists. They proceed, however, from the opposite point of view, and would multiply property rather than abolish it, thinking that the latter process would merely universalise the wage-earner.