The paper addresses the issue of the justification of private property and also compares and contrasts the role that private property plays in the theories of Locke and in his "Second Treatise" and Marx in his "Communist Manifesto". It asks whether individuals have a right to private property, or (which I think is the same thing) whether there are any good right-based arguments for private property. A right-based argument is an argument showing that an individual interest considered in itself; is sufficiently important from a moral point of view to justify holding people to be under a duty to promote it. So my question can be rephrased as follows. What individual interests are served by the existence of private property as opposed to some other sort of property regime (such as communism)? Are any of these interests so important from a moral point of view that they justify holding governments to be under a duty to promote, uphold, and protect property-owning? Or is it rather the case that, taken one by one, the interests which individuals have in the matter do not have this level of importance, and that these interests should be dealt with in the aggregate, in the form of utilitarian arguments about property institutions, rather than treated as the basis of rights? .

             Marx argued in The Communist Manifesto there cannot be private property for anyone at all unless nine-tenths of the population is property less--then the possibility of a GR-based argument for private property, along the lines of the one we have attributed, is in danger. Any thesis about the inevitability of widespread propertylessness threatens the collapse of the sort of argument that Locke wants to put forward in favor of private property. It is the challenge laid down by Karl Marx in a furious response to bourgeois critics of the socialist programme outlined in The Communist Manifesto: .

             You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.