John Locke's Abolition Of Private Property

John Locke is a late seventeenth-century philosopher who wrote about the principles of property before America’s Industrial Revolution. Therefore, Locke’s aim was to justify the pre-industrial form of property. However, Locke’s popularity among the liberals transcends his theory beyond his own time, which consequently creates the theoretical basis of a new form of property that gains social character in the means of production in America. Contrary to Locke, who views property right as an essential part of individual freedom, Karl Marx employs the Labor Theory of Value to argue for the abolition of private property. Marx wrote after the Industrial Revolution in a society going through a drastic change. He perceives private property as a source of alienation and a major obstacle for the attainment of individual freedom. In response to Locke’s premise, Marx would argue that workers’ labor does not grant them any property whereas the capitalist class has all the property but performs no labor. Before John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was first published in 1690, property had been viewed as something created by the government. In a stark contrast, Locke’s …show more content…
He argues that in the state of nature people come to America to have a right to private property (Locke, paragraph 4). The world initially belongs to everyone in common, but every individual is and should be entitled to take one of the common properties and make it their own (Locke, paragraph 34). The phrase, “in common” simply means the absence of ownership is open access property. In taking common property and declaring that it is no longer available then men do not take from other men. Property left unused in nature is wasted since it contributes nothing to human welfare. The productivity of the land comes not from the beneficence of God, but from what men is able to make of the