Excerpt
1. Communist Theory and Program
The idea of a classless, fully egalitarian society first emerged in classical
Greece. Ancient Greece happened to have been the first country in the world to
recognize private property in land and to treat land as a commodity, and hence
it was the first to confront the social inequalities that result from ownership.
Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer (seventh century b.c.), in the poem Works and
Days extolled a mythical “Golden Age” when people were not driven by
the “shameful lust for gain,” when there was an abundance of goods
for all to share and mankind lived in perpetual peace. The theme of the Golden
Age resounded in the writings of the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid; Ovid spoke of
the time when the world knew nothing of “boundary posts and fences.”
The ideal acquired its earliest theoretical formulation in the writings of
Plato. In the Republic, speaking through Socrates, Plato saw the root of discord
and wars in belongings:
Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of the terms
“mine” and “not mine,” “his” and “not
his.” ... read full excerpt from Communism ebook
