Karl Marx did not set out to place every dwelling, every hearth, under the hand of a distant bureaucracy. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 he wrote that the bourgeoisie had turned the means of production—factories, mines, railways—into private property that served only the profit of a few. He distinguished that from the personal belongings of a worker, the tools of his trade, the clothing on his back, which he called “personal property.”

What Marx condemned was the ownership of productive assets by capitalists, the very thing that allowed them to extract surplus labour from the worker. In his later work, the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he described a transitional phase he called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” during which the working class would seize control of those productive assets. The purpose of that seizure was not to hand them to a permanent state apparatus, but to abolish the class distinction that made private ownership possible.

Marx imagined that once the class antagonisms vanished, the state itself would wither away, leaving a society in which the community collectively managed the means of production. In this vision the house in which a family lived would remain theirs to occupy, but the factories, farms, and banks that generated wealth would belong to all, not to a handful of owners or to a monolithic state bureaucracy.

Thus, when Marx spoke of “property,” he meant the capitalist claim to the productive forces that enabled exploitation, not the simple fact that a roof shelters a family. He warned that corporations, by asserting private property over the fruits of labour, turn the rights of the many into the profit of the few. His remedy was communal stewardship, not a permanent state‑owned estate.

In short, Marx’s critique was aimed at corporate ownership that subjugates people’s rights, and his ultimate aim was a stateless, classless arrangement in which the community, not a state or a corporation, held the productive assets in common.