September 13

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it — when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., — in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property — labour and conversion into capital.

Karl Marx
from "Private Property and Communism" in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844