h for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths (Marx, "Manifesto" 486).
The name that Marx gives to this nonexistence is self-alienation, or more commonly, alienation (Marx, "Alienation" 133). Now both upper and working classes experience alienation, but to the former the alienation carries a sense of privilege; to the latter alienation fosters a feeling of being destroyed, "seeing in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence" ("Alienation" 133). Accordingly, to the assertion that abolition of private property would carry with it the abolition of individuality, he answers that the individuality in question refers to "the bourgeois, the middle-class owner of property" (Marx, "Manifesto" 486), who has plenty of comfort within existing society. This analysis discounts entirely the emotional appeal that property ownership might have for a proletariat whose economic fortunes might be improving with each generation, and referring to "bourgeois clap-trap" (
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