call for abolition of private property as the fundamental delegitimation of civil society as it had evolved by 1848:
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its nonexistence in the hands of those nine-tenths" (Marx 26).
The analysis of property as the defining feature of society is also an explanation of power relationships in society, which perforce entails conditions of individual and group inequality. Whoever controls property controls social benefits, and those who lack control are identified with social powerlessness.
Power ratios imply social problems. According to Mill, an exact contemporary of Marx, the source of social and economic problems is to be found in aspects of societal pressure that have the force of law. In the 1859 essay On Liberty (The Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848), Mill cites "an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation" (Mill 18). As society's power strengthens, individual power decreases. Mill sees this power ratio as pernicious because it "is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more and more formidable" (Mill 18).
Mill's views are a critique of the shape of society and advocate social reform. Acquiescence of public opinion in what could be called received wisdom is not less powerful because it is not mandated specifically by law. In fact, that is the power to which Mill refers. Uncritical acceptance of the found conditions of society develops authority, so that even if there is an impulse toward social reform by means of legislation or transformed social custom, the high level of comfort that is associated with things as they are would tend to limit t...