Communist Manifesto Lesson Plan

By Marx and Engel's own admission, the abolition of private property is the most difficult part of the communist position for people to accept. Do you agree with their claim that property is controlled by bourgeois interests? If not, how is property controlled, in your opinion? Will social ownership of property allow workers to better reap the benefits of their labor?

The trick to answering this question is to move past knee-jerk reactions to better understand what the Manifesto claims. Surely, most students will immediately say that the abolition of private property will be bad because that's our basic assumption. But be sure to push them to both explain how private...