Ruskin felt compelled to distinguish himself from the radicals across the Channel. What he dubbed the “Parisian school of Communism” taught that all property was common property. But “we Communists of the old school”—“dark-red Communists,” he emphasized, “reddest of the red”—while they, too, believed that “everybody must work in common, and do common or simple work for his dinner,” they nonetheless upheld a kind of private property that was communist in principle and practice. “Our property belongs to everybody, and everybody’s property to us.” Old-school communists dwell in charity; since
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