For Marx, the future form of common ownership was inextricably bound up with the course of capitalist development, as corporate consolidation prepared industry for collective expropriation and ownership by the revolutionary proletariat. But this meant that the communist principle of morality—the “abilities” and “needs”—would bear the marks of its promethean ancestor: its technocratic politics, its equation of “abundance” with industrial production, its defiant insensitivity to natural limits.
