Comparing Plato and Marx: The Role of Communism in Plato’s Ideal State

Long before Karl Marx wrote about the proletariat seizing the means of production, an ancient Greek philosopher proposed his own version of communism. In The Republic, Plato argued that the rulers of his ideal state should own no property and have no families of their own. The word “communism” gets attached to both thinkers, but the resemblance is mostly on the surface. Plato wanted to perfect a ruling elite; Marx wanted to dissolve elites altogether. Understanding why they reached such different conclusions tells us a great deal about how political thought evolved over two thousand years.

What Plato actually proposed 🔗

Plato’s ideal state, described in The Republic, is built around three classes: the rulers (philosopher-kings), the auxiliaries (soldiers), and the producers (farmers, artisans, traders). These mirror the three parts of the soul in Plato’s psychology, where reason, spirit, and appetite each play a role. Justice, for Plato, means each class doing its assigned job and not interfering with the others.

The problem Plato identified was simple. The people who hold power are constantly tempted to use that power for personal gain. A ruler who owns land might favour policies that increase the value of his land. A ruler with children might twist decisions to benefit his family. Plato’s solution was radical: remove the temptation entirely by removing private property and the private family from the guardian class.

Communism of property 🔗

Plato proposed that the guardians-both rulers and soldiers-should own nothing. No private houses, no land, no gold, no silver. They would live in state-managed barracks and eat together in a common mess, with their basic needs met by goods collected from the producing class. The aim was to make the words “mine” and “yours” disappear from their vocabulary.

Notice the careful limit here. This communism applies only to the ruling minority, not to the whole society. The producing class was still allowed to own property, marry freely, and raise their own children. Plato had no interest in economic equality across all of society. His target was the corruption of power, and his method was to strip the powerful of the assets that corrupt them.

Communism of family 🔗

Plato went further than property. He argued that the family was the great stronghold of selfishness, and so it too had to go for the guardian class. Under his scheme, guardians would not have permanent marriages or private households. Instead, mating would be arranged by the state to produce the best possible offspring, and children would be raised communally without knowing their biological parents.

The logic flows directly from the property argument. If you remove a ruler’s wealth but leave his family intact, he will simply transfer his selfishness from money to children. He will scheme to advance his sons and daughters, creating exactly the nepotism Plato wanted to abolish. By hiding biological ties, Plato hoped every guardian would treat every other guardian as kin, producing a ruling class bound together as a single family devoted entirely to the state.

Why Plato wanted this: unity above all 🔗

The thread running through both forms of communism is unity. Plato believed the greatest evil in any state was division-different groups pursuing conflicting interests rather than the common good. Private property and private families were, in his view, the two main sources of that division.

The political scientist George Sabine summed up Plato’s reasoning neatly: the unity of the state is the goal, property and family stand in the way, therefore property and family must go. This is worth stressing because it explains the partial, elitist nature of Plato’s scheme. He was not trying to liberate the poor or redistribute wealth. He was trying to engineer a class of incorruptible rulers whose decisions would flow purely from wisdom rather than self-interest.

This idea has surprising echoes in modern governance. When we require public officials to declare their assets, divest from businesses, or place their holdings in blind trusts to avoid conflicts of interest, we are applying a watered-down version of Plato’s insight that power and private wealth are a dangerous mix.

What Marx actually proposed 🔗

Marx, writing in the nineteenth century, started from a completely different place. His communism was not a thought experiment about ideal rulers. It was a theory about the entire course of human history, which he understood as a series of class struggles between those who own the means of production and those who labour for them.

Abolition of private property in the means of production 🔗

The most famous line from The Communist Manifesto states that communist theory can be summed up in a single sentence: the abolition of private property. But Marx was precise about what he meant. He clarified that the distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of bourgeois property-the private ownership of factories, land, and capital that lets one class live off the labour of another.

Marx had no objection to a worker owning personal possessions. The target was productive property, the assets that generate wealth from other people’s work. As SparkNotes explains in its analysis of the Manifesto, converting this property into common property does not abolish property as a right; it simply removes its class character by ending its use as a tool of exploitation.

Abolition of class distinctions 🔗

For Marx, abolishing bourgeois property was a means to a larger end: the disappearance of class itself. He argued that once class distinctions vanish and production is concentrated in the hands of the whole nation, political power loses its political character. Political power, in his view, was nothing more than the organised power of one class to oppress another. Remove classes, and the state as an instrument of oppression withers away.

This is the heart of Marx’s vision. He imagined a society without rulers and ruled, without owners and workers-an association, in his words, in which the free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all. Scholars writing for academic publishers note that Marx defines communism fundamentally as the abolition of private property in the means of production, a formula that runs consistently through his mature work.

Where the two thinkers diverge 🔗

Once you lay out both theories, the differences become sharp. They are not two versions of the same idea. They are almost opposites that happen to share a vocabulary.

Scope: elite versus universal 🔗

Plato’s communism is deliberately limited. It applies to a tiny minority-the guardians-while leaving the rest of society with property and family. Marx’s communism is universal. It aims to transform the property relations of the whole of society, abolishing the very division between classes. Plato wanted to perfect a hierarchy; Marx wanted to abolish hierarchy.

Purpose: moral and political versus economic 🔗

Plato’s communism is a moral and political device. Its purpose is to keep the guardians virtuous and the state unified by removing the distractions of wealth and family. Marx’s communism is an economic doctrine rooted in his analysis of capitalism, exploitation, and the labour that produces value. For Plato, property corrupts the soul of the ruler; for Marx, property in the means of production enables one class to exploit another.

Direction: top-down versus bottom-up 🔗

Plato’s scheme is imposed from above on the elite, by the elite, to maintain order over the producing masses. It is, as several commentators put it, ascetic and aristocratic at the same time. Marx’s revolution comes from below, driven by the working class overthrowing the existing order. One reinforces class structure; the other destroys it.

The means of production 🔗

This is perhaps the clearest divide. Marx focused on who controls the factories, the machines, the land that produces wealth-the means of production. Plato had no concept of this. He lived in a pre-industrial society and was concerned with the personal possessions and family ties of rulers, not with the ownership of an economy’s productive base. Asking Plato about the means of production would be anachronistic; the category simply did not exist in his world.

The critiques that followed 🔗

Neither version escaped serious criticism. Plato’s own student, Aristotle, was the first major critic, and his objections still resonate. In Book II of his Politics, Aristotle argued that common ownership leads to neglect, because what is common to the greatest number receives the least care. People look after what is their own and neglect what belongs to everyone.

Aristotle also rejected Plato’s obsession with unity. He argued that a state is naturally made up of different kinds of people, and forcing it into total uniformity would destroy what makes it a state at all. A city of identical citizens, in his view, is not a city but a military alliance. Many later critics, including Karl Popper, attacked Plato’s scheme as elitist and authoritarian, noting that it surrendered all the privileges of communal living to the guardians while excluding the producing class.

Marx’s communism, of course, generated even fiercer debate over the following century, both as a theory and as it was applied in practice in various states. But the philosophical objection that links the two critiques is similar: both Aristotle’s worry about neglect and the later worry about coercion turn on whether human beings can really be made to abandon private interest for a shared one.

Two thinkers, one word, different worlds 🔗

Calling both thinkers “communist” can mislead more than it clarifies. Plato’s communism was a partial, moral arrangement designed to keep a ruling elite incorruptible and a hierarchical state stable. Marx’s communism was a universal, economic project designed to dissolve class hierarchy entirely. One looks backward to an ordered, unchanging ideal; the other looks forward to a revolutionary transformation of society.

What they share is a deep suspicion of private property as a source of social discord. That single shared instinct, separated by more than two millennia, is enough to put them in the same conversation-but their goals, methods, and philosophical foundations could hardly be more different.

What do you think? Is Plato right that holding rulers to a stricter standard than ordinary citizens is the best way to prevent corruption, or does that double standard create an unaccountable elite? And if private property genuinely breeds conflict, why have so many attempts to abolish it-whether for the few or for everyone-run into the problems Aristotle predicted?

References

1. https://countercurrents.org/2017/09/platos-theory-of-communism/
2. https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/political-science/platos-theory-of-communism-including-2-forms-of-communism/40134
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
4. https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/communist/section3/
5. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111marx.html
6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230309142_7
7. https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/otemporaomores/2020/06/25/aristotles-critique-of-platos-communism/
8. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/abs/communism-of-property-a-note-on-aristotle-politics-1263a815/5592B58F2F6A2F4D3BD624023DE4AB30