Which historical communist states came closest to abolishing private property and how was it measured?

1. What Marx meant: abolition of “bourgeois” property, not toothbrushes

Karl Marx’s writings repeatedly frame “abolition of private property” as the abolition of bourgeois private property — ownership of the means of production (factories, large estates, capital) — while preserving personal, non‑productive possessions for individuals; the published commentary in the provided material stresses that Marx and Engels distinguished bourgeois property from personal property ^{[4] [5] [1]}.

2. How communist states implemented property change — law and categories

Historical communist regimes created legal categories that concentrated productive assets under state or collective control while leaving limited private ownership for personal goods and constrained small‑scale farming in some periods. For example, Soviet law formally divided “socialist” (state and collective) property from individually owned private property and confined private ownership largely to consumer goods, houses and small agricultural implements where limited private farming was tolerated ^[2]. Encyclopedic overviews of post‑communist transitions note that communist governments often maintained monolithic state ownership regimes that later loosened after political change ^[3].

3. Measuring “closeness”: what metrics the literature uses (and doesn’t)

Available sources in this set do not provide a standardized, quantitative metric (e.g., percent of national wealth under private title, share of firms privately owned) to rank states by how fully they abolished private property. Instead, the materials measure change in institutional terms — legal abolition or nationalization of means of production, creation of state monopolies, and limits on private economic institutions — rather than giving a cross‑country numeric index ^{[2] [3]}. Therefore a precise ranking by numeric closeness is not present in current reporting (not found in current reporting).

4. Soviet Union as the canonical example: monopoly of productive property

The Soviet Union is presented in these sources as the archetype of state monopoly over productive property: socialist property (state and collective) dominated centrally planned distribution while the “system of private property” that remained was limited to consumer goods and a narrow scope of private farming and housing ^[2]. That institutional outcome aligns with Marx’s target — abolition of bourgeois property — but the sources emphasize that personal property persisted ^{[2] [1]}.

5. China and other cases: legal flexibility and later privatization

Broad overviews note that communist states varied and many later allowed or encouraged forms of private ownership, especially after the 20th century’s latter half; for instance, China under market reforms permitted and promoted private ownership in many sectors even while remaining politically dominated by a communist party ^[3]. The provided material thus frames “abolition” as uneven, historically contingent and sometimes reversed or modified.

6. Competing interpretations and political uses of the phrase

Political and activist sources in the set interpret Marx’s line differently: communist and sympathetic outlets stress that abolition targets capitalist class property and not personal belongings and sometimes argue abolition would expand personal property for workers ^{[6] [7] [8]}. Critics cite the same Marx quote to argue that abolition of property leads to political repression or economic failure ^[9]. Both perspectives rely on the same textual core but project different normative and empirical expectations ^{[1] [9]}.

7. How a researcher could produce the ranking the query seeks

Because the provided sources lack quantitative cross‑country measures, a robust ranking would require assembling data not present here: legal status of property categories, share of national assets under state vs private title, firm ownership breakdowns, land tenure statistics and measures of household ownership of productive assets over time. The supplied set shows what to look for (legal/nationalization events and state ownership regimes) but does not supply the numbers themselves ^{[2] [3]}.

Limitations and takeaway: the available reporting in this collection explains Marx’s intended target (bourgeois/means of production) and describes institutional forms used by regimes like the USSR and China but does not offer a numerical “distance from abolition” or a ranked list of regimes by degree of private property remaining; constructing such a ranking would require empirical datasets not included in these sources ^{[1] [2] [3]}.