In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx writes:

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”

Now obviously this isn’t literally true, it wasn’t in Marx’s time (and he knew it) and it isn’t today. What makes it so powerful is how close to true it is. The Gini index for wealth has always been vastly higher than that for income, at .8 Behold what that looks like:

The bottom 80% of the population jointly control only 14% of the wealth. The bottom 90%? About 27% of the wealth. So yeah, it’s hyperbole to say that capitalism has abolished property for nine-tenths of the population, but only just.

At the present rate, it won’t be all that long at all before nine-tenths of the populace really do have no appreciable assets. The serious philosophical point here is this- the entitlement to property is the paradigm case of a ‘right’ in our society, but with each year the ‘right’ to property becomes more distant and purely conceptual for almost all of us.