'the whole technological and scientific culture of Europe and North America owes its very existence to private property as an indispensable condition sine qua non.
No sensible Marxist has denied or denies this.'
The preceding read:
'That all "Western Culture" developed and flowered in the soil of "private property" is a historically acknowledged fact. "The Declaration of Independence" and the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789" that legally settled this form of property as the basic principle of all legislation were documents of greatest revolutionary significance. The freed the tremendous resources of human potentialities from the surveillance of bureaucratic regimentation and secured wider limits for the realisation of these potentialities and for personal initiative.'
Ilyenkov was speaking at a conference at the University of Notre Dame in 1966, the papers were published the following year as 'Marx and the Western World', edited by N Lobkowicz p 395