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.

  In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

  From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent- into a social power capable of being monopolised-
i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be
transformed into bourgeois property, into capital; from that moment,
you say, individuality vanishes.

  You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of
property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way and made
impossible.

  Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products
of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to
subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

  It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all
work will cease and universal laziness will overtake us.

  According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone
to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who
work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work.
The whole of this objection is but another expression of the
tautology: there can no longer be any wage labour when there is no
longer any capital.

  All objections urged against the Communist mode of producing and
appropriating material products have in the same way been urged
against the Communist modes of producing and appropriating
intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois the disappearance of
class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the
disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the
disappearance of all culture.

  That culture, the loss of which he laments, is for the enormous
majority a mere training to act as a machine.

  But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply to our intended
abolition of bourgeois property the standard of your bourgeois notions
of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth
of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property,
just as yourjurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are
determined by the economic conditions of existence of your class.

  The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal
laws of nature and of reason the social forms springing from your
present mode of production and form of property- historical
relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production-
this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded
you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you
admit in the case of feudal property, you are, of course forbidden
to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

  Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this
infamous proposal of the Communists.

  On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family,
based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form
this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of
things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family
among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

  The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of
capital.

  Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children
by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

  But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations when we
replace home education by social.

  And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the
social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention of
society, direct or indirect, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists
have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do
but seek to alter the character of that intervention and to rescue
education from the influence of the ruling class.

  The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more
disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family
ties among the proletarians are torn asunder and their children
transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of
labour.

  But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the
whole bourgeoisie in chorus.

  The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He
hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in
common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that