the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

  He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do
away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

  For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous
indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they
pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists.
The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has
existed almost from time immemorial.

  Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of
their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common
prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's
wives.

  Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and
thus at the most what the Communists might possibly be reproached with
is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically
concealed, an openly legalized, community of women. For the rest, it
is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production
must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing
from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

  The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.

  The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire
political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the
nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself
national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

  National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing
gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the
bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to
uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life
corresponding thereto.

  The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is
one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

  In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is
put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also
be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes
within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another
will come to an end.

  The charges against Communism made from a religious, a
philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are
not deserving of serious examination.

  Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas,
views, and conceptions- in one word, man's consciousness- changes with
every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his
social relations and in his social life?

  What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material
production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the
ideas of its ruling class.

  When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but
express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one
have been created and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even
pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

  When the ancient world was in its last throes the ancient
religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas
succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society
fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The
ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave
expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of
knowledge.

  "Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religion, moral, philosophical
and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical
development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science,
and law, constantly survived this change."

  "There are, besides, eternal truths such as freedom, justice,
etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism
abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all
morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it,
therefore, acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

  What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all
past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

  But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all
past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other.
No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite
all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain
common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish
except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

  The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
traditional property relations; no wonder that its development