And your education!  Is not that also social, and determined by
the social conditions under which you educate, by the
intervention, direct or indirect, of society, 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 clap-trap 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
the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point 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 legalised 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 working men 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 daily
more and more vanishing, 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 civilised 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 revolutionise 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.