and only by the
united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the
united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the
property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of
the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Let us now take wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, _i.e._, that
quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to
keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the
wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to
prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to
abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an
appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of
human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor
of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable
character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely
to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the
interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase
accumulated labor. In Communist society accumulated labor is but a
means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in
Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois
society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living
person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois:
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition
of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of
production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying
disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the
other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a
meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying,
with the fettered traders of the middle ages, but have no meaning when
opposed