to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the
bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.
But in your existing society private property is already done away with
for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is 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 one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized,
_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 labor 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 tautology, that there can
no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged
against the Communistic 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