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 your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are
determined by the economical 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--the
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, 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 become all the more
disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among
the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into
simple articles of comm