f labour, an appropriation that is made for the
maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no
surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we
want to do away with, is the miserable character of this
appropriation, under which the labourer 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 labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour
is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence
of the labourer.

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 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 labour can no longer be converted into
capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual pr