udal
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, 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 t