he wives and daughters
of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common
prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's
wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common
and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly
be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in
substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised
community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the
abolition of the present system of production must bring with it
the abolition of the community of women springing from that
system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what
they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all
acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of
the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far,
itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily
more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the
bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to
uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of
life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at
least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of
the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another
is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will
also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between
classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation
to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a
philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint,
are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas,
views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes
with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in
his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that
intellectual production changes its character in proportion as
material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Wh