erce and instruments of labor.

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 aimed at 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 the 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 legalized 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 workingmen 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's 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 civilized countries at least, is
one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individu