operty can
no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital,
from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of
property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and
made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the
products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the
power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such
appropriation.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property
all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone
to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who
work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not
work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of
the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when
there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing
and appropriating material products, have, in the same way,
been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and
appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois,
the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of
production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to
him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous
majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don't wrangle with 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--this 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 fe