Workmen's advocate., 1890-07-05
MANIFESTO
 OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
BY KARL MARX & FREDERICK ENGELS.
AUTHORIZED ENGLISH EDITION, EDITED AND ANNOTATED BY FREDERICK ENaELs
(COatinued.)

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 mortified 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 populations its existence for the few is solely due to it's 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 pro- perty. Precisely so: that is just what we intend
 From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i G., from the mo- ment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital. from that mo- ment, you say, Individuality vanishes!
 You must, therefore, confess that by ''individual' you mean m other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of property. This perscn 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 labor of others by means of such appropria- tlOn.
 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 ldleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, 1 h, 1, T work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of tautology; that there can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any capi- tai.
 All objections against the Commun- istic mode of producing and appropria- ting material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Con- munistic modes of producing and appro- priating 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,
 
 But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply,to our intended aboli ton of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the con ditions 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 con- ditions 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-his- torical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production-the mis- conception 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 feudal property, you are of course for bidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
 Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at thlS infamous proposal of the Communists.
 On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based On capital, on private gain. In its com, pletely developed form this family ex- ists only among the bourgeoisis 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 yon charge as with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents: To this crime we plead guilty.
 But, you will say, we destroy the