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But if selling and buying disappears, 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 horrified 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 population; its

existence for the few is solely due to its 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.