Page 43 sur 88

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your

property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into

capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being

monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property 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.