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.