community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters
of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common
prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's
wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common
and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly
be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in
substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised
community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the
abolition of the present system of production must bring with it
the abolition of the community of women springing from that
system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish
countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what
they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all
acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of
the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far,
itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily
more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the
bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to
uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of
life corresponding thereto.