moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which
cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of
class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
traditional property relations; no wonder that its development
involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling as to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the
proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the
total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by
means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on
the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures,
therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable,
but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves,
necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of
production.

These measures will of course be different in different