Great Throughts Treasury

"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 labor of others by means of such appropriation."

"In proportion as the antagonism between the classes vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end."

"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 bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

"The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain."

"The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. By modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few."

"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property."