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
revolutionizing the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be
pretty generally applicable:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land
to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a
national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the
hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the
State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the
improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial
armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual
abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more
equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, etc., etc.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast
association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its
political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely
the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by
the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means
of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps
away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with
these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of
class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have
abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class
antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all.
III.
SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE.
I. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM.
(_a_) _Feudal Socialism_.
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