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. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a
national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation 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 labour. 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 labour in its present form. Combination of
education with industrial production, &c., &c.
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
organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat
during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of
circumstances, to organise 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
1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
_A. Feudal Socialism_
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the
aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern
bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the
English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the
hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was
altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained
possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the
restoration period had become impossible.
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