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 is strong, another is weak; one is married, the other is not. One has more children, another has less, and so on.

"With equal labor [Marx concludes] and, therefore, with an equal share in the public stock of articles of consumption, one will, in reality, receive more than another, will find himself richer and so on. To avoid all this, 'rights,' instead of being equal, should be unequal."

The first phase of Communism, therefore, still cannot produce justice and equality; differences and unjust differences in wealth will still exist, but the exploitation of one by many, will become impossible, because it will be impossible to seize as private property the means of production, the factories, machines, land, and so on. While tearing to tatters Lassalle's small-bourgeois, confused phrase about "equality" and "justice" in general, Marx at the same time shows the line of development of communist society, which is forced at first to destroy only the "injustice" that the means of production are in the hands of private individuals. It is not capable of destroying at once the further injustice which is constituted by the distribution of the articles of consumption according to "work performed" (and not according to need).

The vulgar economists, including the bourgeois professors (such as "our" Tugan-Baranowsky), constantly reproach the Socialists with forgetting the inequality of mankind and with "dreaming" of destroying this inequality. Such a reproach, as we see, only proves the extreme ignorance of the bourgeois ideologists.

Marx not only, with the greatest care, takes into account the inevitable inequalities of men; he also takes cognizance of the fact that the mere conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society—"Socialism" in the generally accepted sense of the word—does not remove the shortcomings of the distribution and the inequality of "bourgeois justice," which continue to exist as long as the products are divided according to the quantity of "work performed."

"But these defects [Marx continues] are unavoidable in the first phase of communist society, in the form in which it comes forth, after the prolonged travail of birth, from capitalist society. Justice can never be in advance of its stage of economic development and of the cultural development of society conditioned by the latter."

And so, in the first phase of communist society (generally called Socialsm) "bourgeois justice" is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic transformation so far attained, that is, only in respect of the means of