Question 1: Are you a Communist? Answer: Yes. Question 2: What is the aim of the Communists? Answer: To organise society in such a way that every member of it
can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society. Question 3: How do you wish to achieve this aim? Answer: By the elimination of private property and its replacement
by community of property. Question 4: On what do you base your community of property? Answer: Firstly, on the mass of productive forces and means of
subsistence resulting from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and colonisation, and on the possibility inherent in machinery, chemical and other resources of their infinite extension.
Secondly, on the fact that in the consciousness or feeling of every individual there exist certain irrefutable basic principles which, being the result of the whole of historical development, require no proof. Question 5: What are such principles? Answer: For example, every individual strives to be happy. The
happiness of the individual is inseparable from the happiness of all, etc. Question 6: How do you wish to prepare the way for your community of
property? Answer: By enlightening and uniting the proletariat.
Endnotes
[1] This article deals with a meeting held in London on September 22. 1845 at which an international society of Fraternal Democrats was formed. The society embraced representatives of Left Chartists, German workers and craftsmen — members of the League of the Just — and revolutionary emigrants of other nationalities. During their stay in England in the summer of 1845, Marx and Engels helped in preparing for the meeting but did not attend it as they had by then left London. Later they kept in constant touch with the Fraternal Democrats trying to influence the proletarian core of the society, which joined the Communist League in 1847, and through it the Chartist movement. The society ceased its activities in 1853. Engels' article, written to show the significance of international unity of the proletarian and revolutionary democratic forces, was directed at the same time against "true socialism"—the petty-bourgeois socialist trend current among German intellectuals and craftsmen from the end of 1844 onwards. This was Engels' second printed article against "true socialism", the first being "A Fragment of Fourier's On Trade" (see present edition, Vol. 4). Engels describes the meeting of September 22, 1845 and cites speeches delivered at it according to the report published in The Northern Star No. 411, September 27, 1845. Excerpts from the article were published in English in The Plebs MagazineNo. 2, March 1922.