“Considering: That the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings, without distinction of sex or race; that the producers can never be free until they are in possession of the means of production (lands, factories, ships, banks, credit, etc.); that there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them:
“1. The individual form, which has never existed as a general and universal fact, and which is being eliminated more and more by industrial progress;
“2. The collective form, whose material and intellectual elements are furnished by the very development of capitalistic society:—
“Considering: That this collective appropriation can result only from the revolutionary action of the productive class—or the proletariat—organized as a distinct political party; that such an organization ought to be pursued by all the means at the disposal of the proletariat, universal suffrage included, and thus transformed from an instrument of injury, as it has hitherto been, into an instrument of emancipation—the French socialistic laborers, in proclaiming as their end the political and economic expropriation of the class of capitalists, and the return into the collective form of all the means of production, have decided, as the means of organizing the conflict, to enter into the elections with the following demands:
“A. POLITICAL PROGRAMME.
“1. The abolition of all laws concerning the press, assemblies, and associations, and especially the law against the ‘International Association of Workmen,’ suppression of the workman’s book,[152] this registration of the laboring class, and of all articles of the code establishing the inferiority of the laborer vis-à-vis his employer and of the inferiority of woman vis-à-vis man.
“2. Suppression of religious appropriations, and the return to the nation of all property designated by the term mortmain (Decree of the Commune of April 2, 1871)....
“3. Suppression of the public debt.
“4. Abolition of standing armies, and the establishment of a militia system to include all the people.
“5. The establishment of the freedom of the Commune as regards its administration and its police.