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. .. We can build communism only from the materials created by capitalism, from the cultural apparatus which is a product of the bourgeois conditions and therefore inevitably steeped-since the question is one of human material as part of the cultural apparatus-in bourgeois psychology. Here lies the difficulty in building communist society, but here also lies the guarantee that it can be built and built successfully. Marxism differs from the old Utopian socialism in that the latter wanted to build a new society not from the mass representatives of human material which are produced by bloody, filthy, plundering, petty-trading capitalism, but from especially virtuous people reared in special greenhouses and conservatories. Everyone now finds this ridiculous idea ludicrous and everyone has abandoned it, but not everyone wants or is able to give thought to the opposite doctrine of Marxism, to think over how it is possible (and essential) to build communism from the mass of human material spoilt by

59 ages and millennia of slavery, feudalism and capitalism, from small scattered enterprises, and wars of all against all for a place in the market, for a higher price for products, or for labour. ...