Woman under socialism Part 35

"Man may no longer look upon himself as an exception to the laws of Nature; he should rather begin at last to ascertain the law that underlies his own acts and thoughts, and to endeavor to live his life according to the laws of Nature. He will arrive at the point when he will arrange his social life with his fellows, that is, his family and the State, not after the precepts of far-back centuries, but after the rational principles of natural sense. Politics, morals, principles of justice--all of which are at present fed from all possible sources--will be determined according to the laws of Nature alone. An existence worthy of human beings, dreamed of for thousands of years, will finally become reality."[226]

That day is approaching with giant strides. Human society has traversed, in the course of thousands of years, all the various phases of development, to arrive in the end where it started from,--communistic property and complete equality and fraternity, but no longer among congeners alone, but among the whole human race. In that does the great progress consist. What bourgeois society has vainly striven for, and at which it suffers and is bound to suffer s.h.i.+pwreck--the restoration of freedom, equality and fraternity among men--Socialism will accomplish.

Bourgeois society could only set up the theory; here, as in so many other respects, their practice was at odds with their theories. It is for Socialism to harmonize the theory with the practice.

Nevertheless, while man returns to the starting point in his development, the return is effected upon an infinitely higher social plane than that from which he started. Primitive society held property in common in the gens and clan, but only in the rawest and most undeveloped stage. The process of development that took place since, reduced, it is true, the common property to a small and insignificant vestige, broke up the gentes, and finally atomized the whole of society; but, simultaneously, it raised mightily the productivity of that society in its various phases and the manifoldness of social necessities, and it created out of the gentes and tribes nations and great States, although again it produced a condition of things that stood in violent contradiction with social requirements. The task of the future is to end the contradiction by the re-transformation upon the broadest basis, of property and productive powers into collective property.

Society re-takes what once was its own, but, in accord with the newly created conditions of production, it places its whole mode of life upon the highest stage of culture, which enables all to enjoy what under more primitive circ.u.mstances was the privilege of individuals or of individual cla.s.ses only.

Now woman again fills the active _role_ that once was hers in primitive society. She does not become the mistress, she is the equal of man.

"The end of social development resembles the beginning of human existence. The original equality returns. The mother-web of existence starts and rounds up the cycle of human affairs"--thus writes Bachofen, in his frequently quoted work "Das Mutterrecht," forecasting coming events. Like Bachofen, Morgan also pa.s.ses judgment upon bourgeois society, a judgment that, without his having any particular information on Socialism, coincides essentially with our own. He says:

"Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its _management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power_. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the State to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. _The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations._ A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has pa.s.sed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. _The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction.

Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes._"[227]

Thus we see how men, proceeding from different starting-points, are guided by their scientific investigations to the identical conclusions.

The complete emanc.i.p.ation of woman, and her equality with man is the final goal of our social development, whose realization no power on earth can prevent;--and this realization is possible only by a social change that shall abolish the rule of man over man--hence also of capitalists over workingmen. Only then will the human race reach its highest development. The "Golden Age" that man has been dreaming of for thousands of years, and after which he has been longing, will have come at last. Cla.s.s rule will have reached its end for all time, and, along with it, the rule of man over woman.

FOOTNOTES:

[224] "Frauenrecht und Frauenpflilcht. Eine Antwort auf f.a.n.n.y Lewald's Briefe 'Fuer und wider die Frauen.'"

[225] In his work "Bau und Leben des sozialen Koerpers" (The Structure and Life of the Social Body), Dr. Schaeffle says: "A loosening of the bonds of matrimony by the facilitation of divorce is certainly undesirable. It flies in the face of the moral objects of human pairing, and would be injurious to the preservation of the population as well as the education of the children." After what has been said herein it follows that we not only consider this view wrong, but are inclined to regard it as "immoral." Nevertheless, Dr. Schaeffle will allow that the idea of introducing and maintaining inst.i.tutions that do violence to its own conceptions of morality, is simply unimaginable in a society of much higher culture than the present.

[226] Quoted in Haeckel's "Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte."

[227] Morgan's "Ancient Society."

PART IV

INTERNATIONALITY

INTERNATIONALITY.

In the very nature of things, an existence worthy of human beings can never be the exclusive possession of a single privileged people.

Isolated from all others, no nation could either raise or keep up such an establishment. The development that we have reached is the product of the co-operation of national and international forces and relations.

Although with many the national idea still wholly sways the mind, and subserves the purpose of maintaining political and social dominations, possible only within national boundaries, the human race has reached far into internationalism.

Treaties of commerce, of tariffs and of s.h.i.+pping, postal unions, international expositions, conventions on international law and on international systems of measurement, international scientific congresses and a.s.sociations, international expeditions of discovery, our trade and intercommunication, especially the international congresses of workingmen, who are the carriers of the new social order and to whose moral influence was mainly due the international congress for factory legislation in the interest of the workingmen, a.s.sembled in Berlin in the spring of 1890 upon the invitation of the German Empire,--these and many other phenomena testify to the international character that, despite national demarcations, the relations between the various civilized nations have a.s.sumed. National boundary lines are being broken through. The term "world's economy" is taking the place of "national economy": an increasing significance is attaching to it, seeing that upon it depends the well-being and prosperity of individual nations. A large part of our own products is exchanged for those of foreign nations, without which we could no longer exist. As one branch of industry is injured when another suffers, so likewise does the production of one nation suffer materially when that of another is paralyzed. Despite all such transitory disturbances as wars and race persecutions, the relations of the several nations draw ever closer, because material interests, the strongest of all, dominate them. Each new highway, every improvement in the means of intercommunication, every invention or improvement in the process of production, whereby goods are made cheaper, strengthens these relations. The ease with which personal contact can be established between distantly located countries and peoples is a new and powerful link in the chain that draws and holds the nations together. Emigrations and colonizations are additional and powerful levers. One people learns from the other. Each seeks to excel.

Along with the interchange of material products, the interchange of the products of the mind is going on, in the original tongue as well as in translations. To millions the learning of foreign living languages becomes a necessity. Next to material advantages, nothing contributes more towards removing antipathies than to penetrate into the language and the intellectual products of a foreign people.

The effect of this process of drawing together, that is going on upon an international scale, is that the several nations are resembling one another ever more in their social conditions. With the most advanced, and therefore pace-setting nations, the resemblance is now such that he who has learned to understand the social structure of one, likewise knows that of all the others in essentials. It happens similarly as in Nature where, among animals of the same species the skeleton formation and organization is the same, and, if in possession of a part of such a skeleton, one can theoretically construct the whole animal.

A further result is this, that where the same social foundations are found, their effects must be the same--the acc.u.mulation of vast wealth, and its opposite pole of ma.s.s-poverty, wage-slavery, dependence of the ma.s.ses upon the machinery of production, their domination by the property-holding minority, and the rest of the long train of consequences.

Indeed, we see that the cla.s.s antagonisms and the cla.s.s struggles, that rage throughout Germany, equally keep all Europe, the United States, Australia, etc., in commotion. In Europe, from Russia across to Portugal, from the Balkans, Hungary and Italy across to England and Ireland, the same spirit of discontent is prevalent, the identical symptoms of social fermentation, of general apprehension and of decomposition are noticeable. Externally unlike, according to the degree of development, the character of the people and their political organization, these movements are all essentially alike. Deep-reaching social antagonisms are their cause. Every year these antagonisms become more p.r.o.nounced, the fermentation and discontent sinks deeper and spreads wider, until finally some provocation, possibly insignificant in seeming, brings on the explosion, that then spreads like lightning throughout the civilized world, and calls upon the people to take sides--pro or con.

The battle is then on between New and Old Society. Ma.s.ses of people step upon the stage; an abundance of intelligence is enlisted, such as the world never before saw engaged in any contest, and never again will see gathered for such a purpose. _It is the last social struggle of all._ Standing at the elevation of this century, the sight is obvious of the steady coming to a head of the forces for the struggle in which the New Ideas will triumph.

The new social system will then rear itself upon an international basis.

The peoples will fraternize; they will reach one another the hand, and they will endeavor to gradually extend the new conditions over all the races of the earth.[228] No people any longer approaches another as an enemy, bent upon oppression and exploitation; or as the representative of a strange creed that it seeks to impose upon others;--they will meet one another as friends, who seek to raise all human beings to the height of civilization. The labors of the new social order in its work of colonization and civilization will differ as essentially in both purpose and method from the present, as the two social orders are essentially different from each other. Neither powder nor lead, neither "firewater"

(liquor) nor Bible will be used. The task of civilization is entered upon with the instruments of peace, which will present the civilizers to the savages, not as enemies, but as benefactors. Intelligent travelers and investigators have long learned to know how successful is that path.

When the civilized peoples shall have reached the point of joining in a large federation, the time will have come when for evermore the storms of war shall have been lain. Perpetual peace is no dream, as the gentlemen who strut about in uniforms seek to make people believe. That day shall have come the moment the peoples shall have understood their true interests: these are not promoted by war and dissension, by armaments that bear down whole nations; they are promoted by peaceful, mutual understandings, and jointly laboring in the path of civilization.

Moreover, as was shown on page 238, the ruling cla.s.ses and their Governments are seeing to it that the military armaments and wars break their own backs by their own immensity. Thus the last weapons will wander into the museums of antiquity, as so many of their predecessors have done before, and serve as witnesses to future generations of the manner in which the generations gone by have for thousands of years frequently torn up one another like wild animals--until finally the human in them triumphed over the beast.

National peculiarities are everywhere nourished by the ruling cla.s.ses in order that, at a given conjuncture, a great war may furnish a drainage for dangerous tendencies at home. As a proof of the extent to which these national peculiarities engender wars, an utterance of the late General Fieldmarshal Moltke may here be quoted. In the last volume of his posthumous work, which deals with the German-French war of 1870-71, this pa.s.sage occurs among others in the introductory observations:

"So long as nations lead separate existences there will be dissensions that only strokes can arbitrate. In the interest of humanity, however, it is to be hoped that wars may become as much rarer as they have become more fearful."

Now then, this national separate existence, that is, the hostile shutting off of one nation from another, will vanish. Thus future generations will be able to achieve without trouble tasks that gifted heads have long conceived, and unsuccessfully attempted to accomplish.

Condorcet, among others, conceived the idea of an international language. The late Ulysses S. Grant, ex-President of the United States, uttered himself this wise on a public occasion: "Seeing that commerce, education and the rapid exchange of thought and of goods by telegraphy and steam have altered everything, I believe that G.o.d is preparing the world to become one nation, to speak one language and to reach a state of perfection in which armies and navies will no longer be needed." It is natural that with a full-blooded Yankee the leading _role_ be played by the "dear G.o.d," who, after all, is but the product of historic development. Hypocrisy, or perhaps also ignorance in matters that concern religion, is nowhere as stupendous as in the United States. The less the power of the State presses upon the ma.s.ses, all the more must religion do the work. Hence the phenomenon that the bourgeoisie is most pious wherever the power of the State is laxest. Next to the United States, come England, Belgium and Switzerland in this matter. Even the revolutionary Robespierre, who played with the heads of aristocrats and priests as with nine-pin b.a.l.l.s, was, as is known, very religious, whence he ceremoniously introduced the "Supreme Being," which shortly before had, with equal bad taste, been dethroned by the Convention. And seeing that the frivolous and idle aristocrats of France had been greatly bragging about their atheism, Robespierre regarded atheism as aristocratic, and denounced it in his speech to the Convention on the "Supreme Being" with these words: "Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being, that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime, comes from the people. If there were no G.o.d, one would have to be invented." The virtuous Robespierre had his misgivings concerning the power of his virtuous republic to cancel the existing social antagonisms, hence his belief in a Supreme Being that wreaks vengeance and seeks to smooth the difficulties that the people of his time were unable to smooth. Hence also was such a belief a necessity to the first republic.

One step in progress will bring another. Mankind will ever set new tasks to itself, and the accomplishment of the same will lead it to such a degree of social development that wars, religious quarrels and similar manifestations of barbarism will be unknown.

FOOTNOTE:

[228] "National and human interests stand to-day opposed to each other.

At a higher stage of civilization these interests will coincide and become one."--v. Thuenen, "Der Isolirte Staat."

PART V

POPULATION _and_ OVER-POPULATION

POPULATION AND OVER-POPULATION

It has become quite fas.h.i.+onable with people who occupy themselves with the social question to consider the question of population as the most important and burning of all. They claim that we are threatened with "over-population;" aye, that the danger is upon us. This, more than any other division of the Social Question, must be treated from an international standpoint. The feeding and the distribution of the people have pre-eminently become international issues of fact. Since Malthus, the law underlying the increase of population has been the subject of extensive dispute. In his celebrated and now notorious "Essay on the Principles of Population," which Marx has characterized as a "school-boyish, superficial and pulpiteer piece of declamatory plagiarism on Sir James Stewart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace and others"

and which "contains not one original sentence," Malthus lays down the proposition that mankind has the tendency to increase in geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), while food could increase only in arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.); and that the consequence is a rapid disproportion between the numbers of the population and the supply of food, that inevitably leads to want and starvation. The final conclusion was the necessity of "abstinence" in the procreation of children, and abstinence from marriage without sufficient means for the support of a family, contrariwise there would be no place at "the banquet table of Nature" for the descendants.

The fear of over-population is very old. It was touched upon in this work in connection with the social conditions of the Greeks and Romans, and at the close of the Middle Ages. Plato and Aristotle, the Romans, the small bourgeois of the Middle Ages were all swayed by it, and it even swayed Voltaire, who, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, published a treatise on the subject. The fear ever turns up again--this circ.u.mstance must be emphasized--_at periods when the existing social conditions are disintegrating and breaking down_. Seeing on all sides privation and discontent at such periods, the privation and discontent are forthwith ascribed to the shortness of the supply of food, instead of to the manner in which the existing supply is distributed.

All advanced social stages have hitherto rested upon cla.s.s-rule, and the princ.i.p.al means of cla.s.s-rule was the appropriation of the land. The land gradually slips from the hands of a large number of proprietors into those of a small number that utilize and cultivate it only partially. The large majority are rendered propertyless and are stripped of the means of existence; their share of food then depends upon the good will of their masters, for whom they now have to work. According to the social condition of things, the struggle for the land takes its form from period to period; the end, however, was that the land continued steadily to concentrate in the hands of the ruling cla.s.s. If undeveloped means of transportation or political isolation impede the intercourse abroad of a community and interfere with the importation of food when the crops fail and provisions are dear, forthwith the belief springs up that there are too many people. Under such circ.u.mstances, every increase in the family is felt as a burden; the specter of over-population rises; and the terror that it spreads is in direct proportion to the concentration of the land in few hands, together with its train of evils--the partial cultivation of the soil, and its being turned to purposes of pleasure for its owners. Rome and Italy were poorest off for food at the time when the whole soil of Italy was held by about 3,000 latifundia owners. Hence the cry: "The latifundia are ruining Rome!" The soil was converted into vast hunting-grounds and wonderful pleasure-gardens; not infrequently it was allowed to be idle, seeing that its cultivation, even by slaves, came out dearer to the magnates than the grain imported from Sicily and Africa. It was a state of things that opened wide the doors for usury in grain, a practice in which the rich n.o.bility likewise led. In consideration of this usury of grain the domestic soil was kept from cultivation. Thereupon the impoverished Roman citizen and the impoverished aristocracy resolved to renounce marriage and the begetting of children; hence the laws placing premiums on marriage and children in order to check the steady decrease of the ruling cla.s.ses.

The same phenomenon appeared towards the close of the Middle Ages, after the n.o.bility and clergy had, in the course of centuries and with the aid of all the crafty and violent means at their command, robbed unnumbered peasants of their property and appropriated the common lands to themselves. When, thereupon, the peasants revolted and were beaten down, the robber-trade gained new impetus, and it was then also practiced upon the Church estates by the Princes of the Reformation. The number of thieves, beggars and vagabonds was never larger than immediately before and after the Reformation. The expropriated rural population rushed to the cities; but there, due to causes that have been described in previous pages, the conditions of life were likewise deteriorating,--hence "over-population" was felt all around.

The appearance of Malthus coincides with that period of English industry when, due to the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Watt, powerful changes set in both in mechanism and technique, changes that affected, first of all, the cotton and linen industries, and rendered breadless the workingmen engaged in them. The concentration of capital and land a.s.sumed at the time large proportions in England: along with the rapid increase of wealth, on the one hand, there went the deepening misery of the ma.s.ses, on the other. At such a juncture, the ruling cla.s.ses, who have every reason to consider the existing world the "best of all possible worlds," were bound to seek an explanation for so contradictory a phenomenon as the pauperization of the ma.s.ses in the midst of swelling wealth and flouris.h.i.+ng industry. Nothing was easier than to throw the blame upon the too-rapid procreation of the workingmen, and not upon their having been rendered superfluous through the capitalist process of production, and the acc.u.mulation of the soil in the hands of landlords.