Socialism: Positive and Negative Part 4

From the point of view of this Socialist materialism, the monogamous family, the present economic unit of society, ceases to be a divine inst.i.tution, and becomes the historical product of certain definite economic conditions. It is the form of the family peculiar to a society based on private property in the means of production, and the production of commodities for sale. It is not crystallized and permanent, but, like all other inst.i.tutions, fluid and subject to change. With the change in its economic basis, the code of s.e.xual morality and the monogamous family are sure to be modified; but, in the judgment of such socialists as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, we shall probably remain monogamous, but monogamy will cease to be compulsorily permanent.[19]

"What we may antic.i.p.ate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of s.e.xual relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They will follow their own practice and fashion their own public opinion--only this and nothing more."[20]

Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on "The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars.

Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow.

In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two excerpts will ill.u.s.trate these points sufficiently:

"Again reciprocity of conjugal rights and duties is desirable for parenthood. If marriage have a proprietary character, neither the owner nor the owned is entirely fit to develop free personalities in his or her children. Moreover the idea of marital ownership more or less involves that of parental ownership, and the latter, as we have seen, is incompatible with a high type of parenthood. The custom of proprietary marriage inevitably leads, for example, to restrictions upon female education. Now just in so far as a woman's education is limited is she handicapped as an educator of her children. It is unfortunate that in the _emanc.i.p.ation of woman_ agitation of the past half-century the reformers failed to emphasize the social as adequately as the individualistic need of change. If women are to be fit wives and mothers they must have all, perhaps more, of the opportunities for personal development that men have. All the activities. .h.i.therto reserved to men must at least be open to them, and many of these activities, certain functions of citizenship[21] for example, must be expected of them.

Moreover, whatever the lines may be along which the fitness of women to labor will be experimentally determined, the underlying position must be established that for the sake of individual and race character she is to be a producer as well as a consumer of social values.[22] As soon as this ethical necessity is generally recognized the conditions of modern industry will become much better adapted to the needs of women workers than they are now, the hygiene of workshop, factory, and office will improve, and child bearing and rearing will no longer seem incompatible with productive activity" (pages 345-347).

Here follows the paragraph upon which the Reverend Doctor Morgan Dix and other clerical defenders of the economic conditions that cause marital and non-marital prost.i.tution pounced with such avidity:

"We have therefore, given late marriage and the pa.s.sing of prost.i.tution,[23] two alternatives, the requiring of absolute chast.i.ty of both s.e.xes until marriage or the toleration of freedom of s.e.xual intercourse on the part of the unmarried of both s.e.xes before marriage, _i. e._, before the birth of offspring. In this event condemnation of s.e.x license would have a different emphasis from that at present. s.e.xual intercourse would not be of itself disparaged or condemned, it would be disapproved of only if indulged in at the expense of health or of emotional or intellectual activities in oneself or in others. As a matter of fact, truly monogamous relations seem to be those most conducive to emotional or intellectual development and to health, so that, quite apart from the question of prost.i.tution, promiscuity is not desirable or even tolerable. It would therefore, seem well from this point of view, to encourage early trial marriage,[24] the relation to be entered into with a view to permanency, but with the privilege of breaking it if proved unsuccessful and in the _absence of offspring_ without suffering any great degree of public condemnation.

"The conditions to be considered in any attempt to answer the question that thus arises are exceedingly complex. Much depends upon the outcome of present experiments in _economic independence for women, a matter which is in turn dependent upon the outcome of the general labor 'question.'_ Much depends upon revelations of physiological science. If the future brings about the full economic independence of women, if physiologists will undertake to guarantee society certain immunities from the s.e.xual excess of the individual,[25] if, and these are the most important conditions of all, increases in biological, psychological and social knowledge make parenthood a more enlightened and purposive function than is even dreamed of at present and if _pari pa.s.su_ with this increase of knowledge a higher standard of parental duty and a greater capacity for parental devotion develop, then the need of s.e.xual restraint as we understand it _may_ disappear and different relations between the s.e.xes before marriage and to a certain extent within marriage may be expected."

The Socialist materialist leaves idle speculations of this nature to the bourgeois Utopians; he knows that a revolution in economic conditions must precede any material changes in s.e.xual relations, and that when such changes take place they will take place in response to the stimuli of the transformed economic environment, and not in accordance with any preconceived notions of Mrs. Parsons or others.

Those, who are horrified at such proposed modifications of marriage as Mr. George Meredith's marriages for a fixed, limited period, and Mrs.

Parsons' "trial marriages," will do well to ponder this posthumous aphorism of the clearsighted Norse genius, Ibsen, recently published in Berlin:

"To talk of 'men born free' is a mere phrase. There are none such.

Marriages, the relations of man and woman, have ruined the whole race and set on all the brand of slavery."[26]

In the same case is what we may call the stage-setting of the monogamous family, the home. The home ceases to be regarded as the sacred and eternal Palladium of society. It, too, is destined to change, if not to disappear. "With the transformation of the means of production into collective property," Engels writes, "the private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public matter."[27]

This does not deny the splendid role that the Home has played in the history of the last three centuries. Many an English and American home to-day still merits even such an offensively pretentious epithet as "Palladium." What morals our people have known and practised they have learned and been drilled in in the homes. That these morals should have been warped by a cla.s.s-bias was inevitable. A home, itself the product of a society divided into cla.s.ses, could not teach anything but a cla.s.s-morality. A purely social morality (if morality be the proper name for the highest conduct in a cla.s.sless society) is even yet impossible.

But, much as we owe to the home, (I pity the reader who can recall his or her early home life with dry eyes), the Nihilism of Socialism tells us the day of the home is drawing to its close. So it may be as well for us to consider for a moment the bad side of the home as we know it to-day. It may be that when we have done so, we shall be able to antic.i.p.ate its pa.s.sing with greater equanimity.

At this late day--when seventeen years have rolled by since Ibsen's "The Doll's House" was first introduced to an English-speaking audience at the Novelty Theatre in London--it is surely not necessary to dwell upon the dwarfing and stifling effects upon women of even "happy" homes. In the brilliant preface to "Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant," Bernard Shaw, referring to middle-cla.s.s home life, speaks of "the normal English way being to sit in separate families in separate rooms in separate houses, each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma, cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude." "The result," he continues, "is that you may make the acquaintance of a thousand streets of middle-cla.s.s English families without coming on a trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation of the senses."

In the following paragraph he adds:

"In proportion as this horrible domestic inst.i.tution is broken up by the active social circulation of the upper cla.s.ses in their own orbit, or its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the working cla.s.ses, manners improve enormously. In the middle cla.s.ses themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (n.o.body has yet done justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word 'home'), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time; and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a cla.s.s that not only submits to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a cla.s.s worth belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then, let my plays be printed as well as acted."

A concrete picture may give us a better idea of what Shaw means when he calls women "the unhappy prisoners of the home." In that magnificent scene in the third act of "Candida," after Morell has called on Candida to choose between him and the poet, Marchbanks, Candida gives us a vivid glimpse of what her home life had been, in this speech, addressed to Marchbanks, and, in reading it, remember that Morell was "a good husband" and that Candida loved him.

"--You know how strong he (Morell) is--how clever he is--how happy!

Ask James's mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy.

Ask me what it costs to be James's mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out.

I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not tell you a moment ago how it came to be so."

This should make it easy for us to understand why so many women are ready to sympathize with William Morris in the sentiments he expressed in the following paragraph in "Signs of Change:"

"As to what extent it may be necessary or desirable for people under social order to live in common, we may differ pretty much according to our tendencies toward social life. For my part I can't see why we should think it a hardship to eat with the people we work with; I am sure that as to many things, such as valuable books, pictures, and splendor of surroundings, we shall find it better to club our means together; and I must say that often when I have been sickened by the stupidity of the mean, idiotic rabbit warrens that rich men build for themselves in Bayswater and elsewhere, I console myself with visions of the n.o.ble communal hall of the future, unsparing of materials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with the n.o.blest thoughts of our time, and the past, embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce; such an abode of man as no private enterprise could come anywhere near for beauty and fitness, because only collective thought and collective life could cherish the aspirations which would give birth to its beauty, or have the skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part should think it much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in all respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live in, simply because I call it my own, or my house."

From the viewpoint of this historical materialism, the State loses its attribute of permanence and becomes the product of definite economic conditions--in a word, it is the child of economic inequality. "The State," in the words of Engels, "is the result of the desire to keep down cla.s.s conflicts. But, having arisen amid these conflicts, it is as a rule the State of the most powerful economic cla.s.s that by force of its economic supremacy becomes also the ruling political cla.s.s, and thus acquires new means of subduing and exploiting the oppressed ma.s.ses. The antique State was, therefore, the State of the slave owners for the purpose of holding the slaves in check. The feudal State was the organ of the n.o.bility for the oppression of the serfs and dependent farmers.

The modern representative State is the tool of the capitalist exploiters of wage labor."[28]

"The State, then," Engels says on another page of the same work, "did not exist from all eternity. There have been societies without it, that had no idea of any State or public power.[29] At a certain stage of economic development, which was of necessity accompanied by a division of society into cla.s.ses, the State became the inevitable result of this division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage of evolution in production, in which the existence of cla.s.ses has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive fetter on production. Hence, these cla.s.ses must fall as inevitably as they once arose. The State must irrevocably fall with them. The society that is to reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal a.s.sociation of the producers, will transfer the machinery of the State where it will then belong--into the Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze ax."[30]

In another work, he says: "The first act by virtue of which the State really const.i.tutes itself the representative of the whole of society--the taking possession of the means of production in the name of Society--this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State.

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not abolished. _It dies out._"[31]

It is thus seen that, according to the teaching of historical materialism, the State is destined, when it becomes the State of the working-cla.s.s, to remove its own foundation--economic inequality--and thus, to commit suicide.

Many of those, who have witnessed with mingled consternation and amus.e.m.e.nt the strenuous efforts of Mr. Roosevelt and the frantic zeal of Mr. Hearst to enlarge the scope of governmental action to cover every conceivable field of human activity from spelling to beef-canning, will hail with delight Engels' tidings that the State is to "die out."

The thesis, that the realization of the socialist ideal involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the Family, and the suicide of the State, would now appear to be sufficiently demonstrated.

One cannot help wondering what proportion of the "educated and professional" persons, who, Mr. Street testifies, are in growing numbers yielding to the lure of Socialism, really desire these results. Many of them, no doubt, are trying on a new field the old experiment of serving G.o.d and Mammon, of putting new wine into old bottles. Ibsen's Nora, though she had far less learning than is usual in the "educated and professional cla.s.ses" of England and America, was, in this matter, far wiser than are they. When the falsehood and slavery of life in "The Doll's House" became unbearable to her, she knew that she must choose between the Old and the New; and that, if she chose the new life of revolt and freedom, she must leave behind her all the badges of her doll's life. Had she taken with her the trinkets and gauds that the master of the Doll's House had given her, she would not have escaped from the doll's life when she turned her back on the Doll's House. Her woman's instinct did not fail her, and, when, with a woman's courage she chose the New and left the Old, she told Torvald, "Whatever belongs to me I shall take with me. I will have nothing from you either now or later on."

Many of the young people of education, who have of late come into the socialist movement, have left--temporarily, at least--the Doll's House of conservatism; but they have brought with them many of the habits of thought, many of the conventions of their old doll's life. Some of them, doubtless, realizing that the Materialist Conception of History involves the Nihilism of Socialism, and thus calls on them to abandon their religious, metaphysical, and dualistic habits of thought, to cast aside their conventional cla.s.s morality, to cease vaporing about that impossible monstrosity, "the Socialist State," attempt to cut the Gordian knot by denying the Materialist Conception of History, while clinging to their socialist ideal. They thus repeat in inverted form the curious feat in intellectual acrobatics performed by Professor Seligman, who believes in historical materialism, but rejects Socialism. "There is nothing in common," he a.s.serts, "between the economic interpretation of history and the doctrine of socialism, except the accidental fact that the originator of both theories happened to be the same man." And a few pages further on he reiterates: "Socialism and 'historical materialism' are entirely independent-conceptions."[32]

To the educated socialists, who deny or mutilate the doctrine of historical materialism, the materialist socialist might well reply by a.s.serting that these educated socialists are socialists only because of the artistic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual changes they expect the economic revolution of socialism to produce. The fact that they, lovers of "the things of the spirit," are socialists proves that they believe, albeit unconsciously, in economic determinism.

But, although this personal argument might Well be deemed sufficient, it can readily be proven affirmatively that the whole theory of Modern Socialism rests upon the foundation of historical materialism. This clearly appears in the' admirable summary of the teachings of Marx that Gabriel Deville gives in the Preface to his epitome of Marx's "Capital."

"History, Marx has shown, is nothing but the history of cla.s.s conflicts. The division of society into cla.s.ses, which made its appearance with the social life of man, rests on economic relations--maintained by force--which enable some to succeed in shifting on to the shoulders of others the natural necessity of labor.

"Material interests have always been the inciting motives of the incessant struggles of the privileged cla.s.ses, either with, each other, or against the inferior cla.s.ses at whose expense they live.

Man is dominated by the material conditions of life, and these conditions, and therefore the mode of production, have determined and will determine human customs, ethics, and inst.i.tutions--social, economic, political, juridical, etc.

"As soon as one part of society has monopolized the means of production, the other part, upon whom the burden of labor falls, is obliged to add to the labor-time necessary for its own support, a certain surplus-labor-time, for which it receives no equivalent,--time that is devoted to supporting and enriching the possessors of the means of production. As an extractor of unpaid labor, which, by means of the increasing surplus-value whose source it is, acc.u.mulates every day, more and more, in the hands of the proprietary cla.s.s the instruments of its dominion, the capitalist regime surpa.s.ses in power all the antecedent regimes founded on compulsory labor.

"But to-day, the economic conditions begotten by this regime, trammelled in their natural evolution by this very regime, inexorably tend to break the capitalist mould which can no longer contain them, and these destroying principles are the elements of the new society.

"The historic mission of the cla.s.s at present exploited, the proletariat, which is being organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of capitalist production, is to complete the work of destruction begun by the development of social antagonisms. It must, first of all, definitively wrest from its cla.s.s adversaries the political power--the command of the force devoted by them to preserving intact their economic monopolies and privileges.

"Once in control of the political power, it will be able, by proceeding to the socialization of the means of production through the expropriation of the usurpers of the fruits of others' toil, to suppress the present contradiction between collective production and private capitalist appropriation, and to realize the universalization of labor, and the abolition of cla.s.ses."[33]

If the "educated and professional" socialists cannot break the chain of this logic, they find themselves, as Nora did, face to face with the necessity of making a choice. Behind them is the old doll's house life with its manifold conventions--once useful, but through economic evolution outgrown and thus become false and deadly--a life, easy enough mayhap, but wholly devoid of idealism; before them is the new life of freedom, of revolt against outworn beliefs and conventions--a life of great difficulty, mayhap, but a life cheered by a n.o.ble ideal--an ideal in whose realization the socialist materialists believe as fully, as pa.s.sionately as the ancient Hebrews believed in the fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies.

Theirs is a hard case. Without ideals they cannot, in any worthy sense, live. The only possible ideal, that even the keen eyes of so shrewd an observer as Mr. Street can perceive, is the ideal of Socialism. But they cannot accept this ideal without abandoning much, I do not say that is dear to them, but much that by habit and tradition has become part and parcel of their intellectual being.

If they decide to go forward into the New, the old world of dolls'

houses must become a strange land to them. In the difficulties and trials of the new life, they cannot send back for aid to the old world, which will have become a world of strangers to them. Nora's woman's instinct did not fail her here; when Torvald asked if he could send help to her in case of need, her unhesitating reply was, "No, I say. I take nothing from strangers."

Far better is the case of the workingman attracted by the socialist ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism has no deterrent terrors for him, for, as Karl Marx said long ago, "he has nothing to lose but his chains, and a whole world to gain." He has long since lost all interest in religion; the factory by enlisting his wife and children as workers has already destroyed his home; and to him the State means nothing but the club of the policeman, the injunction of the judge, and the rifle of the militiaman.