Kitabı oku: «Woman under socialism», sayfa 30

PART III
WOMAN IN THE FUTURE

This chapter can be condensed in few words. It only contains the conclusions that flow from what has been said, conclusions that the reader may draw for himself.

The woman of future society is socially and economically independent; she is no longer subject to even a vestige of dominion and exploitation; she is free, the peer of man, mistress of her lot. Her education is the same as that of man, with such exceptions as the difference of sex and sexual functions demand. Living under natural conditions, she is able to unfold and exercise her mental powers and faculties. She chooses her occupation on such field as corresponds with her wishes, inclinations and natural abilities, and she works under conditions identical with man's. Even if engaged as a practical working-woman on some field or other, at other times of the day she may be educator, teacher or nurse, at yet others she may exercise herself in art, or cultivate some branch of science, and at yet others may be filling some administrative function. She joins in studies, enjoyments or social intercourse with either her sisters or with men, – as she may please or occasion may serve.

In the choice of love, she is, like man, free and unhampered. She woos or is wooed, and closes the bond from no considerations other than her own inclinations. This bond is a private contract, celebrated without the intervention of any functionary – just as marriage was a private contract until deep in the Middle Ages. Socialism creates in this nothing new: it merely restores, at a higher level of civilization and under new social forms, that which prevailed at a more primitive social stage, and before private property began to rule society.

Under the proviso that he inflict injury upon none, the individual shall himself oversee the satisfaction of his own instincts. The satisfaction of the sexual instinct is as much a private concern as the satisfaction of any other natural instinct. None is therefor accountable to others, and no unsolicited judge may interfere. How I shall eat, how I shall drink, how I shall sleep, how I shall clothe myself, is my private affair, – exactly so my intercourse with a person of the opposite sex. Intelligence and culture, perfect individual freedom – qualities that become normal through the education and the conditions of future society – will guard everyone against the commission of acts that will redound to his injury. Self-training and the knowledge of their own being are possessions of the men and the women of future society to a degree much above the present. The simple circumstance that all bashful prudery and affectation of secrecy regarding natural matters will have vanished is a guarantee of a more natural intercourse of the sexes than that which prevails to-day. If incompatibility, disenchantment, or repulsion set in between two persons that have come together, morality commands that the unnatural, and therefore immoral, bond be dissolved. Seeing, moreover, that all the circumstances and conditions, which until then condemned large numbers of women to celibacy and to prostitution, will have vanished, man can no longer superimpose himself. On the other hand, the completely changed social conditions will have removed the numerous inconveniences that to-day affect married life, that often prevent its favorable unfolding, or that even render it wholly impossible.

The contradictions in and the unnatural features of the present position of woman are realized with ever increasing force in wide social circles. The sentiment finds lively utterance in the literature of the Social Question as well as in works of fiction, – often, it must be confessed, in wrongful manner. That the present form of marriage corresponds ever less with its purpose, no thinking person any longer denies. Thus is seen the phenomenon of the demand for freedom in the choice of love, and for the untrammeled dissolution of the marriage bond, when necessary, made by people who refuse to draw the requisite conclusions for the change of the present social system. They believe that the freedom of sexual intercourse must be asserted only in behalf of the privileged classes. In a polemic against Fanny Lewald's efforts in behalf of the emancipation of woman, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg expresses herself this wise:

"If you (Fanny Lewald) claim the complete equality of woman with man in social and political life, George Sand also must be right in her struggles for emancipation, which aim no further than at what man has long been in undisputed possession of. Indeed, there is no reasonable ground for admitting the head and not the heart of woman to this equality, to give and to take as freely as man. On the contrary, if woman has by nature the right, and, consequently, also the duty – for we should not bury the talent bestowed upon us – of exerting her brain tissue to the utmost in the race with the intellectual Titans of the opposite sex, she must then have precisely the same right to preserve her equilibrium by quickening the circulation of her heart's blood in whatever way it may seem good to her. Do we not all read without the slightest moral indignation how Goethe – to begin with the greatest as an illustration – again and again wasted the warmth of his heart and the enthusiasm of his great soul on a different woman? Reasonable people regard this as perfectly natural by the very reason of the greatness of his soul, and the difficulty of satisfying it. Only the narrow-minded moralist stops to condemn his conduct. Why, then, deride the 'great souls' among women!.. Let us suppose that the whole female sex consisted of great souls like George Sand, that every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, whose children are all children of love and who brought up all these children with true motherly love and devotion, as well as with intelligence and good sense. What would become of the world? There can be no doubt that it could continue to exist and to progress, just as it does now; it might even feel exceptionally comfortable under the arrangement."²²⁴

Accordingly, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg is of the opinion that, if every woman were a Lucretia Floriani, that is, a great soul like George Sand, who draws her own picture in Lucretia Floriani, they should be free for the "preservation of their equilibrium to quicken the circulation of their heart's blood in whatever way it may seem good to them." But why should that be the privilege of the "great souls" only, and not of the others also, who are no "great souls," and can be none? No such difference exists to us. If a Goethe and a George Sand – to take these two from the many who have acted and are acting like them – live according to the inclinations of their hearts – and about Goethe's love affairs whole libraries are published that are devoured by his male and female admirers in wrapt ecstasy – why condemn in others that, which done by a Goethe or a George Sand, becomes the subject of ecstatic admiration?

Indeed, such freedom in the choice of love is an impossibility in bourgeois society. This fact was the objective point in our preceding array of evidence. But place the whole community under social conditions similar to those enjoyed by the material and intellectual elect, and forthwith the opportunity is there of equal rights and freedom for all. In "Jacques," George Sand depicts a husband who judges the adulterous relations of his wife with another man in these words: "No human being can command love; and none is guilty if he feels, or goes without it. What degrades the woman is the lie: what constitutes her adultery is not the hour that she grants to her lover, but the night that she thereupon spends with her husband." Thanks to this view of the matter, Jacques feels obliged to yield the place to his rival, Borel, and he proceeds to philosophize: "Borel, in my place, would have quietly beaten his wife, and perhaps would not have blushed to receive her afterwards into his bed, debased by his blows and his kisses. There are men who cut the throat of an unfaithful wife without ceremony, after the fashion of the Orientals, because they consider her as legal property. Others fight with their rival, kill him or drive him away, and again seek the kisses of the woman they pretend to love, and who shrinks from them with horror, or resigns herself in despair. These, in cases of conjugal love, are the most common ways of acting, and I say that the love of the hogs is less vile and less gross than that of these men." Commenting on these passages, Brandes observes: "These truths, which are considered elemental with our cultured classes, were 'sophisms that cried to heaven' only fifty years ago." But the "property and cultured world" dare not to this day openly avow the principles of George Sand, although, in point of fact, it lives up to them in the main. As in morality and religion, the bourgeois is a hypocrite in marriage also.

What Goethe and George Sand did, has been done and continues to be done by thousands of others, who are not to be compared with Goethe, yet without in the least losing the esteem and respect of society. All that is needed is a respectable position, the rest comes of itself. All this notwithstanding, the liberties of a Goethe and a George Sand are improper, judged from the standpoint of bourgeois morality, and stand in contradiction with the nature of its social principles. Compulsory marriage is the normal marriage of bourgeois society: it is the only "moral" union of the sexes: all other sexual union, by whomsoever entered into, is immoral. Bourgeois marriage – we have proved the point beyond cavil – is the result of bourgeois property relations. This marriage, which is intimately related with private property and the right of inheritance – demands "legitimate" children as heirs: it is entered into for the purpose of acquiring these: under the pressure of social conditions, it is forced even upon those who have nothing to bequeath:²²⁵ it becomes a social law, the violation of which the State punishes by imprisoning for a term of years the men or women who live in adultery and have been divorced.

In future society there is nothing to bequeath, unless the domestic equipment and personal inventory be regarded as inheritance: the modern form of marriage is thus devoid of foundation and collapses. The question of inheritance is thereby solved, and Socialism need not concern itself about abolishing the same. No right of inheritance can arise where there is no private property.

Woman is, accordingly, free, and her children, where she has any, do not impair her freedom: they can only fill all the fuller the cup of her enjoyments and her pleasure in life. Nurses, teachers, female friends, the rising female generations – all these are ready at hand to help the mother when she needs help.

It is possible that there may be men in the future who will say with Alexander von Humboldt: "I am not built for the father of a family. Moreover, I consider marriage a sin, and the begetting of children a crime." What of it? The power of natural instincts will restore the equilibrium. We are alarmed neither by a Humboldt's hostility to marriage nor by the philosophic pessimism of a Schopenhauer, a Mainlaender or a v. Hartmann, who raise to man the prospect of self-destruction in the "ideal State," In this matter we hold with Fr. Ratzel, who justly says:

"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 shipwreck – 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 circumstances was the privilege of individuals or of individual classes 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 passes 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 passed 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 emancipation 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. Class rule will have reached its end for all time, and, along with it, the rule of man over woman.

PART IV
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 shipping, postal unions, international expositions, conventions on international law and on international systems of measurement, international scientific congresses and associations, 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, assembled 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 assumed. 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 accumulation of vast wealth, and its opposite pole of mass-poverty, wage-slavery, dependence of the masses 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 class antagonisms and the class 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 pronounced, 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. Masses 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 classes 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 classes 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 passage 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 God 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 God," 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 masses, 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 balls, 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 God, 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.