Letter: Squaring the family circle (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Squaring the family circle

The article on “The Future of the Family” in the February Socialist Standard gave me food for thought, and I’d like to make some comments.

First, about social groupings in Socialism. P. Deutz says — “People . . . belonging to the community does not have to mean living cheek-by-jowl in an undifferentiated mass! Rather, a mixture of private and communal life in accordance with individual choice.” I think she carries over into the new society the distinction between “private” and “public” life which exists in capitalism.

“Private” life in the nuclear family is often restricting and isolating, but it does have some human qualities — continuity, personal relations etc. — which are lacking in the even more manipulated and alienating forms of “public” life, such as the mass political meeting. In both, workers are kept separated from one another and dominated. No doubt people in a Socialist society will want different degrees of privacy at different times, but there is no need to fear that either the more or the less communal parts of their lives will bear any resemblance to the present-day family or mass events. People will want to break down the huge factory and office work settings into smaller and more friendly workshop-type teams. Discussion and decision-making will most conveniently be done in quite small meetings, linked together by delegate congresses and telecommunications. This will be made possible by automation and computer technology. On the other hand, people will have gained the security, material and emotional, that may enable them to extend their intimate relationships at the same time as improving their responsibility to one another’s needs.

Just as people will want to combine the most satisfying aspects of urban and rural life, so they’ll want to combine the most satisfying aspects of “public” and “private” life. At any rate, I’d want to.

I’m glad that P. Deutz recognizes that men and women will both take a full part in childcare, and whatever housework cannot be eliminated, as well as in production and so on. Finally, don’t the family and lack of Socialist understanding have some connection with one another? (I mean the family as it exists now.) In terms of restricted horizons and concerns for both men and women, the illusions of sex rôles, and all those people in little boxes staring at the goggle-box? Don’t we have to start thinking about the effects that different social institutions have on consciousness, and what we can do about it?

Stephen Stefan

London N2.

Reply

The history of the family shows that its form has adapted to suit prevailing economic conditions and not the other way round. Modern families may be preoccupied with their own affairs but they do not exist in a vacuum. Or do you seriously suggest that people are impervious to any influence from outside their family circle? (Many parents might wish it were so). Even television, as well as puerile slop, beams into workers’ homes pictures of the latest technological success which contrast starkly with other scenes of human deprivation and misery.

The view on the blend of private and public life assumed that in a harmonious society human individuals will still have varying personalities and needs. However congenial the communal life we may still wish to relate to, and live with, others on a more individual basis.

We have always stated that under Socialism men and women will, in accordance with their ability, co-operate to perform the tasks necessary to that society. You have never read anything to the contrary in this journal!

Editors.

Private lives (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent in Greater Manchester asks a series of questions beginning: ‘‘What is the socialist view of the regulation and control (if any) of sexual activity within a Socialist society? Please deal individually with the questions of marriage, divorce and its family consequences, the age of consent, homosexuality (male and female), rape.” Further questions are who would have the say in the bringing-up of children, and would children be ‘‘disciplined” as now to make them conform; on individual rights to privacy, quietness, etc.; and finally, whether Socialism would not need some enforcement machinery for these matters.

They all represent aspects of the individual’s relationship to the community—but putting it that way distorts things at the outset. The basic social relationships are created by the structure of society itself. A complex of subsidiary relationships grows within them, with ideas attached. Yet these ideas in turn react on society; they produce endless changes of detail, and also the desire for new relationships which can only be obtained by developing society further. Thus, the socialist view is not that we shall have common ownership and then try to improve existing relationships. It is that with the end of class society, the relationships and attitudes which are parts of it also end, and entirely new ones grow up on the basis of common ownership.

The social pattern of sexual activity has changed from one society to another: for an account of it, read Engels’s The Origin of the Family. Within the “pairing” marriage changes have taken place. The “extended” family which included all close relatives has given way to the “nuclear” family of one couple and its children, and the social importance of this in turn has declined. The reasons are simply economic: division of labour makes the experience and life-style of one generation alien to the next. Along with this goes the separation of sexual pleasure from reproduction, which is by no means a modern idea but has been scientifically perfected in the 20th century.

What will happen in Socialism is that people will live together without having to seek a licence and part if and when they want to. A good many attempt this today, within the limits of convenience and approval allowed by capitalism. Those limits are removed when property society is abolished: social relations of equality and freedom make personal ones possible.

It is the question of parting that causes concern, of course — the “family consequences”. The paramount factor among them is one which will be absent from Socialist society: money, unending worries over it, the need for it to keep a family housed, clothed and fed. In capitalist society the break-up of a marriage almost invariably causes hardship in those terms, and divorce and separation proceedings are chiefly about financial provisions to support the individuals who are “dependent” under the existing family system. But this takes us back to the foundation of the relationship. When it involves material dependence it clearly is not an equal partnership, and it isn’t surprising that resentment is common.

Other consequences cannot be separated from material ones. Children (like adults) want stability and affection, and in present-day society those things are associated with a conventional home-life. There is no reason why they should not be had, fully, in different arrangements. This is not a case of one regime replacing another, but of being able to make choices which capitalism does not allow. Socialism will be a responsible society precisely because it means freedom to choose. Class-based, authoritarian society gives no such freedom; the choices are imposed, and the individual has to be exhorted into responsibility towards them. When they are made personally or communally, with knowledge and without coercion, true responsibility is felt and exercised.

Not much joy

Sex is both a natural impulse and a supreme pleasure. What sort of world is it whose “regulation of sexual activity” denies satisfaction to large numbers of people, and persuades many more that it is intrinsically shameful? In recent years emphasis has been laid on frankness about sex. Whatever the merits of this, it has produced —inevitably, in capitalism—the commercial exploitation of desires which society does not let be fulfilled. It is impossible to have the best from this area of life without decent material conditions. Privacy, hot water, warmth and some degree of comfort, and not being worried or tired, are the minimum requirements; simple as they sound, they add up to a standard of housing and general well-being which the majority of working people cannot get.

Change this, and there is no need to argue for a right to privacy. Our correspondent links it with “a place of one’s own”, and asks if that does not presuppose private property; but owner-occupiers generally are no better off than council-house tenants in this respect. Of course sexual satisfaction (and the enjoyment of life in many other respects) is heavily obstructed by living between cardboard-thin walls through which the neighbours or the children can hear every word and creak. The privacy problem is a matter of bricks-and-mortar environment, the result of a class-divided society and production for profit. Houses built for use instead of money will embody different assumptions.

There is another aspect of this. Privacy, like its opposite, is not supposed to be a permanent situation; lonely people would say they get too much of it. It is a field for the choice which capitalism refuses, except to the privileged minority. There are times when any of us needs to be alone and undisturbed, other times when company and noise are desired. It is a striking indictment of our society that relatively few can choose like that, and a great many lead thoroughly miserable lives because they are condemned to one position or the other.

The age of consent, homosexuality and rape are run together inappropriately by our correspondent, presumably because they all appear as “problems” to do with sex. The first is a matter of social custom which varies from country to country, and its legal force is bound up with the definition of persons below their majority as “minors” or “infants”. Would such a rule be necessary in Socialism, with the same ostensible purpose of protecting the immature? It does not “protect” them now from sexual experience if they have it in mind. But maturity has cultural as well as physical components: sexual pressure on little girls of nine comes not from hormones but from big business (watch the TV advertisements). The sex drive makes itself known sharply at puberty, but the situation in society as a whole determines the direction it takes. It will be the absence of exploitation that shapes conduct in Socialism, not the absence of laws.

Homosexuality is an offence against social custom (its legalization “in private between consenting adults” has not stopped day-after-day prosecutions of homosexuals who cannot arrange the needed privacy). There is no space here for such questions as whether it is a genetic or an environmental phenomenon; but if we accept that it is constitutional in some people and will therefore exist in Socialism, the only remark to make is that it will be regarded as nobody’s concern except those involved. It is worth recalling the scheme of the early socialist Fourier to cater for sexual variations, which he thought Socialism would accommodate cheerfully: each person with a “mania” would carry a card naming it, to facilitate finding partners.

Rape falls into a different category, because it is an act of delinquency with a sexual content. As delinquency, its roots are similar to those of other forms; it is a deliberately injurious reaction against society in general. The particular expression of the reaction shows what has been learned from society, and in that connection the novelist Jacky Gillott wrote recently in a women’s magazine that rape was “just a surface marker indicating a vast and tangled undergrowth of mythologies, resentments and ignorance that still persisted beneath the unspoken—and often unconscious—views men and women have of one another” (Cosmopolitan, September 1977).

Because Socialism will not have the resentment-breeding divisions which cause delinquency, or an “undergrowth of mythologies” obscuring relationships, we believe it will be free of ugly marks like rape. However, it must be made clear that socialists do not imagine everybody will be automatically made “good” once common ownership is established; or, alternatively, that any individual may do his own thing to the detriment of others. Socialism means a democratic organization of society in which the wishes of the majority prevail. Of course there will be problems; but in that sort of society we shall be able to deal with them as capitalism cannot.

Growing up

Last, about the upbringing of children. Our correspondent asks what is “the socialist psychology” in this matter. We haven’t one; possibly, when we are nearer to establishing Socialism, it will appear. The important thing, however, is not just possessing the insights but being able to put them into practice. A chronic frustration for teachers of all age-groups today is to be clearly aware of what needs to be done and to know also that it is impossible in the present system. As regards obtaining conformity by force, the dominant ideas of an age are, as Marx said, those of its ruling class; force is the method of class rule, reflected in (and so re-created through) its everyday conduct. Socialists do not need that.

Who will make the decisions about children—well, who makes them now? The working class have to accept the dominance of the state education system (the wealthy in general get rid of handling their children, first to nannies and then to schools away from home). Certainly, in any social system children have to learn basic skills required by society and for themselves; under capitalism, because its education is geared to the value of labour-power, the outcome for a high proportion is abysmal and recalls Mr. Weller’s question “vether it’s worth goin’ through so much to learn so little”. We do not envisage a sane society trying to impose a single mode of upbringing and learning for all children—that is the capitalist sausage-machine. The “decisions” are choices, which children and parents and their associates will make in different ways at different times.

Robert Barltrop

A Scientist on the Family. (1908)

From the February 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the fact is accepted that the family has passed through four successive forms, and is now in a fifth, the question at once arises whether this form can be permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is, that it must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in the past. It is the creature of the social system, and will reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in modern times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained. Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements of society, assuming the continuous progress of civilization, it is impossible to predict the nature of its successor.

Morgan. “Ancient Society.”

No More Family Life. (1908)

From the January 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is the awful pronouncement which greeted readers of the Daily Distress one morning in October. Said the Editor:—

“We have proved from the writings of Socialist leaders that atheism is one of their principal creeds, and that the marriage ties are not considered to be of any importance. But our exposures have caused consternation at the Socialist headquarters, and every effort is being made to deny our charges in order to allay the fears of those who have succumbed to the blandishments of the smooth-tongued street-corner orators. Socialism cannot endure exposure. It flourishes in the dark.”

Socialism flourishes in the dark, you see. Only a day or so previously a leading article in the same veracious journal impressed upon its intelligent clientele that “the greatest mistake we can make in dealing with the Socialists is to debate with them. It is just what they want.” It is painfully evident that we Socialists don’t know when we are well off. After all, why should we seek the light of debate when, so the Express says, we “flourish in the dark” ? To us, our hundreds of meetings in the open air, in parks, at street corners, at factory gates, have savoured of extreme publicity, and the invariable presence of the police would appear to warrant the assumption. We have nurtured a phantom. On the authority of the Express we have been in Stygian blackness the whole time. Hence our flourishing condition. This, of course, is Express reasoning. If the editorial tongue were not so plainly visible within the editorial cheek, a plain man might be tempted to style it twaddle. Mr. Pearson further informs us that:

“Under advanced Socialism every child is to belong to the “State.” Parental responsibility in every shape is to be ended. Feeding, clothing, training, educating—the State is to do it all. One stands aghast, and wonders whether the result would be more disastrous to the parent than to the child,”

but on page 4 of the same issue a Mr. Claude Lowther “dealing” with the “Canker of Socialism” says “of course we recognise that the child belongs to the community and that the health of the child is the well-being of the State.” So it would appear that Socialism has stolen a march upon us and is here in all its hideous nakedness. And the mother don’t seem to mind. Or shall we say that Mr. Lowther would be well advised if in future he compared notes with the Editor before rushing into type ? There is a possibility of a glimmer of sense creeping in by accident whilst the present haphazard arrangement lasts. Don’t risk it, Claude.

Education again, we always understood, was the particular concern of the State. But read this first :

BARRACK NURSERIES

And what about character ? What about individual care ? What about family life and that affection which makes childhood’s days so sweet in the remembering ? Because many homes are unhappy; because many poor little children cry for food in the slums ; because some parents are without love and kindness, are all children to be without parents and to have a barrack for a nursery and a soulless “State” for a mother’s care ?

THE HOME IS TO GO. FAMILY LIFE HAS TO GO. Let the little ones wake in the night and cry for their parents — Let the mother stretch out for the child.

It is not hers at all. It is the State’s !

Socialism has no care for empty arms and wistful mothers. The child is the State’s, and mothers must go desolate. The little shoes, the little baby clothes—the kind “State” will provide those, and they will be all of a pattern and all alike.

Under Socialism every child will be a workhouse child. If the mothers dressed them, one would be prettier than another—and that would not be Socialism.”

Let me emphasise the fact that the article here quoted appeared in the Daily Express, Oct. 8th, not in Punch as perhaps might be imagined.

Only one thing is lacking to complete the harrowing picture. Why not prevail upon the talented artist who enlivened the last L.C.C. election with his beautiful and soulful conceptions to endeavour to depict the interior of a “barrack nursery.” Nothing appeals to the masses like a picture, and one such of a very long room, tall and broad, filled with hundreds of squalling infants, each seated before a “soulless” half yard of indiarubber pipe, through which the State pumped nutriment, would carry conviction. I present the idea to the Daily Express for what it is worth.

But coming down to hard facts and above all, those of present-day life, how does this strike the Editor of the Daily Distress and those who think with him that human society has reached its highest possible expression in that of to-day, so completely does it meet the individual wants of its components ? This is from the Boston American, July 28th :—

”MINOR EMPLOYES OF STEEL TRUST SOLD BODY AND SOUL.

Parents Are Compelled to Sign Release Deed Before Work is Secured.

Hundreds Execute It.

Worcester, July 27.—The American Steel and Wire Trust is buying children in Worcester for one dollar a head.

Several hundred have already been sold to slave in the three huge mills of the trust in this city, and the sale of hundreds of others will soon be consummated it the State authorities do not interfere.

Many parents have refused to sell their children into slavery, and it is expected that they will soon have to find employment elsewhere than in the trust mills for their boys and girls.

The Steel and Wire Trust is determined that it shall own its employes body and soul.

To secure absolute control of the children the trust recently demanded that their parents sign “A MINOR’S RELEASE.”

Each parent who signs this receives one dollar, and for that dollar he or she waives forever all control over the child: all right to collect his or her pay and all legal rights, in the opinion of the trust’s attorney, to collect damages should the child be killed or maimed in the mills.

Here is a copy of the “minor’s release,” by which the parent makes his child a slave for a mite of the trust’s gold:

MINOR’S RELEASE. 

Know all men by these presents, That, in consideration of the sum of One Dollar and other good and valuable considerations, to me in hand paid, I ………. of …….. have emancipated and do hereby emancipate …… of …… my son, of and from any and all liability to render or account for his services to me, and all obligations to me of whatsoever kind or nature, and do hereby release and forever waive any and all right which I may have in and to his services, or any wages or salary earned by him; and do hereby authorize any and all persons whomsoever to contract with my said son without any liability to me, and to pay him his wages, and to do any and all things and make any and all contracts, with said son, without any liability to me ; and authorize the said son to appropriate and receive, for his own use and benefit, without any liability to me, his services, and pay and all proceeds or avails thereof.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and seal at …… this …… day of 190…

Witness : ……………………………………………………………………

(Seal)”

Comment is almost needless. The Socialist is simply charged with certain proposals : here is an actuality. What of family life ? “Let the little ones wake in the night and cry for their parents—let the mother stretch out for her child.”

It is not hers at all. It is the Trusts !

“And what about character? What about individual care? What about family life and that affection which makes childhood’s days so sweet in the remembering ?”

How awkward for the Express that we here can speak in the present tense. THE HOME HAS GONE. FAMILY LIFE AS WELL.

And the American Socialists have denounced it. And the American prototypes of the Express have denounced the Socialists.

We need not travel so far as Tariff-protected America for indications of the ineffable state of bliss, marital and otherwise, in which the working class exists. We are indebted to capitalist sources almost exclusively for our best and most illuminating arguments and statistics.

The census returns show about 43 millions of human beings as inhabiting the British Isles. Of these 38 millions take just over half the national yearly production of wealth, the other 5 millions taking the remainder. The average income of the larger division is less than £160 per head. Thirteen millions are perpetually on or below the poverty line, and nearly a million receive Poor Law relief. What a bed of roses ! What possibilities for the formation of character and that affection which makes childhood’s day’s etc., ad nauseum. Beautiful language the Express people pour forth. “Because many homes are unhappy; because many poor little children cry for food in the slums ; because some parents are without love and kindness; are all children to be without parents and to have a barrack for a nursery and a soulless “State” for a mother’s care? ”

I reply : Because a paltry, parasitic, useless, one-ninth of the population absorbs nearly 50 per cent. of the national income and own seven-eighths of the whole wealth of the country; because less than one-thousandth per cent. of the population owns more than 50 per cent. of the total area of land ; because 5 millions of the lazy plunder 38 millions of the industrious; because of these and scores of similar facts, are 13 millions of wealth producers to be perpetually on the brink of starvation ? Are nearly 90,000 human beings to die in workhouses, lunatic asylums and similar institutions annually ? Are 120,000 workers, the only people who matter, to be robbed of life or limb every year, whilst creating wealth they never enjoy ? Are nearly a million fellow-creatures to be so reduced by privation that they are compelled to claim public assistance and become, despite the repressive measures adopted by “sweet charity,” paupers, in the midst of colossal wealth?

A million married women are compelled to work for wages. What of home life ? And childhood’s days so sweet in the remembering? Nearly 140 in every 1,000 never have any childhood’s days to remember, for they die before their first year of “life” is completed. And family life too ! What of that ? Yes, what of family life ? The average age of the worker is 29 years. The lunacy figures have doubled during the last 40 years. The unemployed problem becomes ever more intense. The worker’s wife and children have now to turn out on the labour market and help to keep a roof over their heads until the arrival of the undertaker—at the age of 29 or thereabouts.

“The home is to go” wails the Express. “Family life too” it sobs. Pass on ! it makes one peevish.

And now what of the Socialist proposals. Of course volumes could be written and have been written upon the institutions of religion and marriage. But briefly, very briefly, the position occupied by the Socialist in viewing the institutions named is very simple and readily understood. It is this.

Before man can formulate a religion, or a social custom like marriage, it is fairly apparent that he must be living in a community, and that the nature of that community will depend largely upon the methods by which the material wants, primarily food, are supplied. For instance, where animal or vegetable food is difficult of access, there, as history shows, one can confidently expect to find cannibalism. The social customs of that community will be an exact reflex of the way they are compelled to get their living. Their god will be as partial to human flesh as they. Their frailties, passions and virtues will find a truthful mirror in their deity. This is so historically and logically true that the wonder is that any person is to be found who, having given a very moderate amount of study to the question, can for a moment doubt it. Take the ancient Norsemen : men of pillage, rapine and plunder ; wild, restless, roving pirates, as fond of wine as they were of war. Their gods, Thor, Wodin, etc., were glorified counterparts of themselves. Higher in the scale the Greeks, a people who had brought the arts to a marvellous pitch of perfection, personified the arts and graces, that is, they made their gods and goddesses after their own image, and then deified and worshipped them. With the decay of the Greek civilisation, their deities died of the same complaint. So that as regards religion the Socialist position should be fairly clear. Change the economic condition of a people and their god or gods obediently dance to the altered tune. A moment’s reflection should make this abundantly clear. Even in the case of Christianity it is continually changing as the minds of its adherents change. “It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdon of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” said Christianity’s great expositor 2,000 years ago. But a system of society has arisen in which the rich capitalist is looked upon as the mainspring by which Society is enabled to move: a society in which the followers of the humble Nazarene become the possessors of enormous wealth. And—mark what happens. Dr. Akeds arise in scores to prove that Christ did not really mean it. Theologians go to extreme pains to prove that the eye of a needle was something entirely different to our domestic implement. The camel’s task was really very easy : only a bit of a squeeze and he was through. Same with the rich man, and so on.

And now regarding the custom of marriage. There is something decidedly humorous in the spectacle of the introducers of the Divorce Courts reproaching anyone with sinister designs upon the “sacred contract.” The severing of the marriage tie by means of divorce is a measure that surely no one will lay to the door of the Socialists. And who is it that fills the Divorce Court ? The very people who are now accusing the Socialist of designs upon the purity and sanctity of home life. Who are the greatest patrons of the horrible social ulcer known as prostitution ? The question is almost automatically answered. Regent Strest and Piccadilly are not working-class quarters; they are not even, remotely “tainted” with the “canker of Socialism.” Yet the bare names of these thoroughfares have become synonymous for the vice which flourishes, unashamed and practically unchecked, upon them. The average man (who is not a Socialist) will tell you that prostitution is a necessary evil, and that the unfortunates who are its victims should receive State recognition and be licensed, as on the Continent. The upholders of the present system cannot conceive of human society without it. “It always has been and always will be” sums up the whole of their philosophy.

The true Socialist position is that the present marriage contract is by no means the last word to be said upon the subject. History shows that as the economic basis of human society has changed, so the customs of that society have altered, including, necessarily, marriage. The present social system is based upon the ownership of private property, and the marriage contract is in essence a property contract. The single sentence from the Marriage Service, “with all my worldly goods I thee endow” is indicative of this, especially as the recipient of this cornucopean shower immediately surrenders all control over it by promising to “love, honour and obey” the benevolent “bestower.” The Married Women’s Property Act legalises the holding of property by married women, but even this becomes an expedient by means of which the bankrupt can secure some of his “hard-earned” plunder against the inroads of his swindled creditors, provided he has sufficient foresight.

It should be clear, then, that present-day society is organised upon a basis of private property in the means whereby the wealth creators live and that necessarily the customs of Society will partake of the general structure. With the change in the basis, necessarily the superstructure must follow suit. Abolish a system where the mainspring of all effort is the glorification, and aggrandisement of the individual at the expense of the community ; where the ideal is tersely expressed as “every man for himself and devil take the hindmost,” and substitute a community whose driving factor shall be collective effort for the mental and material well-being of all, and whose chief concern shall he the free and unfettered development of all its component units ; abolish the one, we say, and substitute the other and the way is easy for a marriage based upon mutual esteem; upon Love in actuality and not as at present, merely as an accessory after the fact—the fact of the possession of a “decent berth” or a banking account.

One thing the Express and those of its kidney appear to overlook is this. In any society where woman were the social equal of man, is it to be imagined for one moment that she would acquiesce in anything the Express portion of the population cared to suggest? No ! Capitalist morals, bourgeois ethics, would follow the Express into the oblivion of a hideous past. Under Socialism there will be no sex barrier. Elementary logic would appear to show that the individuals most interested, or rather more affected, by social changes, should at least be among the first to be consulted. It does not seem to have occurred to the Express that woman would have a voice in the ordering of her sex-relationship. Need her answer be anticipated ? Think it over !

W. T. Hopley

The Proletariat (The Working Class). By Karl Kautsky (1907)

From the October 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

Specially translated for The Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

2.—Wages.

Wages cannot be so high as to make it impossible for the capitalist to carry on his business and to live from it. For under these circumstances it would be more advantageous for the capitalist to give up business altogether. Hence the wages of the worker can never rise high enough to equal the value of his product. They must always leave a margin, a surplus value, for only the prospect of this margin induces the capitalist to buy labour-power. Thus in capitalist society wages can never rise so high that the exploitation of the worker comes to an end.

But the margin, the surplus value, is greater than is generally supposed. It consists not only of the profit of the manufacturer, but also much that is reckoned as cost of production and sale, viz., ground rent, interest on invested capital, discount for the merchant who disposes of the goods produced by the industrialist, taxes, rates, etc. All this comes out of the surplus value which the product of the worker yields above his wages. This margin must consequently be considerable if an undertaking is to prove profitable. Wages can, therefore, never rise sufficiently high to enable the worker to receive in his wages anything approaching the value he has created. The capitalist wage system means under all circumstances exploitation of the worker. It is impossible to abolish exploitation so long as that system exists, and even where high wages are being paid the exploitation of the worker must be extensive.

But wages hardly ever reach the highest possible point, more often, however, they fall to the very lowest. That point is reached when the wages of the worker cease to purchase his very necessaries of life. If the worker not only starves but starves quickly, his work ceases altogether.

Between these two limits wages fluctuate, becoming lower as the customary wants of life of the workers decrease, as the supply of labour-power in the labour market increases, and as the power of resistance on the part of the workers decreases.

Generally wages must, of course, be high enough to keep the worker in a fit state to work, or better said, wages must be so high as to ensure to the capitalist the measure of labour-power needed by him. Wages must hence be high enough to make it possible for the worker not only to maintain himself in a fit state to work but also to reproduce children fit to work.

The economic development shows the tendency—so favourable to the capitalist—of reducing the cost of maintenance of the workers and of thereby decreasing wages.

Skill and strength were in times gone by indispensable to the worker. The period of apprenticeship of the handicraftsman was a very long one, and the cost of his maintenance was considerable. Progress in the division of labour and in machine construction caused special skill and strength in production to become superfluous. This progress makes it possible to replace skilled by unskilled—that is cheaper— labour-power; it makes it also possible to replace the labour of men by that of weak women, and even children. Even in manufacture this tendency was perceptible; but only with the introduction of machinery begins wholesale exploitation of women and of children of tender age, exploitation of the most helpless of the helpless who fall victims to revolting ill-treatment and spoliation. Here we get acquainted with a new characteristic of the machine in the hands of Capital.

The wage-worker who did not belong to the family of the employer had originally to receive in his wages not only the cost of his own maintenance but also that of his family if he were to be in a position to reproduce his species, to regenerate his labour-power. Without this reproduction of labour-power the heirs of the capitalist would find no proletariat to exploit. But if the wife, and, from early childhood, also the children of the worker are in a position to provide for themselves, the wages of the male worker can almost entirely he reduced to the cost of maintenance of his own person without the slightest danger to the reproduction of labour-power. And the labour of women and children has the further advantage of their being less capable of resistance than men. Moreover, through their entering the ranks of labour the supply of labour-power in the labour market is tremendously increased.

The labour of women and children does not only lower the cost of maintaining the worker, it reduces also his power of resistance and increases the supply of labour-power—in short, it has the effect under any of these circumstances of causing the wages of the worker to fall.

3.—The Dissolution of the Proletarian Family. 

The industrial labour of woman in capitalist society means the entire destruction of the worker’s family life without substituting a higher form of family. The capitalist mode of production, in most cases, does not dissolve the individual working-class household, but it deprives it of all its brightness, leaving only its dark side with the waste of woman’s energy and her exclusion from public life. The industrial labour of woman to-day does not mean her relief from household duties, it means adding a fresh burden to those she already bears. But one cannot serve two masters. The household of the worker goes to wreck and ruin if his wife has to assist in earning subsistence for the family ; but what present society puts in place of the individual household and the individual family is miserable refuse: the soup-kitchen and the day-nursery in which the leavings of the physical and mental nourishment of the rich are thrown to the lower classes.

Socialism is accused of aiming at the destruction of the family. Well, we know that each particular mode of production has its particular form of household to which corresponds a particular form of family. We do not consider the present form of family to be the last, and expect that a new form of Society will also develop a new form of family. But such expectation is something altogether different to an endeavour to dissolve all family ties. Those who destroy the family —who not merely want to do, but actually DO destroy it before our eyes—are not the Socialists but the capitalists. Many a slave-owner in the past has torn husband from wife, parents from children able to work : but capitalist methods surpass the abominations of slavery ; they tear the suckling from the mother, forcing her to entrust her infant to the care of strangers. And a society in which that occurs daily in hundreds and thousands of cases, a society that has specially founded “charitable institutions patronised by the ‘nobility'” for the purpose of making it easier for the mother to part from her child—such a society has the audacity to reproach us with intending to dissolve the family, because we are convinced that household-work will develop into a special branch of industry, thereby transforming the character of the household and of family life.

4. Prostitution.

Besides being reproached with the intention of dissolving the family we are accused of aiming at community of women. This reproach is as void of foundation as the other. We assert on the contrary that the very opposite of community of women, of sexual compulsion and immorality, namely, ideal love, will form the basis of all marital relations in the Socialist Commonwealth, and such love can generally prevail only in such a state of Society. But what do we see to-day ? The want of resistance on the part of women who have hitherto been confined to their households and have mostly but a faint conception of public life and the power of organisation—is so great, that the capitalist employer dare pay them wages which do not suffice for their sustenance, and incite them to prostitution as a means of augmenting their wages. An increase in the industrial employment of women has everywhere the tendency of causing au increase in prostitution. In the modern state of the fear of God and pious morals there exist entire “flourishing” branches of industry in which the women workers are so badly paid that they would have to starve to death were they not to stoop to prostitution. And the employers declare that just upon these low wages depends the possibility of their successful competition, and that higher wages would rain them.

Prostitution is as old as the contradiction between poverty and riches. But in ages gone by prostitutes occupied in the social scale a position falling between those of beggars and scamps, constituting a luxury in which Society could afford to indulge, and the loss of which would by no means have endangered the very existence of that society. To-day it is not only the women of the loafing proletariat but working women, who are compelled to sell their bodies for money. This selling of their bodies is no longer only a matter of luxury, no, it has become the basis of industrial development. In the capitalist system of production prostitution becomes one of the pillars of Society. The defenders of this society themselves practise community of women, the vice of which they accuse us; of course, community with women of the Proletariat. And this method of community of women has taken root so deeply in present society that its representatives declare prostitution to be a necessity. They cannot conceive that the abolition of the Proletariat must mean the abolition of prostitution, because they cannot possibly conceive a society without community of women.

The community of women of to-day is an invention of the “higher” grades of Society, not of the Proletariat. This community of women is one of the ways of exploiting the Proletariat. It is not Socialism, but its very opposite.

Blogger's Note:

It was the German SPGBer, Hans Neumann, who translated Kautsky's writings from the German into English for the Socialist Standard.

The Queer side. (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have been frequently met with the taunt that they are going to “break up the home” (for firewood?), “destroy the sacredness of the family hearth,” “invade the innermost secrecies of the family life,” etc., etc. How this desperate invasion was going to occur our opponents (in their usual clear-headed way) were not quite sure ; but somehow or other the State (metaphysical muddle heads must have Gods, you know) was going to walk in through the door (without knocking) and tear children from their parents and wives from their husbands to make them economically independent of each other, thus destroying the calm security (!) and harmony (!!) of the family circle. (Sometimes we are told that pa comes home blind drunk and beats his wife—but I forget, that is when another thesis has to be proved.)

This view receives the pious support of wealthy men doubtless from the knowledge that the economic independence of working women will mean the end of their present paradise, in which they enjoy (like their prototypes, the beasts) the almost unlimited satisfaction of their sexual appetites. An examination of the true facts of the case, however, shows the hollow hypocrisy of the plea.

The average working-class family of the past century and a half has been composed of wage-workers— from the child of 8 or 10 who sells papers and delivers milk, to the father and mother who work in the factories, sometimes alternately—the one through the day and the other through the night.

The number of females who have appeared upon the labour market has grown year by year. Every year sees fresh branches of industry open to women, and the ties of the family are insen­sibly loosened, to be eventually torn asunder, not by the growth of Socialism, but, by the iron hand of modern industrial conditions.

Women are more submissive, more long-suffering, and more economical wage-slaves than men, and are therefore introduced wherever possible by our philanthropic and tender-hearted masters. In the early development of machinery the workman saw in the machine his mortal enemy, and the smashing of the machine instead of the smashing of the system was the order of the day, as witness the historic Luddite Riots. Now that the greater number of the workers have become operators of machinery, their antipathy to the “iron man” has died, although quietly and insidiously the machine is rendering unnecessary larger and larger proportions of workers in every department of capitalism. Now that women are replacing men in their various spheres the enmity of the men is directed toward the women instead of against the system that breeds such conflicting tendencies.

Another asset of the present war to the capitalist class has been the opportunity offered to experiment in the introduction of women into departments of work which they were hitherto supposed to be physically incapable of performing. The following extract from the “Daily Mail” (16.9.15) will illustrate the point:

“The great movement among women toward filling up gaps in labour is shown in all classes of work ; but nowhere more strikingly than in the big munitions iron works. That woman’s work in this new sphere is satisfactory is acknowledged by works managers and foremen. Asked if a motor cylinder would offer greater difficulty than a shell to bore one of these men said, ‘Hardly any.’ ‘A woman, then, could go in for ordinary industrial steel working, lathe work, screw-cutting, and the like, just as well as a man ?’ ‘Certainly, for the general run of work.’ ”

A quotation from the same paper of another date (10.9.15), dealing with the interim report of the committee appointed by the British Association is also enlightening :

“In some cases the experience gained during the war had shown that certain jobs could be more efficiently done by women than by men.

The great increase of women’s employment could hardly fail to have permanent results, and it might be anticipated that after the war the proportion of women in industry would be greater than before and the competition of men and women would increase.”

Now what about the sacred family circle ? The wave of female labour is to be converted into a torrent, and the war-worn warriors who return from the battle-fields (poor crippled, broken wrecks) will find a labour-market choked with women competitors, the standard of living lowered, and the general conditions of the workers worse than before the war commenced. A splendid reward for all your hardship and sacrifice, ye poor deluded, fellow-workers.

Of course, the “family hearth” ghost is easily laid by the worker who reflects on his present penurious and work-weary condition ; and the prospect of that mythical sacredness being violated under Socialism has no terrors for him. I may suggest, however, that the love which is born of economic necessity can neither be so deep nor so lasting as that which exists between those who are economically independent of each other and who seek each other’s company and affection purely from mutual esteem.

The Socialist, in promoting the common-ownership and democratic control of all that nature, ingenuity, and human energy can produce—in suggesting the equitable distribution of the burdens as well as the pleasures of life—is also giving the opportunity for human affection to develope to its highest and purest form.

—————-

Whilst turning out an old drawer the writer came upon the following quotation from “Lloyd’s Weekly” (31.3.12). It is worth treasuring.

“Arrangements are being made at Lyons to celebrate next year the centenary of the birth of the inventor of the sewing machine, Barthélemy Thimonnier, who died in 1857 an abject poverty.—Reuter.”

The above fate has been the reward of the majority of the brilliant thinkers who, applying their brains to the various spheres of production, have assisted largely in the rapid evolution of modern industry, in which those wonderful machines and processes operate to enslave the ignorant masses.

For the present the wealthy shareholders of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and their international fellow capitalists reap the fruits of the inventor’s teeming brain. But when the worker awakens and hails the dawn of freedom with open clear eyes, those same mighty brains and marvellous machine will be converted into a means to lighten labour and increase the sum total of human happiness.

In the days that are to come, fellow workers, remember the annals of your class. Remember the bloody massacres of your fellows upon the industrial and political battlefields. Remember the sweating and the destruction of child life, and the violation of womanhood. Remember !—and proceed unswervingly upon your course. Do not be deterred from prosecuting the war of your class by the sentimental humbugs who regard the destruction of vermin as a crime against “God’s creatures,” and are for ever trying to divert the attention of the workers from the main issue—their emancipation from wage-slavery.

The war between the exploiting and exploited classes can only end with the extinction of one or the other. The “war that will end war” is the war waged by the down-trodden, masses against their task-masters ; and victory will signify the abolition for ever of privilege, private property, and its accompanying oppressions. The place for all working men who would play a man’s part in the struggle of their class is under the red banner of Socialism, sounding the tocsin of the Revolution. There they will ally themselves with comrades worthy of their aid.

Gilmac.

Do We Need a Bigger Population? (1945)

From the March 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

A revolution in ideas regarding population has taken place since 1798, when Malthus wrote his coldblooded “Essay on Principles of Population.” It had a favourable reception from the ruling class of the day, but the passing of time has shown his ideas to be fallacious, and they have been superseded by ideas which are quite contrary to his conclusions. His doctrine, which declared that there is a universal tendency for population to outrun the means of subsistence, expressed the ignorance of his time.

The only solution Malthus saw to the poverty of his day was to get a decrease in the population and so raise the standard of living among the remainder. He does not seem to have been quite so heartless as some of his contemporaries, who regarded the lower class as a variety of animals requiring even less care than domestic animals. Commenting on one of them, the notorious Count Rumford, who had concocted recipes for cheap soups as a suitable diet for the common people, Malthus writes:

“They (the soups) are excellent inventions for the public institutions and as occasional resources; but if they were once universally adopted by the poor, it would be impossible to prevent the price of labour from being regulated by them . . . perhaps some cold politician might propose to adopt the system with a view of underselling the foreigners in the markets of Europe. … I really cannot conceive anything much more detestable than the idea of knowingly condemning the labourers of this country to the rags and wretched cabins of Ireland, for the purpose of selling a few more broadcloths and calicoes.” (Essay on the Principles of Population, page 232-233.)

So Malthus was not completely unaware of the trend of wages, although he knew nothing of surplus value !

The housing problem was then, as always, acute among the poor, but Malthus saw in it a weapon for keeping down the population.

“One of the most salutary and least pernicious checks to the frequency of early marriages in this is the difficulty of procuring a cottage, and the laudable habits which prompt a labourer rather to defer his marriage some years in the expectation of a vacancy, than to content himself with a wretched mud cabin like those in Ireland.” (Ibid, page 250.)

Portal houses are now to be produced for precisely the opposite reason.

As Socialists profiting by the work of Karl Marx, we realise that workers are short of the means of life, not because production falls short of demand, but because the present anarchy of production is concerned merely with profit-making and not with supplying people’s needs the latter being incidental.

Turning to recent writers on population, we find them arguing in the opposite direction to Malthus. The writers and investigators on the subject—Glass, Carr Saunders of the Eugenic Society, Titmuss, Charles and Ginsberg, to mention just a few—are full of woe and gloomy prognostications. They foresee something like extinction for the Western nations in 200 years time, and for the near future they predict more old people in bathchairs than infants in prams.

They relate it to economics too. D. V. Glass states :

“The population will suffer from a much higher degree of invalidity and the burden of State health insurance will be greater. So, too, will the relative cost of old age benefits. On the other hand, this large section of aged and therefore unemployed people will have to be supported by a relatively much smaller proportion of able-bodied persons. That is, proportionately the amount of taxation per head will rise, while the ability to bear it will fall. Moreover, the position of industry is likely to be more difficult. In the last century the industrial system recovered fairly easily from the depressions through which it passed, and one of the major factors in this case of recovery was undoubtedly the growth of the population. An increase in the numbers of people meant an increase in the demand for the products of industry, and with it the slump period of the trade cycle was shortened. The much reduced rate of the increase of the population of the world since the war has no doubt helped to intensify and prolong the economic crisis, and if population actually falls in the future, the effect of the trade cycle upon economic prosperity is likely to be much more severe.” (“The Struggle for Population,” pages 14-15.)

To a Socialist such fears appear fantastic; to the orthodox economist, however, they are very real : immersed in a vain effort to reform and prevent the worst trends of capitalism, the real solution escapes them. Under Socialism people would not deny themselves the pleasures of children and the play of their normal instincts. Generally speaking, contraception is practised because would-be parents either cannot afford children or wish to do better for the ones they have. The working class, possessing only their power to labour, possessing no resources of wealth on which they can draw in bad times, find the inclination is not strong to procreate merely to create a reserve army of unemployed for the capitalist to draw upon in boom periods and that will languish on the dole during slumps. The worker is not interested in falling populations, but he is well aware that after successful strikes or negotiations for a rise in wages, a usual practice in the times called peace is to turn off many workers and instal bigger and better machines to do their work, and thus reduce the wages bill.

In an effort to stem the falling birth rate (rising temporarily in the present war), the Government of this country are about to institute some form of family allowances. As an inducement to parenthood it does not bear the stamp of originality. Family allowances were first given in France in 1854 but did not become general until 1916, when rising prices were making it increasingly difficult for the parents of children to maintain their standard of living. It was resisted by the trade unions, who claimed that it would reduce real wages. Until 1932, when the Equalisation Fund was set up, the scheme was a voluntary one run on contributions obtained only from employers. We dismiss at once any suggestion that it might be due to their innate generosity or love of little children (for it is not characteristic of employers as a class), and look for a more likely reason. Possibly the following quote fills the bill:

“Among other factors which may have influenced employers is the one given by the Director of the Fund for the Stephanoise Region. He believes that the granting of allowances has effectively withdrawn the family man from the ‘class struggle.’ If this is true, the employers had very strong grounds for extending the system.” (D. V. Glass, “The Struggle for Population,” page 52.)

The Fascist powers, in their rise to domination, in Italy and Germany, made a determined attempt to increase the birth rate. The Nazis made loans free of interest to young couples, cancelling repayments at the birth of each child. Promotion was also given to fathers of families, together with opportunities to obtain the best houses or flats.

The Italian plan, though on the same principle, had different features. A bachelor tax was levied, and financial burdens decreased in large families, by means of tax exemptions. The large family, however, consisted of seven children among State employees and ten children among other workers! In both countries improvements were made in maternity and child welfare.

Methods employed in Russia are akin to the Fascist powers in this as in other matters. A 50 per cent. increase has been made in maternity benefit and endowments given to mothers of six or more children, whilst the mother of ten qualifies for a medal. L. Ginsberg, in a Fabian pamphlet, “Parenthood and Poverty”, thinks, in the Fabian manner, that it is merely an extension of the social services and an attempt to raise the standard of living; we prefer to view them in a more realist manner. The anti-abortion law of 1936 marked the commencement of a new policy regarding population which finds expression in the more recent changes.

A method used by these countries is discouragement of birth control propaganda and sale of appliances. In Italy the latter became illegal, but was avoided in a truly commercial manner by selling certain articles under the heading of preventatives of disease.

Individual capitalists are not concerned with the state of the population in a hundred years’ time; they want their profits now.

Sweden, claimed as one of the most democratic countries, has adopted a saner method. Deciding that wanted children thrive best, birth control information is disseminated, whilst granting allowances and improving maternity and child welfare.

Most Western countries now grant allowances for children. These include Spain, Hungary, Holland and Belgium. So also do Australia and New Zealand. The Baltic countries and Switzerland, Austria and Bulgaria grant them to State employees.

The latter grants seem to indicate the desire of these countries to keep State servants loyal to the government and to induce them to refrain from following their class aspirations. We find Britain only recently tackling her problem. The proposed allowance for each child (after the first) is to be 5s. and not the 8s. suggested by Beveridge.

From Malthus to his modern counterparts, no solution to the so-called population problem along their lines can be effective!. Malthus advised continence among the “lower orders,” the moderns advise the opposite, and neither solves any real problems for the working class.

In a world torn and bleeding by a ruthless and brutal war, it is sheer humbug, cant and hypocrisy to talk of a population problem. Capitalism, which dooms millions to hunger in a world of plenty, wastes the lives of millions in useless toil, and periodically sends millions to their death in futile wars in every part of the globe, will appeal in vain to the working class to solve capitalism’s future population problems. There can be only one answer to such appeals-— a determined purpose to change the basis of society on the part of the workers, and to win a world with natural resources so vast and with productive forces so great that the needs of all can and will be supplied. Intelligent men and women will not then deny themselves the joys that children can give, and no special incentives need be offered to induce unwilling people to procreate. Family allowances and medals are devices of a ruling class endeavouring to solve its particular problems.

Workers should cease looking to family allowances and social services for the solution to their present troubles. Why ask for paltry sums when the world is yours to win ?

W. P.

The Family Way (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The position of women in society is one of the most significant examples of social, political and economic subordination; various major social movements have arisen committed to changing this situation, ranging from the Liberal feminism of the Suffragettes to the biological determinism of one of the current supporters of “Women's Liberation”. Women as a group share a common oppression for three main reasons: firstly, as potential child-bearers they lack the power of completely determining when and in what circumstances they will bear children; secondly, right across the class structure women are found in subordinate positions in economic and political organisations; lastly, women are socialised and educated to take a domestic role and to be attractive to men rather than to be part of economic activity outside the family.

In all capitalist economies there is a difference in power, income, status and responsibility which operates against women and turns them into a disadvantaged group. (Women are obviously also disadvantaged in other forms of society too. but in this article attention is focussed on capitalism). It is to the property relations of capitalism that we must look in order to explain this all-pervasive inferiority of women. Women's condition is an historically changing aspect of the material situation — the division of labour has developed from division based on sex. natural predisposition, physical strength and so on to a formal institutional division firmly based on the ownership of property. The structure of the present-day family and the role women play within it and in society at large, have been determined by past developments in the organisation of production and will continue to change in response to future changes in capitalism until eventually they are transformed in socialist society.

The transition period from feudalism of capitalism was a crucial one in this long process of change — the lives of women were inevitably profoundly affected. Engels pointed out that the monogamous family had come into being as a result of economic development. In The Origin of the Family. Private Property and the State, he writes “Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural but on economic conditions, viz: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism”. He goes on to elaborate on the change for women that these larger changes involved:

“Supremacy of the man in the family and generations of children that could be his offspring alone and were destined to be the heirs of his wealth — these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be the sole object of monogamy . . . Monogamy then does by no means enter history as reconciliation of man and wife, and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other".

The transition in Britain, from feudalism to capitalism destroyed and undermined many relations in the old society, not least of which was the structure of the family. Out of the upheaval were to come the bourgeois proletarian family. Under feudalism, land had been the immediate source of life for rich and poor alike — men and women had lived in predominantly self-sufficient rural households. The feudal family was the unit of production and women played an important and acknowledged role in the survival of the household. However, by the 1640s there were an estimated half million workers who had been ‘freed from the soil’ and their lack of property became the basis for the accumulation of wealth by the growing capitalist class. In Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels wrote 

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his '‘natural superiors’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. than callous ‘cash payment’ . . . (It) has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” 

The landless poor, their ranks swollen by dispossessed and unemployed craftsmen and tradesmen, were forced to rely entirely on selling their labour power. As a result a new family structure came into being, and many women found their lives profoundly altered. They could no longer combine child-bearing and rearing with their work: without land they could not contribute in the same way to their families’ livelihood. The family, in fact, ceased to be the basic economic unit and wives became dependent to a far greater extent on their husbands. Many peasant women became financial liabilities to their menfolk and the family was undermined as an institution.

Just as the lives of the peasant women were changing as the proletarian family was forced into existence, so too the growing affluence of the bourgeoisie meant that they developed a lifestyle and a family structure appropriate to their new economic roles. As the division of labour became more complex and specialised, the successful craftsman or tradesman hired others to work for him: his wife tended to withdraw from her previous activities in the workshop and she became increasingly confined to the home. The roles of husband and wife became more specifically differentiated and the home ceased to be a productive part of the community. “The external world of work became the sphere of the man exclusively. The internal world of the family and the household was the proper business of the women . . . Not to work, for the women of the middling people became the mark of class superiority at the very moment when their men were establishing work as the criterion of dignity and worth” (Women, Resistance and Revolution, Sheila Rowbotham). The administration of the household lost its public character and women were excluded from participation in social production.

Thus, as feudalism gave way to capitalism women's lives changed radically and they found themselves increasingly at a disadvantage in the new organisation of industry. The process was a continuing one, affecting different groups of women in very different ways. For some the separation of the workplace from the home reduced their productivity and limited their role. For others, the introduction of a new machine excluded them from production, or alternatively their position in the guilds and crafts organisations was weakened sufficiently to drive them out, and trades which had been reserved for women were taken over by men. Yet other women moved out of the search for work outside the home altogether and into leisure and domestic isolation. “Modern industry in overturning the economical foundation on which was based the traditional family and the family labour corresponding to it. had also loosened all traditional family ties” (Marx. Capital. Vol.l)

Women’s position in society and their role within the family have changed greatly in the past 400 years, and they will continue to change as capitalism itself develops. However, so long as capitalism remains, the exploitation of women will also remain Not until we establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means of production will everyone — both women and men — be able to realise their full potential.

J.S.

50 Years Ago: Children and Empire (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The special correspondent of the Daily News, reporting the speech of Dr. Vaughan Cornish, President of the Geographical Section of the British Association, writes:—

‘In his opinion, if you are to do your duty to the Empire you must have at least four children. He made it clear that you should not invite children into the world for their own pleasure and amusement, but should enlist them as it were, in an army for home defence.

‘In his view, it appeared, children were merely potential soldiers.

'In order to have strategic security in this island’, he insisted, ‘we must be able to meet the air force of a European combination as well as to carry out our traditional plan of dispatching a powerful expeditionary force for the support of a friendly power. This active defence requires a large population.’

(Daily News 14.9.1923).

Imagine urging us to increase our families so that our children may provide food for guns! And the monuments to the ‘glorious dead’ are still being covered with wreaths though their dependants cannot find the necessary covering to shelter them from the inclement weather.

(From an unsigned editorial Produce More — Children in the Socialist Standard, October 1923).

The Revolution in Chinese marriage (1956)

From the September 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, despite the usual misleading Communist phraseology, marked the completion of the Capitalist revolution there. The new system of society which is emerging from it has changed many things hitherto fundamental to the Chinese way of life, and not the least of these is marriage.

The majority of people, both in Europe and Asia, regard their existing form of marriage, together with the sexual morality that their society claims as sacrosanct, as something permanent, something that always has been and always will continue. But, in fact, marriage laws and sexual morality change in keeping with changing social systems.

Early Chinese Marriage

In ancient times in China the aristocracy were married with elaborate rites and ceremonies. The wife of an aristocrat would be associated in the rites of her husband’s ancestral temple; the temple of his "Clan.” Marriage was particularly important because property was involved and the heirs’ legal claim to the estate had to be established.

But the peasants were not included in the clan system, had no surname or pedigrees, and consequently could not participate in ancestor-worship. Moreover, they did not possess any land of their own. They were serfs, cultivating their master’s soil under his direction. They dwelt in groups in villages during the harsh winter, and in huts built among the fields during the summer when agriculture was possible. Every spring, the peasants celebrated a festival in which the youths and girls of neighbouring villages met in free association, only translated into formal marriage in the autumn if the girls were with child

The Traditional Chinese Marriage

Feudalism was abolished in China in 300.B.C. and replaced by a unified central government ruling through a civil service. Wealth increased rapidly, and extended to fresh groups of the population. This spread of private property necessitated a change in morality as well as in the marriage customs of the population for peasants wished to leave their farms to their own sons, and marriage, therefore, became a social necessity for them. But the heavy tasks of draining farmland in the marshy valleys and the irrigation works that were needed afterwards, required the labour of large family groups. 

A system of ethics was evolved which was expressed by the teachings of the sage Confucius, laying down a code of behaviour to cover all relationships. The submission of the subject to the ruler, and, within the family, the submission of the individual to the head of the household. Moreover there were rules formulated to cover relationships such as between younger brother and elder brother, husband and wife, wife and mother-in-law. Thus Confucianism not only made the task of ruling over vast China easier, but enabled the individuals in these otherwise unwieldy family groups to live together in more or less harmony and co-operation. Some of those whose mothers-in-law lived with them as one of the family may perhaps have received an inkling of the desirability of such regulating of family life and behaviour.

This somewhat puritanical code of Confucianist morals was rigidly adhered to in conservative China, where changes were extremely gradual because the Chinese made their living by engaging in small scale intensive agriculture, which has developed very slowly right down through the ages until a few years ago. It also forms the philosophic basis for the literary classics, a thorough knowledge of which was necessary to pass the civil service examinations.

In China until recent times it was the custom for the parents of the bride and bridegroom to be brought into contact by a marriage broker, the parents being the final arbiters on the suitability of the proposed union. The couple had no say in the choice and moreover did not meet before the ceremony. The Chinese compared this form of betrothal with a cold pot that is put on the fire and gradually heats up; whereas marriage in the West usually taking place after courtship was likened to a pot boiling at the time of the ceremony, but thereafter beginning to cool off.

Marriage in “Communist” China

The Marriage Law of the Peoples Republic of China, which came into force on 1st May, 1950, indicates the need for a new set of family rules to govern behaviour in this new Capitalist system of society. It reveals too an interesting side-light on some of the social changes taking place there; for it is only to be expected that China, the latest recruit to the State Capitalist system, should adopt the most up-to-date set of Capitalist marriage laws.

Article 1 of the new law formally abolishes the previous marriage system, and in its place institutes the “New Democratic” Marriage Law which, it states, is based on free choice of partners, on monogamy, on equal rights for both sexes, and of the lawful interest of women and children.

“Husband and wife are companions living together and shall enjoy equal status in the home. Both shall have the right to free choice of occupation and free participation in work or social activities."

Other Articles deal with prohibition of bigamy and concubinage. The local government is delegated to issue the marriage certificates.

The change in the status of women has the advantage for the ruling-class that the women are “free" to become wage-workers.

Rights and duties are further detailed, as well as the relations between parents and children; and divorce is to be granted only when the efforts of the local government officials have failed to bring about a reconciliation. After appropriate measures have been taken for the care of children and property, divorce certificates are to be issued without delay. Both parents still have the duty to support their children. In case of divorce, the wife shall retain such property as belonged to her before her marriage.

As a further indication of the trend of society in modern China, 12 put of the 27 articles that go to make up this law deal wholly or partly with money or property matters.

For the smooth running of capitalism, workers must conform to the rules of behaviour which have been found suitable for the social system; and because the needs of capitalism are similar irrespective of which part of the globe is involved, the marriage laws, which codify a part of this behaviour pattern are also similar, differing only in detail in the various national sections of the Capitalist world.

It is understandable that the new Chinese marriage law abolishes the previous marriage system; it is in the interest of the Capitalists to try to increase the surplus value obtained from the labour of the workers, who are induced to speed up their work by the prospects of a higher standard of living. This elusive prize is dangled before them, like the carrot before the donkey’s nose. Moreover, in order to get the Chinese worker to work harder, the old-fashioned household, consisting of several related families sharing the income of their wage-earners, has had to be broken up into smaller units; in this way the wage-earner and his immediate family receive all the benefit from his wages.

The breaking-up of this now out-moded household into the more modern form of family unit has the further advantage, from the Capitalist point of view, that the parents, because the family is now dependent on their sole earnings, are more amenable to Capitalist demands. Hence, the new marriage laws of China, by substituting for child betrothals, the “free choice” of husband and wife and by fixing the responsible minimum marrying ages for women and men, transfer the responsibility for the marriage; financially and otherwise, from the large family group to a smaller family unit; the unit which is now considered normal in the Capitalist world.

This change in the status of women has evoked great interest in China, and Chinese newspapers and magazines frequently carry photos showing the various jobs women have undertaken. One day the Peking newspapers carried on their front pages photographs of women proudly driving the local trams, other pictures showed women repairing these trams, and others, gear-cutting in the machine building shops. A picture of a group of smiling nurses had a caption to the effect that 85,000 medical assistants were to be trained in the next five years. On the railways some of the engine crews are women and there is a train on the Peking-Tientsin run entirely staffed by women whose photographs show them as being understandably pleased with their accomplishments. There are many pictures published of proud "Labour Heroines ’’—those pacesetters of China’s industrialisation drive.

Work teams composed of functionaries of the People's Court and members of the Democratic Womens’ Federation and the Youth League, visit the villages to see that the Marriage Law is properly enforced. They help to settle marital disputes on the spot and illustrate the merits of the law through plays, skits and lantern slide exhibitions.

It is reported that the special panel meetings for husbands and mothers-in-law are proving very effective.

But as a lotus petal separated from the flower is carried along in the grip of the wind, so have the women of China been broken away from the relatively secure group-household to start on a separate course of life. This has at least begun with great hopes of happiness. The publication of the Marriage Law was accompanied by articles written by leading Chinese personalities—the-Vice-President of the Supreme People’s Court and the Vice-Chairman of the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation—anticipating domestic bliss as a consequence of the operation of this law. In other parts of the globe where somewhat similar laws obtain, the mounting figures of divorces, separations, and juvenile delinquency resulting from broken homes, give cause for doubts about such optimism.

And in China, some of the smiles must surely have changed to tears by now, for another photograph published later shows a parting between a young mother and her toddler at the entrance to a factory nursery. The caption reads—“Come, dear! Let your mother go to work."

Other pictures show women members of the armed forces in Korea of whom it is stated that they are merely in the medical corps but that others are taking part in the fighting as combat troops. This information has been borne out by reports in Western newspapers of women figuring in the fighting in Korea. Thus is the road to woman's “emancipation" via blood, toil, tears and sweat."

And so the world changes. But the more things change the more they often really stay the same; for in a class-dominated society so many reforms, on the eve of fulfilment, turn to dust and ashes. By the promulgation and enforcement of the Marriage Law of the Peoples' Republic of China are the women of China free—free to become wage-slaves.

Frank Offord

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.” The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million. “It’s a very good country for the rich man. Chauffeurs, servants, big houses. The question is, who is suffering? The common man.” :

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The anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom party (PVV) won 24 seats and third place in the Dutch national election last month, says he is forming international alliances to launch branches of his Islamophobic party across the Western world. Almost 1.5m Dutch people voted for the PVV in June. “The message, ‘stop Islam, defend freedom’, is a message that’s not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world.”

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The United Nations estimates that each year 5,000 mostly Muslim women and girls are shot, stoned, strangled, stabled, burned, or smothered by family members with the intention of cleansing shame from the family’s name. While most of these crimes occur in the Middle East and South Asia, immigration is taking them around the globe.

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Fears are growing for the fate of thousands of young girls in rural Mauritania, where campaigners say the cruel practice of force-feeding young girls for marriage is making a significant comeback since a military junta took over the West African country. Aminetou Mint Ely, a women’s rights campaigner, said girls as young as five were still being subjected to the tradition of leblouh every year. The practice sees them tortured into swallowing gargantuan amounts of food and liquid - and consuming their vomit if they reject it.

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As 14-year-old Nguyen Hoang Anh was being branded with hot irons, had solvents poured in his wounds and had his teeth pulled out with pliers, those who heard him ignored his cries. In most countries, suspicions of any kind of child abuse, let alone such a horrific case, would rouse a small army of social workers and police. Vietnam, however, has no such public system and only loose laws protecting children and other vulnerable people. “We don’t consider beating a child to be violence against children,” concedes Nguyen Hai Huu, director of the Ministry for Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs’ child-protection unit.

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An Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares, reports said Saturday, after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names. Two judges at the Bombay High Court on Friday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha. “Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to Indian newspapers.

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