theories of the socialist party; they wish to impose upon it a new
method of action. It must no longer strive to conquer the public powers
by a great struggle, legal or revolutionary as need may be, but let
itself be conquered by every ministry of a republican coalition; it is
no longer to oppose the socialist party to all the bourgeois parties;
what is needed is to put it at the service of the liberal party; we
must no longer organize it for the class struggle, but keep it ready
for all the compromises of politicians. And to further the triumph of
the new method of action, they propose to disorganize the socialist
party, to break up its old systems and to demolish the organizations
which for twenty years have labored to give the workers a sense of
their class interests and to group them in a party of economic and
political struggle.
But the intellectuals will lose their labors; thus far they have only
succeeded in drawing closer the ties uniting the socialists of the
different organizations, and in making themselves ridiculous.
The intellectuals ought to have been the first of all the various
groups to revolt against capitalist society, in which they occupy
a subordinate position so little in keeping with their hopes and
their talents, but they do not even understand it; they have such a
confused idea of it that Auguste Comte, Renan, and others more or less
distinguished have cherished the dream of reviving for their benefit an
aristocracy copied after the model of the Chinese mandarin system. Such
an idea is a reflection of past ages in their heads, for nothing is
in more absolute opposition with the modern social movement than such
pretensions. The intellectuals in previous states of society formed
a world outside and above that of production, having charge only of
education, of the direction of religious worship, and of the political
administration.
The mechanic industry of these societies combine in the same producer,
manual labor and intellectual labor; it was for example the same
cabinetmaker who designed and executed the piece of furniture, who
bought its first material and who even undertook its sale. Capitalist
production has divorced two functions which once were indissolubly
united; on the one side it puts the manual workers, who become more
and more servants of the machine, and on the other the intellectual
workers, engineers, chemists, managers, etc. But these two categories
of workers, however different and contrary they may be in their
education and habits, are welded together, to the point that a
capitalist industry can not be carried on without manual laborers any
more than without intellectual wage-workers.
United in production, united under the yoke of capitalist exploitation,
united they should be also in revolt against the common enemy. The
intellectuals, if they understood their own real interests would come
in crowds to socialism, not through philanthropy, not through pity for
the miseries of the workers, not through affectation and snobbery,
but to save themselves, to assure the future welfare of their wives
and children, to fulfill their duty to their class. They ought to be
ashamed of being left behind in the social battle by their comrades in
the manual category. They have many things to teach them, but they have
still much to learn from them; the workingmen have a practical sense
superior to theirs, and have given proof of an instinctive intuition
of the communist tendencies of modern capitalism which is lacking to
the intellectuals, who have only been able by a conscious mental effort
to arrive at this conception. If only they had understood their own
interests, they would long since have turned against the capitalist
class the education which it has generously distributed in order
better to exploit them; they would have utilized their intellectual
capacities, which are enriching their masters, as so many improved
weapons to fight capitalism and to conquer the freedom of their class,
the wage-working class.
Capitalist production, which has overthrown the old conditions of life
and of work, has elaborated new forms, which already can be discerned
without supernatural vision, but which to the intellectuals remain
sealed under seven seals. One of the leading lights of intellectualism,
M. Durkheim, in his book, "The Division of Labor," which made some
noise in university circles, can not conceive of society except on
the social pattern of ancient Egypt, each laborer remaining, his life
through, penned up in one single trade. However, unless one is so
unfortunate as to be affected by the hopeless near-sightedness of the
Ecole Normale, one can not help seeing that the machine is suppressing
trades, one after the other, in a way to let only one survive, that
of the machinist, and that when it has finished its revolutionary
work which the socialists will complete by revolutionizing capitalist
society, the producer of the communist society will plow and sow with
the machine today, will spin, will turn wood or polish steel to-morrow,
and will exercise in turn all the trades to the greater profit of his
health and his intelligence.
The industrial applications of mechanics, chemistry and physics,
which, monopolized by capital, oppress the worker, will, when they
shall be common property, emancipate man from toil and give him leisure
and liberty.
Mechanical production, which under capitalist direction can only buffet
the worker back and forth from periods of over-work to periods of
enforced idleness, will when developed and regulated by a communist
administration, require from the producer, to provide for the normal
needs of society, only a maximum day of two or three hours in the
workshop, and when this time of necessary social labor is fulfilled he
will be able to enjoy freely the physical and intellectual pleasures of
life.
The artist then will paint, will sing, will dance, the writer will
write, the musician will compose operas, the philosopher will build
systems, the chemist will analyze substances not to gain money, to
receive a salary, but to deserve applause, to win laurel wreaths, like
the conquerors at the Olympic games, but to satisfy their artistic and
scientific passion; for one does not drink a glass of champagne or kiss
the woman he loves for the benefit of the gallery. The artist and the
scientist may then repeat the enthusiastic words of Kepler, that hero
of science: "The elector of Saxony with all his wealth can not equal
the pleasure I have felt in composing the Mysterium Cosmographicum."
Will not the intellectuals end by hearing the voice of the socialist
calling them to the rescue, to emancipate science and art from the
capitalist yoke, to liberate thought from the slavery of commercialism?
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Ever since the French Revolution the law has required the words
"Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité." to be placed over the door of every
public building in France.—Translator.
[32] It is a well-known fact that in the American establishments of
these and similar companies each workman before receiving employment
must sign papers transferring to the corporation the title to all
inventions made by him while in its service.—Translator.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM
The nineteenth century was the century of capitalism. Capitalism
filled that century to overflowing with its commerce, its industry,
its manners, its fashions, its literature, its art, its science,
its philosophy, its religion, its politics and its civil code, more
universal than the laws imposed by Rome upon the nations of the ancient
world. The capitalist movement, starting from England, the United
States and France, has shaken the foundations of Europe and of the
world. It has forced the old feudal monarchies of Austria and Germany
and the barbaric despotism of Russia to put themselves in line; and in
these last days it has gone into the extreme East, into Japan, where
it has overthrown the feudal system and implanted the industry and the
politics of capitalism.
Capitalism has taken possession of our planet; its fleets bring
together the continents which oceans had separated; its railroads,
spanning mountains and deserts, furrow the earth; the electric wires,
the nervous system of the globe, bind all nations together, and their
palpitations reverberate in the great centers of population. Now for
the first time there is a contemporary history of the world. Events in
Australia, the Transvaal, China, are known in London, Paris, New York,
at the moment they are brought about, precisely as if they happened in
the outskirts of the city where the news is published.
Civilized nations live off the products of the whole earth. Egypt,
India, Louisiana, furnish the cotton, Australia the wool, Japan the
silk, China the tea, Brazil the coffee, New Zealand and the United
States the meat and grain. The capitalist carries in his stomach and on
his back the spoils of the universe.
The study of natural phenomena has undergone an unprecedented, an
unheard-of, development. New sciences, geology, chemistry, physics,
etc., have arisen. The industrial application of the forces of nature
and of the discoveries of science has taken on a still more startling
development; some of the geometrical discoveries of the scientists
of Alexandria, two thousand years old, have for the first time been
utilized.
The production of machine industry can provide for all demand and more.
The mechanical application of the forces of nature has increased man's
productive forces tenfold, a hundredfold. A few hours' daily labor,
furnished by the able-bodied members of the nation, would produce
enough to satisfy the material and intellectual needs of all.
But what has come of the colossal and wonderful development of science,
industry and commerce in the nineteenth century? Has it made humanity
stronger, healthier, happier? Has it given leisure to the producers?
Has it brought comfort and contentment to the people?
Never has work been so prolonged, so exhausting, so injurious to man's
body and so fatal to his intelligence. Never has the industrial labor
which undermines health, shortens life and starves the intellect been
so general, been imposed on such ever-growing masses of laborers. The
men, women and children of the proletariat are bent under the iron yoke
of machine industry. Poverty is their reward when they work, starvation
when they lose their jobs.
In former stages of society, famine appeared only when the earth
refused her harvests. In capitalist society, famine sits at the hearth
of the working class when granaries and cellars burst with the fruits
of the earth, and when the market is gorged with the products of
industry.
All the toil, all the production, all the suffering of the working
class has but served to heighten its physical and mental destitution,
to drag it down from poverty into wretchedness.
Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the
social and political life of a century of science and industry, has
become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like
the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to
provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they
dared demand the right to work—a slave's right.[33]
The capitalist class has also made a failure of itself. It has seized
upon the social wealth to enjoy it, and never was the ruling class more
incapable of enjoyment. The newly rich, those who have built up their
fortunes by accumulating the filchings from labor, live like strangers
in the midst of luxury and artistic treasures, with which they surround
themselves through a foolish vanity, to pay homage to their millions.
The leading capitalists, the millionaires and billionaires, are
sad specimens of the human race, useless and hurtful. The mark of
degeneracy is upon them. Their sickly offspring are old at birth. Their
organs are sapped with diseases. Exquisite meats and wines load down
their tables, but the stomach refuses to digest them; women expert in
love perfume their couches with youth and beauty, but their senses are
be-numbed. They own palatial dwellings in enchanting sites, and they
have no eyes, no feeling for joyful nature, with its eternal youth
and change. Sated and disgusted with everything, they are followed
everywhere by ennui as by their shadows. They yawn at rising and when
they go to bed; they yawn at their fests and at their orgies. They
began yawning in their mother's womb.
The pessimism which, in the wake of capitalist property, made its
appearance in ancient Greece six centuries before Jesus Christ, and
which has since formed the foundation of the moral and religious
philosophy of the capitalist class, became the leading characteristic
of the philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century. The
pessimism of Theognis sprang from the uncertainties and vicissitudes of
life in the Greek cities, torn by the perpetual wars between rich and
poor; the pessimism of the capitalist is the bitter fruit of satiety,
ennui and the impoverishment of the blood.
The capitalist class is falling into its second childhood; its
decreptitude appears in its literature, now returning to its
starting point. Romantic literature, the literary form proper to the
capitalist class, which started out with the romantic Christianity
of Chateaubriand, is returning to the same point, after passing
through the historical novel and the character novel. (Witness in this
country the immense sale of "Ben Hur" and its imitators.—Translator.)
Capitalism, which in its virile and combative youth in the eighteenth
century had wished to emancipate itself from Christianity, resigns
itself in its old age to practices of the grossest superstition.
The capitalist class, bankrupt, old, useless and hurtful, has finished
its historic mission; it persists as ruling class only through its
acquired momentum. The proletariat of the twentieth century will
execute the decree of history; will drive it from its position of
social control. Then the stupendous work in science and industry
accomplished by civilized humanity, at the price of such toil and
suffering, will engender peace and happiness; then will this vale of
tears be transformed into an earthly paradise.
FOOTNOTE:
[33] I allude to the Days of June, 1848. The Insurgents demanded the
"Right to Work."
THE WOMAN QUESTION
The bourgeois has thought and still thinks that woman ought to
remain at home and devote her activity to supervising and directing
the housekeeping, caring for her husband, and manufacturing and
nourishing children. Even Xenophon, at the time when the bourgeoisie
was newly born and was taking its shape in ancient society, traced
the main outlines of this ideal of woman. But if through the course
of centuries, this ideal may have appeared reasonable, because it
corresponded to economic conditions which prevailed, it is no longer
anything more than an ideological survival, since these conditions have
ceased to exist.
The domestication of woman presupposes that she fulfills in the
household certain numerous functions which absorb all her energy; now,
the most important and the most exacting of these domestic labors—the
spinning of wool and linen, the cutting and making up of clothing,
laundry work, baking, etc.,—are carried on by capitalistic industry.
It furthermore presupposes that man by his contribution to the family
capital and his earnings provides for the material needs of the
family; now, among the comfortable bourgeoisie, marriage is as much an
association of capitals[34] as a union of persons and often the capital
contributed by the wife exceeds that of the husband, and in the small
bourgeoisie the gains of the father of the family have fallen so low
that the children,—girls as well as boys,—are compelled to earn their
living in business, railroad offices, banks, teaching, civil service
positions, etc., while it often happens that the young wife continues
to work outside in order to help out the resources of the housekeeping,
when the earnings of the husband do not suffice to cover the expenses.
The daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, as well as those
of the working class, thus enter into competition with their father,
brothers and husband. This economic antagonism, which the bourgeoisie
had prevented from developing by confining the wife to the family
dwelling, is becoming general and is intensified in proportion as
capitalistic production develops; it invades the fields of the liberal
professions—medicine, law, literature, journalism, the sciences,
etc.,—where man had reserved for himself a monopoly, which he imagined
was to be eternal. The laborers, as is always the case, have been the
first to draw the logical consequences of the participation of woman
in social production; they have replaced the ideal of the artisan,—the
wife who is nothing but a housekeeper,—by a new ideal,—woman as a
companion in their economic and political struggles for the raising of
wages and the emancipation of labor.
The bourgeois has not yet succeeded in understanding that his ideal
is already long since out of date and that it must be remodeled
to correspond to the new conditions of the social environment;
nevertheless since the first half of the nineteenth century the ladies
of the bourgeoisie have begun to protest against their inferior
position in the family, so much the more intolerable in that their
dowry placed them on a footing of equality with the husband; they
rebelled against the domestic slavery and the parsimonious life to
which they were condemned, as well as the deprivation of intellectual
and material enjoyments which was imposed upon them; the bolder ones
went so far as to demand free love and to ally themselves with the
utopian sects which preached the emancipation of woman.[35] The
philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they
would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest
of the family, which they declared could not survive without the
subjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on
of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote
herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man
might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties.
These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the
cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which,
by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child's
cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the
working-class family.
The bourgeois ladies laughed at the sermons, equally imbecile and
ethical, of these solemn philosophers; they kept on their way and
attained the end they set for themselves; like the patrician lady of
ancient Rome and the countess of the eighteenth century, they threw
off the cares of housekeeping and of the nursing of the child upon
mercenaries, that they might devote themselves wholly to the toilet,
that they might be the most luxuriously arrayed dolls in the capitalist
world and in order to make business move. The daughters and wives of
American plutocracy have attained the extreme limits of this sort of
emancipation; they are transforming their fathers and husbands into
accumulators of millions, which they squander madly. Since the toilet
does not exhaust the entire activity of the ladies of capitalism, they
find amusement in breaking the marriage contract in order to assert
their independence and improve the race. The Communist Manifesto
remarks that the innumerable divorce suits in which adultery is alleged
are indisputable proofs of the respect inspired in the bourgeois of
both sexes by the sacred bonds of marriage which the "licentious
socialists" talk of loosening.
When the daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, obliged to
earn their living and to increase the resources of the family, began
to invade the stores, the offices, the civil service and the liberal
professions, the bourgeois were seized with anxiety for their means
of existence already so reduced; feminine competition would reduce
them still further. The intellectuals who took up the defense of the
males, thought it prudent not to start afresh with the ethical sermons
which had miscarried so piteously in the case of the wealthy bourgeois
ladies;—they appealed to science; they demonstrated by reasons which
were irrefutable and loftily scientific that woman cannot emerge from
the occupations of housekeeping without violating the laws of nature
and history. They proved to their complete satisfaction that woman
is an inferior being, incapable of receiving a higher intellectual
education and of furnishing the combination of attention, energy and
agility demanded by the professions in which she was entering into
competition with man. Her brain, less voluminous, less heavy and less
complex than that of man, is a "child's brain." Her less developed
muscles have not the strength for attack and for resistance; the
bones of her forearm, her pelvis, her femur, and in fact all her
osseous, muscular and nervous system do not permit her to undertake
more than the routine of the household. Nature designed her in all her
organization to be the servant of man, just as the odious god of the
Jews and Christians marked out the race of Ham for slavery.
History contributed its startling confirmation of these ultra
scientific truths; the philosophers and the historians affirmed that
always and everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had been
shut up in the house, in the woman's apartments; if such had been her
lot in the past, such was to be her destiny in the future, was the
positive declaration of Auguste Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois
philosophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, went him one better:
he seriously declared that social statistics proclaimed the inferiority
of woman, since the number of female criminals is below that of male
criminals; while buried in these figures, he might have added that the
statistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferiority. Thus we see
that ethics, anatomy, physiology, social statistics and history riveted
forever upon woman the chains of domestic servitude.
II.
Bachofen, Morgan and a crowd of anthropologists have revised the
opinion of the historians and philosophers upon the role played by
woman in the past. They have shown that everywhere the paternal
family, which subordinated woman to man, had been preceded by the
maternal family, which gave the first place to woman. The Greek
language contains the record of her two conditions: while the Spartans,
among whom matriarchal customs persisted, still continued to call
her _despoina_, the mistress of the house, the sovereign, the other
Greeks gave to the wife the name _damar_, the subdued, the vanquished.
The Odyssey, in characterizing Nausicaa, says that she is _parthenos
admes_, the girl not subdued, that is to say, without a husband,
without a master. The modern expression "yoke of marriage" preserves
the ancient idea.