at the beginning of the patriarchal period the husband buys her from
her father, who has to refund her purchase price if for any cause
whatever he repudiates her and sends her back to her family; later this
purchase price is returned to him and constitutes her dowry, which
her relatives are accustomed to double. From the moment when the wife
enters into her husband's house with a dowry, she ceases to be a slave
whom he may dismiss, sell and kill. The dowry, which in Rome and Athens
became a legal charge upon the property of the husband, was, in case
of her repudiation or divorce, to be restored to her in preference to
any creditor. "No pleasure is derived from the riches which a woman
brings into the household," says a fragment of Euripides, "they only
serve to render divorce difficult." The comic authors ridiculed the
husbands, who in fear of a suit over the dowry, fell into dependence
upon the wife. A character in Plautus says to a husband who is talking
against his wife, "You accepted the money of her dowry, you sold your
authority—imperium." The wealthy Roman matrons carried their insolence
to such a point that they did not trust the management of their dowry
to their husbands, they gave it over to the stewards, who sometimes
fulfilled with them another service, as the evil-speaking Martial
states.
Adultery on the part of the wife involved a legal divorce and the
restitution of the dowry, but rather than come to this painful
extremity, the husbands preferred to close their eyes to the foibles
of their wives; at Rome and at Athens the law had to strike at them
in order to recall them to their marital dignity; in China a certain
number of bamboo strokes were applied to the soles of their feet. The
penalties not being sufficient to encourage the husbands to repudiate
their adulterous wives, the law, in order to prop up masculine virtue,
permitted those who denounced the infidelity of the wife to retain a
part of the dowry; there were then men who married only in prospect
of the adultery of the wife. The Roman women evaded the law by having
themselves enrolled in the censor's book on the list of prostitutes,
to whom it did not apply. The number of matrons inscribed became so
considerable that the Senate, under Tiberius passed a decree forbidding
"women who had a patrician for a grandfather, husband or father to
traffic in their bodies." (Tacitus, Annals II., 85.) Adultery on the
part of the wife in the patrician society of antiquity, as well as
in the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century, had become so
general that it had so to speak entered into the social customs. It was
looked upon lightly as a corrective and accompaniment of marriage.
[35] The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that the religion of
Saint Simon had come "to put an end to that shameful traffic, that
legal prostitution, which under the name of marriage often blesses
the monstrous union of self-surrender and egoism, of light and of
ignorance, of youth and decrepitude."
[36] The French companies make no differences between the sexes because
they pay very small annuities. La Génerale, the most important one in
France, gives for $1,000 at the age of 50 years an annuity of $64.20;
at 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at 80 years $134.70. Thus
it realizes immense profits: its shares which in 1819 were worth 750
francs each were quoted last January at 31,300 francs.
[37] E. Legou. "Some Considerations on the Development of the Foetus."
Paris. 1903. The weights and measurements of M. Legou were made for
official use.
[38] The latest observations upon ants and bees tend to prove that the
fertilized eggs would give birth to females and to workers; and the
nonfertilized to males, which consequently would be born from eggs that
are less complex.
[39] A. W. Howit, who observed among the Australians a species of
sexual totemism, says that it often happens that the women and men of
one and the same clan fight, when the animal that serves as the totem
for one sex is killed by the other sex.
THE SOCIALIST IDEAL
Our comrades in Germany were discussing some time since the question
whether Socialism is a science. Socialism is not and cannot be a
science for the simple reason that it is a political party and must
disappear when its work is accomplished after the abolition of the
classes which gave birth to it; but the end which it pursues is
scientific.
Guizot, who had a vague idea of the theory of the class
struggle—himself a product of the Revolution, which was a dramatic
struggle between classes—said with good reason that a class cannot
emancipate itself until it possesses the qualities requisite for taking
the leadership of society; now one of these qualities is to have a
more or less definite conception of the social order which it proposes
to substitute for that which is oppressing it. This conception cannot
but be a social ideal, or, to employ a scientific word, a social
hypothesis; but an hypothesis, as well in the natural sciences as in
social science, may be utopian or scientific.
Socialism, because it is a political party of the oppressed class,
has therefore an ideal. It groups and organizes the efforts of the
individuals who wish to build on the ruins of capitalist society, based
upon individual property, an ideal or hypothetical society based upon
common property in the means of production.
Only through the class struggle can modern socialism realize its
social ideal, which possesses the qualities demanded of any hypothesis
that claims a scientific character. The fact of choosing a scientific
goal, and of trying to reach it only through the class struggle,
distinguishes it from the Socialism of 1848, which was pursuing through
the reconciliation of classes a social ideal which could not but be
utopian considering the historic moment in which it was conceived.
Socialism has thus evolved from Utopia into science. Engels has traced
the main lines of this evolution in his memorable pamphlet, "Socialism,
Utopian and Scientific." It is the same with all sciences, which begin
with Utopia to arrive at positive knowledge; this course is imposed by
the very nature of the human mind.
Man progresses in social life as in intellectual life, only by starting
from the known and traveling toward the unknown, and that unknown must
be represented by the imagination; that imaginary conception of the
unknown, which cannot but be hypothetical, is one of the most powerful
incentives to action, it is the very condition of every forward
step. It is natural that men like Bernstein in Germany and Jaurès in
France should seek to domesticate Socialism and to put it in tow of
liberalism, accusing it of hypnotising its soldiers with an ideal of
the year 3000, which makes them live in the expectation of a Messianic
"catastrophe" and reject the immediate advantages of an understanding
and co-operation with bourgeois parties, and which blinds them to
their shocking errors regarding the concentration of wealth, the
disappearance of small industry and the middle class, the increase of
class antagonisms, the spreading and intensification of the misery of
the working class, etc. These errors may have been plausible hypotheses
before 1848, but since then events have shown their falsity. This
unfortunate ideal prevents them from descending from the revolutionary
heights to accept the responsibilities of power and of setting aside
the cause of labor to devote themselves entirely tongue and pen, to
the rehabilitation of a millionaire leader; it obliges them to oppose
all exterior policies and acts, to vote not a cent nor a soldier for
colonial expeditions, which carry labor, Christianity, syphilis and the
alcoholism of civilization to the barbaric tribes. The neo-methodists
of the ancient and outworn gospel of the brotherhood of classes advise
the socialists to suppress their ideal, or, since it unfortunately
captivates the masses of the people, to speak of it without caring
for it, as Jaurès does, that they may consecrate themselves to
practical necessities, to the vast plans of agricultural and industrial
co-operation, to popular universities, etc.
The dilettantes of politics, these practical groundlings of
opportunism, nevertheless hold themselves up for transcendent idealists
and march with their eyes fixed upon the stars, because they substitute
for ideas a brilliant orchestra of sonorous words and eternal
principles.
These bourgeois idealists edge their way in everywhere; after the
Revolution of 1789 they rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses
and their theories; according to them science should have stopped with
the study of facts in themselves without dreaming of uniting them into
a general system. "What is the use of cutting stones without putting
up a building," replied Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple
of Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his theory on the
continuity of species, which, only thirty years after his death, was
to take on a new birth with Darwin. They are still reproaching the
physiologists for wasting their time in elaborating hypotheses which
last on an average only three years and which cannot explain what
takes place in a muscle which contracts and in a brain which thinks.
They grumble against the hypotheses of the physicists, who do not know
the real nature of elasticity, of electrical conductivity, or even
what happens when a particle of sugar is dissolved. They would like
to prohibit scientists from any speculation because it is disastrous
and may lead into error. But the latter protest and declare that
imagination is one of the first and most indispensable faculties of
the scientist, and that the hypotheses to which they give birth, even
though they be erroneous and able to survive only three years, are
nevertheless the necessary condition of all scientific progress.
If the communist ideal were an hypothesis undemonstrable and false it
would still be a propelling force of social progress, but such is not
the case.
The hypothesis in science, as in the social field, is the more
undemonstrable and susceptible of error in proportion as the data
contributing to its elaboration are less numerous and more uncertain.
Greek science, which had to furnish a conception of the world when the
data regarding the phenomena of nature were of the most rudimentary,
was obliged to resort to hypotheses which for boldness and intuitive
accuracy are marvels of history and of thought; after having admitted,
according to the vulgar opinion, that the earth was flat, and that
the temple of Delphi was situated at its center, they put forth the
hypothesis of its spherical form, then undemonstrable.
Socialism, which dates from the first years of the nineteenth century,
started, like Greek science, from hypotheses the more erroneous, and
from ideal the more utopian, in that the social world which it proposed
to transform was less known; and at that epoch could not be known for
the excellent reason that it was in course of formation.
The machine operated by steam was beginning to edge into industry
where the tool, managed by the artisan, was moved by human power,
and in some rare circumstances by animals, wind or waterfalls. The
Socialist thinkers, as Engels observes, were then obliged to draw from
their own brain the social ideal which they could not extract from the
tumultuous economic environment in full course of transformation.
They grasped again, infusing new life into it, the communist ideal
which has slumbered in the mind of man since he emerged from the
communism of primitive society which the poetic Greek mythology calls
the golden age and which has awakened to shine here and there with a
glorious splendor at great epochs of social upheaval. They sought,
then, to establish communism, not because the economic environment
was ready for its introduction, but because men were miserable,
because the laws of justice and equality were violated, because the
precepts of the Christ could not be followed in their purity. The
communistic ideal, not springing from economic reality, was then but
an unconscious reminiscence of a prehistoric past, and came only
from idealistic notions upon a justice, an equality and a gospel law
no less idealistic; it is then idealistic in the second degree, and
consequently utopian.
The Socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century, who
rekindled the communist ideal, had the rare merit of giving it a
consistency less idealistic. They spoke little of the Christian
religion, of justice and of equality; Robert Owen laid the
responsibilities of social evils upon the family, property and
religion; Charles Fourier criticises the ideas of justice and morality
introduced by the bourgeois Revolution of '89 with incomparable
animation and irony. They did not weep over the misery of the poor,
but left that to Victor Hugo and the charlatans of romanticism. They
preached the social problem from its realistic side, the only side
from which it can be solved. They used their talents to prove that
a social organization of production would succeed in satisfying the
desires of all without reducing the share of any, not even that of the
privileged capitalist class. Meanwhile the recent application of steam
and machinery demanded also a new organization of labor, and this was
the constant concern of the industrial bourgeoisie. The socialists were
thus pursuing the same end as the industrials; bourgeois and socialists
might consequently come to an understanding. We therefore find in the
socialist sects of that epoch industrials, engineers and financiers
who in the second half of the century cast away their sympathy for the
workers and occupied an important place in capitalist society.
The socialism of that epoch could not under these conditions be
anything else than pacific; instead of entering on the struggle with
the capitalists, the socialists thought only of converting them to
their system of social reform from which they were to be the first to
benefit. They proclaimed the association of capital, intelligence and
labor, the interests of which, according to them, were identical! they
preached a mutual understanding between the employer and the employed,
between the exploiter and the exploited; they know no class struggle;
they condemned strikes and all political agitation, especially if it
were revolutionary; they desired order in the street and harmony in the
workshop. They demanded, finally, nothing more than was desired by the
new industrial bourgeoisie.
They foresaw that industry, strengthened by the motive power of steam,
machinery and the concentration of the instruments of labor, would have
a colossal producing power, and they had the simplicity to believe that
the capitalists would content themselves with taking only a reasonable
part of the wealth thus created, and would leave to their co-operators,
the manual and intellectual laborers, a portion sufficient to enable
them to live in comfort. This socialism was marvellously agreeable
to capital, since it promised an increase of wealth and advised an
understanding between the laborer and the employer. It recruited
the great majority of its adepts in the educational hotbeds of the
bourgeoisie. It was utopian, therefore it was the socialism of the
intellectuals.
But precisely because it was utopian, the laborers, in constant
antagonism with their employers on questions of labor and hours,
looked on it with suspicion. They could understand nothing of this
socialism which condemned strikes and political action and which
assumed to harmonize the interests of capital and labor, of the
exploiter and exploited. They kept aloof from the socialists and gave
all their sympathies to the bourgeois republicans, because they were
revolutionary. They joined their secret societies and climbed with them
upon the barricades to make riots and political revolutions.
Marx and Engels took socialism at the point to which the great utopians
had brought it, but instead of torturing their brains to improvise the
organization of labor and of production, they studied that which was
already created by the very necessities of the new mechanical industry
which had arrived at a degree of development sufficient to permit
its power and its tendency to be apparent. Its productivity was so
enormous, as Fourier and Saint Simon had foreseen, that it was capable
of providing abundantly for the normal needs of all the members of
society. This was the first time in history that such a productive
power had been observed, and it was because capitalist production could
satisfy all needs, and for that reason alone, that it is possible to
reintroduce communism, that is to say the equal participation of all in
social wealth, and the free and complete development of the physical,
intellectual and moral faculties. Communism is no longer a utopia but a
possibility.
Machinery replaces the individualistic production of the small
industry, by the communistic production of the capitalistic factory,
but property in the means of labor has remained individual, as in the
time of the small industry. There is then a contradiction between the
individualistic mode of possession and the communist mode of production
and this contradiction translates itself into the antagonism between
the laborer and the capitalist employer. The producers, who form the
immense majority of the nation, no longer possess the instruments
of labor, the possession of which is centralized in the idle hands
of a decreasing minority. The social problem imposed by mechanical
production will be solved, as the social problems imposed by preceding
modes of production have been solved, by precipitating the evolution
begun by economic force, by finishing the expropriation of the
individual in the means of production, by giving to the communistic
mode of production the communistic mode of possession which it demands.
The communism of contemporary socialists no longer proceeds, like that
of former times, from the cerebral lucubrations of gifted thinkers; it
proceeds from economic reality, it is the final goal of the economic
forces which, without attracting the attention of the capitalists and
their intellectuals, have fashioned the communistic mold of a new
society, the coming of which we only have to hasten. Communism, then,
is no longer a utopian hypothesis; it is a scientific ideal. It may be
added that never has the economic structure of any society been better
and more completely analyzed than capitalist society, and that never
was a social ideal conceived with such numerous and positive data as
the communist idea of modern socialism.
Although it is the economic forces which fashion men at the pleasure
and spur them to action, and although these constitute the mysterious
force determining the great currents of history which the Christians
attribute to God, and the free-thinking bourgeois assign to Progress,
to Civilization, to the Immortal Principles and other similar manitous,
worthy of savage tribes, they are nevertheless the product of human
activity. Man, who created them and brought them into the world, has
thus far let himself be guided by them; yet now that he has understood
their nature and grasped their tendency, he can act upon their
evolution. The socialists who are accused of being stricken by Oriental
fatalism and of relying upon the good pleasure of economic forces to
bring to light the communist society instead of crossing their arms
like the fakirs of official Economics, and of bending the knee before
its fundamental dogma, _laissez faire_, _laissez passer_, propose on
the contrary to subdue them, as the blind forces of nature have been
subdued, and force them to do good to men instead of leaving them to
work misery to the toilers of civilization. They do not wait for their
ideal to fall from heaven as the Christians hope for the grace of
God, and the capitalists for wealth; they prepare, on the contrary,
to realize it, not by appealing to the intelligence of the capitalist
class and to its sentiments of justice and humanity, but by fighting
it, by expropriating it from its political power, which protects its
economic despotism.
Socialism, because it possesses a social ideal, has in consequence
a criticism of its own. Every class which struggles for its
enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition
with that of the ruling class. The struggle is waged at first in
the ideological world before the physical shock of the revolutionary
battle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of the society which
must be revolted against, for "the ideas of the ruling class are the
ideas of society," or these ideas are the intellectual reflection of
its material interests.
Thus, the wealth of the ruling class is produced by slave labor;
religion, ethics, philosophy and literature agree in authorizing
slavery. The ugly God of the Jews and Christianity strikes with his
curse the progeny of Ham, that it may furnish slaves. Aristotle, the
encyclopedic thinker of Greek philosophy, declares that slaves are
predestined by nature and that no rights exist for them, for there
can be no rights except between equals. Euripides in his tragedies
preaches the doctrine of servile morality; St. Paul, St. Augustine and
the Church teach slaves submission to their earthly masters that they
may deserve the favor of their heavenly master; Christian civilization
introduced slavery into America and maintains it there until economic
phenomena prove that slave labor is a method of exploitation more
costly and less profitable than free labor.
At the epoch when the Greco-Roman civilization was dissolving, when the
labor of artisans and free workers began to be substituted for slave
labor, pagan religion, philosophy and literature decided to accord them
certain rights. The same Euripides who advised the slave to lose his
personality in that of the master does not wish him to be despised.
"There is nothing shameful in slavery but the name," says the pedagogue
in Ion, "the slave, moreover, is not inferior to the free man when
he has a noble heart." The mysteries of Eleusis and of Orphism, like
Christianity, which continues their work, admit slaves among their
initiated and promise them liberty, equality and happiness after death.
The dominating class of the Middle Ages being military, the Christian
religion and social ethics condemned lending money at interest, and
covered the lender with infamy; to take interest for money loaned
was then something so ignominious that the Jewish race, obliged to
specialize itself in the trade of money, still bears the shame of it.
But today, now that the Christians have become Jews, and the ruling
class lives on the interest of its capital, the trade of the lender at
interest is the most honorable, the most desirable, the most exclusive.
The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class
is imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and
political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and
secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the
oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness
of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its
emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society
opposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.