Marxian Socialism, which seeks to solve the complex problem of human
misery by economic and proletarian revolution, has manifested a new
vitality. Every shade of Socialistic thought and philosophy acknowledges
its indebtedness to the vision of Karl Marx and his conception of the
class struggle. Yet the relation of Marxian Socialism to the philosophy
of Birth Control, especially in the minds of most Socialists, remains
hazy and confused. No thorough understanding of Birth Control, its aims
and purposes, is possible until this confusion has been cleared
away, and we come to a realization that Birth Control is not merely
independent of, but even antagonistic to the Marxian dogma. In recent
years many Socialists have embraced the doctrine of Birth Control, and
have generously promised us that "under Socialism" voluntary motherhood
will be adopted and popularized as part of a general educational system.
We might more logically reply that no Socialism will ever be possible
until the problem of responsible parenthood has been solved.
Many Socialists to-day remain ignorant of the inherent conflict between
the idea of Birth Control and the philosophy of Marx. The earlier
Marxians, including Karl Marx himself, expressed the bitterest
antagonism to Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theories. A remarkable
feature of early Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete
unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrine have
been derided, denounced and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called
"law of population" was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox
Marxians, as a "tool of the capitalistic class," seeking to dampen the
ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better
world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish
class motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist
who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels,
Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and all the celebrated leaders and interpreters
of Marx's great "Bible of the working class," down to the martyred Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Birth Control has been looked upon as a
subtle, Machiavellian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the
blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalist
class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally
and sternly uncompromising.
Marxian vituperation of Malthus and his followers is illuminating. It
reveals not the weakness of the thinker attacked, but of the aggressor.
This is nowhere more evident than in Marx's "Capital" itself. In that
monumental effort, it is impossible to discover any adequate refutation
or even calm discussion of the dangers of irresponsible parenthood
and reckless breeding, any suspicion that this recklessness and
irresponsibility is even remotely related to the miseries of the
proletariat. Poor Malthus is there relegated to the humble level of
a footnote. "If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose essay on
Population appeared in 1798," Marx remarks somewhat tartly, "I
remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than
a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart,
Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single
sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet
caused was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had
passionate defenders in the United Kingdom.... `The Principles of
Population' was quoted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the
great destroyer of all hankerings after human development."(1)
The only attempt that Marx makes here toward answering the theory of
Malthus is to declare that most of the population theory teachers were
merely Protestant parsons.--"Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson
Malthus and his pupil the Arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing
of the lesser reverend scribblers in this line." The great pioneer of
"scientific" Socialism then proceeds to berate parsons as philosophers
and economists, using this method of escape from the very pertinent
question of surplus population and surplus proletariat in its relation
to labor organization and unemployment. It is true that elsewhere (2) he
goes so far as to admit that "even Malthus recognized over-population
as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his narrow fashion, he
explains it by the absolute over-growth of the laboring population, not
by their becoming relatively supernumerary." A few pages later, however,
Marx comes back again to the question of over-population, failing
to realize that it is to the capitalists' advantage that the working
classes are unceasingly prolific. "The folly is now patent," writes the
unsuspecting Marx, "of the economic wisdom that preaches to the laborers
the accommodation of their numbers to the requirements of capital. The
mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly affects
this adjustment. The first work of this adaptation is the creation of a
relatively surplus population or industrial reserve army. Its last work
is the misery of constantly extending strata of the army of labor, and
the dead weight of pauperism." A little later he ventures again in the
direction of Malthusianism so far as to admit that "the accumulation
of wealth at one pole is... at the same time the accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation
at the opposite pole." Nevertheless, there is no indication that Marx
permitted himself to see that the proletariat accommodates its numbers
to the "requirements of capital" precisely by breeding a large, docile,
submissive and easily exploitable population.
Had the purpose of Marx been impartial and scientific, this trifling
difference might easily have been overcome and the dangers of reckless
breeding insisted upon. But beneath all this wordy pretension and
economic jargon, we detect another aim. That is the unconscious
dramatization of human society into the "class conflict." Nothing was
overlooked that might sharpen and accentuate this "conflict." Marx
depicted a great melodramatic conflict, in which all the virtues were
embodied in the proletariat and all the villainies in the capitalist.
In the end, as always in such dramas, virtue was to be rewarded and
villainy punished. The working class was the temporary victim of a
subtle but thorough conspiracy of tyranny and repression. Capitalists,
intellectuals and the BOURGEOISIE were all "in on" this diabolic
conspiracy, all thoroughly familiar with the plot, which Marx was so
sure he had uncovered. In the last act was to occur that catastrophic
revolution, with the final transformation scene of the Socialist
millennium. Presented in "scientific" phraseology, with all the authority
of economic terms, "Capital" appeared at the psychological moment.
The heaven of the traditional theology had been shattered by Darwinian
science, and here, dressed up in all the authority of the new science,
appeared a new theology, the promise of a new heaven, an earthly
paradise, with an impressive scale of rewards for the faithful and
ignominious punishments for the capitalists.
Critics have often been puzzled by the tremendous vitality of this work.
Its predictions have never, despite the claims of the faithful, been
fulfilled. Instead of diminishing, the spirit of nationalism has
been intensified tenfold. In nearly every respect Marx's predictions
concerning the evolution of historical and economic forces have been
contradicted by events, culminating in the great war. Most of his
followers, the "revolutionary" Socialists, were swept into the whirlpool
of nationalistic militarism. Nevertheless, this "Bible of the working
classes" still enjoys a tremendous authority as a scientific work. By
some it is regarded as an economic treatise; by others as a philosophy
of history; by others as a collection of sociological laws; and finally
by others as a moral and political book of reference. Criticized,
refuted, repudiated and demolished by specialists, it nevertheless
exerts its influences and retains its mysterious vitality.
We must seek the explanation of this secret elsewhere. Modern psychology
has taught us that human nature has a tendency to place the cause of its
own deficiencies and weaknesses outside of itself, to attribute to some
external agency, to some enemy or group of enemies, the blame for
its own misery. In his great work Marx unconsciously strengthens
and encourages this tendency. The immediate effect of his teaching,
vulgarized and popularized in a hundred different forms, is to relieve
the proletariat of all responsibility for the effects of its reckless
breeding, and even to encourage it in the perpetuation of misery.
The inherent truth in the Marxian teachings was, moreover, immediately
subordinated to their emotional and religious appeal. A book that could
so influence European thought could not be without merit. But in the
process of becoming the "Bible of the working classes," "Capital"
suffered the fate of all such "Bibles." The spirit of ecclesiastical
dogmatism was transfused into the religion of revolutionary Socialism.
This dogmatic religious quality has been noted by many of the most
observant critics of Socialism. Marx was too readily accepted as the
father of the church, and "Capital" as the sacred gospel of the social
revolution. All questions of tactics, of propaganda, of class warfare,
of political policy, were to be solved by apt quotations from the "good
book." New thoughts, new schemes, new programs, based upon tested fact
and experience, the outgrowth of newer discoveries concerning the nature
of men, upon the recognition of the mistakes of the master, could only
be approved or admitted according as they could or could not be tested
by some bit of text quoted from Marx. His followers assumed that Karl
Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and that the duty of
the proletariat thenceforth was not to think for itself, but merely to
mobilize itself under competent Marxian leaders for the realization of
his ideas.
From the day of this apotheosis of Marx until our own, the "orthodox"
Socialist of any shade is of the belief that the first essential for
social salvation lies in unquestioning belief in the dogmas of Marx.
The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with
Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter
refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and
psychological aspects--these aspects, apparently, having no place in the
"economic interpretation of history." It has remained for George Bernard
Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than the
ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of rapid
multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the peasant
proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to arouse the
orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury. "But indeed the
more you degrade the workers," Shaw once wrote,(3) "robbing them of all
artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their
fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, upon the one pleasure
and the one human tie left to them--the gratification of their instinct
for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct
as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there
comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is
diabolic, and set up a cry of `over-population.' But your slaves are
beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits: and their poverty
breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness."
Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident
throughout the writings of the Marxians. The Marxian Socialists,
according to Kautsky, defended women in industry: it was right for woman
to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man! Man
must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist Guesde,
because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man! Bebel, the great
authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically studied
the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too excessive
fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to have an
"anti-generative" effect upon the agricultural population of Upper
Bavaria! Such are the results of the literal and uncritical acceptance
of Marx's static and mechanical conception of human society, a society
perfectly automatic; in which competition is always operating at maximum
efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy against the blameless
proletariat.
This lack of insight of the orthodox Marxians, long represented by
the German Social-Democrats, is nowhere better illustrated than in Dr.
Robinson's account of a mass meeting of the Social-Democrat party to
organize public opinion against the doctrine of Birth Control among
the poor.(4) "Another meeting had taken place the week before, at which
several eminent Socialist women, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Clara
Zetkin, spoke very strongly against limitation of offspring among the
poor--in fact the title of the discussion was GEGEN DEN GEBURTSTREIK!
`Against the birth strike!' The interest of the audience was intense.
One could see that with them it was not merely a dialectic question,
as it was with their leaders, but a matter of life and death. I came to
attend a meeting AGAINST the limitation of offspring; it soon proved to
be a meeting very decidedly FOR the limitation of offspring, for every
speaker who spoke in favor of the artificial prevention of conception
or undesired pregnancies, was greeted with vociferous, long-lasting
applause; while those who tried to persuade the people that a limited
number of children is not a proletarian weapon, and would not improve
their lot, were so hissed that they had difficulty going on. The
speakers who were against the... idea soon felt that their audience
was against them.... Why was there such small attendance at the regular
Socialistic meetings, while the meetings of this character were packed
to suffocation? It did not apparently penetrate the leaders' heads
that the reason was a simple one. Those meetings were evidently of
no interest to them, while those which dealt with the limitation of
offspring were of personal, vital, present interest.... What particularly
amused me--and pained me--in the anti-limitationists was the ease and
equanimity with which they advised the poor women to keep on bearing
children. The woman herself was not taken into consideration, as if she
was not a human being, but a machine. What are her sufferings, her labor
pains, her inability to read, to attend meetings, to have a taste of
life? What does she amount to? The proletariat needs fighters. Go on,
females, and breed like animals. Maybe of the thousands you bear a few
will become party members...."
The militant organization of the Marxian Socialists suggests that their
campaign must assume the tactics of militarism of the familiar type. As
represented by militaristic governments, militarism like Socialism has
always encouraged the proletariat to increase and multiply. Imperial
Germany was the outstanding and awful example of this attitude. Before
the war the fall in the birth-rate was viewed by the Junker party
with the gravest misgivings. Bernhardi and the protagonists of
DEUTSCHLAND-UBER-ALLES condemned it in the strongest terms. The Marxians
unconsciously repeat the words of the government representative, Krohne,
who, in a debate on the subject in the Prussian Diet, February 1916,
asserted: "Unfortunately this view has gained followers amongst the
German women.... These women, in refusing to rear strong and able
children to continue the race, drag into the dust that which is the
highest end of women--motherhood. It is to be hoped that the willingness
to bear sacrifices will lead to a change for the better.... We need
an increase in human beings to guard against the attacks of envious
neighbors as well as to fulfil our cultural mission. Our whole economic
development depends on increase of our people." Today we are fully aware
of how imperial Germany fulfilled that cultural mission of hers; nor
can we overlook the fact that the countries with a smaller birth-rate
survived the ordeal. Even from the traditional militaristic standpoint,
strength does not reside in numbers, though the Caesars, the Napoleons
and the Kaisers of the world have always believed that large exploitable
populations were necessary for their own individual power. If Marxian
dictatorship means the dictatorship of a small minority wielding power
in the interest of the proletariat, a high-birth rate may be necessary,
though we may here recall the answer of the lamented Dr. Alfred Fried to
the German imperialists: "It is madness, the apotheosis of unreason, to
wish to breed and care for human beings in order that in the flower of
their youth they may be sent in millions to be slaughtered wholesale by
machinery. We need no wholesale production of men, have no need of the
`fruitful fertility of women,' no need of wholesale wares, fattened and
dressed for slaughter What we do need is careful maintenance of those
already born. If the bearing of children is a moral and religious duty,
then it is a much higher duty to secure the sacredness and security of
human life, so that children born and bred with trouble and sacrifice
may not be offered up in the bloom of youth to a political dogma at the
bidding of secret diplomacy."
Marxism has developed a patriotism of its own, if indeed it has not yet
been completely crystallized into a religion. Like the "capitalistic"
governments it so vehemently attacks, it demands self-sacrifice and even
martyrdom from the faithful comrades. But since its strength depends
to so great a degree upon "conversion," upon docile acceptance of the
doctrines of the "Master" as interpreted by the popes and bishops of
this new church, it fails to arouse the irreligious proletariat.
The Marxian Socialist boasts of his understanding of "working class
psychology" and criticizes the lack of this understanding on the part
of all dissenters. But, as the Socialists' meetings against the
"birth strike" indicate, the working class is not interested in such
generalities as the Marxian "theory of value," the "iron law" of wages,
"the value of commodities" and the rest of the hazy articles of faith.
Marx inherited the rigid nationalistic psychology of the eighteenth
century, and his followers, for the most part, have accepted his
mechanical and superficial treatment of instinct.(5) Discontented
workers may rally to Marxism because it places the blame for their
misery outside of themselves and depicts their conditions as the result
of a capitalistic conspiracy, thereby satisfying that innate tendency
of every human being to shift the blame to some living person outside
himself, and because it strengthens his belief that his sufferings
and difficulties may be overcome by the immediate amelioration of his
economic environment. In this manner, psychologists tell us, neuroses
and inner compulsions are fostered. No true solution is possible, to
continue this analogy, until the worker is awakened to the realization
that the roots of his malady lie deep in his own nature, his own
organism, his own habits. To blame everything upon the capitalist and
the environment produced by capitalism is to focus attention upon merely
one of the elements of the problem. The Marxian too often forgets
that before there was a capitalist there was exercised the unlimited
reproductive activity of mankind, which produced the first overcrowding,
the first want. This goaded humanity into its industrial frenzy, into
warfare and theft and slavery. Capitalism has not created the lamentable
state of affairs in which the world now finds itself. It has grown
out of them, armed with the inevitable power to take advantage of our
swarming, spawning millions. As that valiant thinker Monsieur G. Hardy
has pointed out (6) the proletariat may be looked upon, not as the
antagonist of capitalism, but as its accomplice. Labor surplus, or
the "army of reserve" which as for decades and centuries furnished
the industrial background of human misery, which so invariably defeats
strikes and labor revolts, cannot honestly be blamed upon capitalism.
It is, as M. Hardy points out, of SEXUAL and proletarian origin. In
bringing too many children into the world, in adding to the total of
misery, in intensifying the evils of overcrowding, the proletariat
itself increases the burden of organized labor; even of the Socialist
and Syndicalist organizations themselves with a surplus of the docilely
inefficient, with those great uneducable and unorganizable masses. With
surprisingly few exceptions, Marxians of all countries have docilely
followed their master in rejecting, with bitterness and vindictiveness
that is difficult to explain, the principles and teachings of Birth
Control.
Hunger alone is not responsible for the bitter struggle for existence we
witness to-day in our over-advertised civilization. Sex, uncontrolled,
misdirected, over-stimulated and misunderstood, has run riot at the
instigation of priest, militarist and exploiter. Uncontrolled sex has
rendered the proletariat prostrate, the capitalist powerful. In this
continuous, unceasing alliance of sexual instinct and hunger we find the
reason for the decline of all the finer sentiments. These instincts tear
asunder the thin veils of culture and hypocrisy and expose to our gaze
the dark sufferings of gaunt humanity. So have we become familiar with
the everyday spectacle of distorted bodies, of harsh and frightful
diseases stalking abroad in the light of day; of misshapen heads and
visages of moron and imbecile; of starving children in city streets
and schools. This is the true soil of unspeakable crimes. Defect and
delinquency join hands with disease, and accounts of inconceivable and
revolting vices are dished up in the daily press. When the majority
of men and women are driven by the grim lash of sex and hunger in the
unending struggle to feed themselves and to carry the dead-weight of
dead and dying progeny, when little children are forced into factories,
streets, and shops, education--including even education in the Marxian
dogmas--is quite impossible; and civilization is more completely
threatened than it ever could be by pestilence or war.
But, it will be pointed out, the working class has advanced. Power has
been acquired by labor unions and syndicates. In the beginning power
was won by the principle of the restriction of numbers. The device of
refusing to admit more than a fixed number of new members to the unions
of the various trades has been justified as necessary for the upholding
of the standard of wages and of working conditions. This has been the
practice in precisely those unions which have been able through years
of growth and development to attain tangible strength and power. Such
a principle of restriction is necessary in the creation of a firmly and
deeply rooted trunk or central organization furnishing a local center
for more extended organization. It is upon this great principle of
restricted number that the labor unions have generated and developed
power. They have acquired this power without any religious emotionalism,
without subscribing to metaphysical or economic theology. For the
millenium and the earthly paradise to be enjoyed at some indefinitely
future date, the union member substitutes the very real politics
of organization with its resultant benefits. He increases his own
independence and comfort and that of his family. He is immune to
superstitious belief in and respect for the mysterious power of
political or economic nostrums to reconstruct human society according to
the Marxian formula.
In rejecting the Marxian hypothesis as superficial and fragmentary, we
do so not because of its so-called revolutionary character, its threat
to the existing order of things, but rather because of its superficial,
emotional and religious character and its deleterious effect upon the
life of reason. Like other schemes advanced by the alarmed and the
indignant, it relies too much upon moral fervor and enthusiasm. To build
any social program upon the shifting sands of sentiment and feeling, of
indignation or enthusiasm, is a dangerous and foolish task. On the other
hand, we should not minimize the importance of the Socialist movement
in so valiantly and so courageously battling against the stagnating
complacency of our conservatives and reactionaries, under whose
benign imbecility the defective and diseased elements of humanity
are encouraged "full speed ahead" in their reckless and irresponsible
swarming and spawning. Nevertheless, as George Drysdale pointed out
nearly seventy years ago;
"... If we ignore this and other sexual subjects, we may do whatever else
we like: we may bully, we may bluster, we may rage, We may foam at
the mouth; we may tear down Heaven with our prayers, we may exhaust
ourselves with weeping over the sorrows of the poor; we may narcotize
ourselves and others with the opiate of Christian resignation; we may
dissolve the realities of human woe in a delusive mirage of poetry and
ideal philosophy; we may lavish our substance in charity, and labor over
possible or impossible Poor Laws; we may form wild dreams of Socialism,
industrial regiments, universal brotherhood, red republics, or
unexampled revolutions; we may strangle and murder each other, we may
persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break
through our unnatural moral codes; we may burn alive if we please the
prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and our neighbor's
hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us, but not one step,
not one shall we advance, till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt
the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed." These words were
written in 1854. Recent events have accentuated their stinging truth.
(1) Marx: "Capital." Vol. I, p. 675.
(2) Op. cit. pp, 695, 707, 709.
(3) Fabian Essays in Socialism. p. 21.
(4) Uncontrolled Breeding, By Adelyne More. p. 84.
(5) For a sympathetic treatment of modern psychological
research as bearing on Communism, by two convinced
Communists see "Creative Revolution," by Eden and Cedar
Paul.
(6) Neo-Malthusianisme et Socialisme, p. 22.