Woman under socialism

by August Bebel

Moreover the agricultural fields of Ireland are, in great measure, in the hands of a large number of small tenants, who are not able to cultivate the land in the most profitable manner. Thus Ireland presents the aspect of a country that is retrogressing from an agricultural into a pastoral condition. The population, that at the beginning of the nineteenth century was over eight million strong, has declined to about five million, and still several millions are "in excess." Ireland's normal state of rebellion against England is thus easily explained; and yet the struggle of the "Home Ruler" aims only at the creation of an Irish landlord class and no wise carries the wished-for deliverance to the mass of the Irish people. The Irish people will perceive that so soon as the Home Ruler shall carry out his plans. Scotland presents a picture similar to that of Ireland with regard to the ownership and cultivation of its soil.[231]

A similar development reappears in Hungary, a country that entered upon the modern field of development only recently. Hungary, a land in point of the fertility of her soil, as rich as few in Europe, is overloaded with debt, and her population, pauperized and in the hands of usurers, emigrates in large numbers. Hungary's soil is now concentrated in the hands of modern capitalist magnates, who carry on a ruinous system of cultivation in forest and field so that Hungary is not far from the time when it will have ceased to be a grain exporting country. It is quite similarly with Italy. In Italy, just as in Germany, the political unity of the nation has taken capitalist development powerfully under the arm; but the thrifty peasants of Piedmont and Lombardy, of Tuscany, Romagna and Sicily are ever more impoverished and go to ruin. Swamps and moors are reappearing on the sites occupied but recently by the well cultivated gardens and fields of small peasants. Before the very gates of Rome, in the so-called Campagna, a hundred thousand hectares of land lie fallow in a region that once was the "garden of Rome." Swamps cover the ground, and exhale their poisonous miasmas. If, with the application of the proper means the Campagna were thoroughly drained and properly irrigated, the population of Rome would have a fertile source of food. But Italy suffers of the ambition to become a "leading power:" she is ruining herself with military and naval armaments and with African colonization plans, and, consequently, has no funds left for such tasks as the reclaiming of the Campagna for cultivation. And as the Campagna, so are South Italy and particularly Sicily. The latter, once the granary of Rome, sinks ever more into deepening poverty. There is no more sucked-out, poverty-stricken and maltreated people in all Europe than the Sicilian. The easily-contented sons of the most beautiful region of all Europe overrun half Europe and the United States as lowerers of wages because they care not to starve to death upon the native soil that has ceased to be their property. Malaria, that frightful fever, is spreading over Italy to an extent that, frightened at the prospect, the government instituted in 1882 an investigation, which brought to light the deplorable fact that, of the 69 provinces of the country, 32 were severely afflicted by the disease, 32 were infected, and only 5 had so far remained free. The disease, once known only in the rural districts, penetrated the cities, where the urban, increased by the rural proletariat, constitutes a center of infection.

These facts, together with what has been said touching the effects and results of the capitalist system of production, teach us that want and misery with the masses are not the results of insufficiency in the means of existence, but of an unequal distribution, that furnishes some with a superfluity and condemns others to privation. It causes the destruction and squandering of supplies, and, along with that, negligence in producing these. The Malthusian assertions have sense only from the standpoint of the system of capitalist production. Whoever stands on that principle has every reason to defend it, otherwise the ground would slip from under him.

On the other side, however, the capitalist system itself favors the production of children, in so far as it needs cheap "hands" in the shape of such in its factories. The begetting of children, moreover, often becomes a matter of calculation with the proletariat. They cost the parents little or nothing: they soon earn their own support. In the house industries the proletarian is even obliged to have many children: they equip him all the better for the competitive struggle. It certainly is an abominable system: it conceals the pauperization of the workingman and it provokes his own rendering of himself superfluous through the children who work for the most miserable of wages. The immorality and harmfulness of this system are obvious, and they spread with the extension of capitalism. It is precisely for that reason that the bourgeois ideologists—and all bourgeois economists are that—defend the Malthusian theories. Hence in Germany also and in particular the notion of "over-production" ever finds support among the bourgeoisie. Capital is the innocent defendant, the workingman is the criminal.

Unfortunately, however, for this theory Germany has "superfluity," not of proletarians only, but also of "intellectuals." Capital brings about not only an over-production of soil, goods, workingmen, women and children, but also of "officials and learning"—as we shall show. There is only one thing that is not "superfluous" in this capitalist world—capital and its owner, the capitalist.

If the capitalist economists are Malthusians they are simply what their capitalist interests compel them to be. Only, they should not shift their bourgeois whims to the shoulders of Socialist society. John Stuart Mill says among other things: "But Communism is precisely the state of things in which opinion might be expected to declare itself with greatest intensity against this kind of selfish intemperance. An augmentation of numbers which diminished the comfort or increased the toil of the mass, would then cause (which now it does not) immediate and unmistakable inconvenience to every individual in the association; inconvenience which could not then be imputed to the avarice of employers, or the unjust privileges of the rich. In such altered circumstances, opinion could not fail to reprobate, and if reprobation did not suffice, to repress by penalties of some description, this or any other culpable self-indulgence at the expense of the community. The Communistic scheme, instead of being peculiarly open to the objection drawn from danger of over-population, has the recommendation of tending in an especial degree to the prevention of that evil." And Prof. Ad. Wagner says: "Least of all could freedom of marriage or freedom of procreation be tolerated in a Socialist community."[232] These authors proceed from the theory that the tendency towards over-population is one common to all social conditions, but both allow that Socialism is better able than any other social system to establish the equilibrium between population and food. The latter is true, not so the former.

True enough, there were one time Socialists, who, tainted by the Malthusian theories, perceived the "imminent danger" of over-population. But these Socialist Malthusians have disappeared. A clearer insight into the nature of bourgeois society, together with the fact that, judging from the plaintive songs of our Agrarians, we produce not too little but too much food, and that the resulting low prices render the production of foodstuffs unprofitable, has enlightened them on the subject.

A part of our Malthusians imagine—and the chorus of the mouth-pieces of the bourgeoisie parrot-like echo their utterances—that a Socialist society, in which there is freedom in the choice of love and ample provision for a livelihood worthy of human beings, must soon degenerate into a rabbit warren: it would succumb to excessive sexual indulgence and to excessive procreation. Exactly the reverse is most likely to happen, as certain observations go to prove. Until now the largest number of children were had, not by the best, but by the worst situated. It may even be said without being guilty of exaggeration: the poorer the condition of a proletarian stratum, the more numerous also is its average blessing of children, conceding exceptions here and there. Even Virchow confirms this. He says: "As the English workingman in his deepest degradation, in the utter vacancy of the mind, finally knows but two sources of enjoyment, drunkenness and coition, so did the population of Upper Silesia, until recent years, concentrate all its wishes, all its desires upon these two things. Liquor and the gratification of sexual cravings had become sovereign with it. Hence it is easy to understand that its population gained as rapidly in numbers as it lost in physical vigor and moral fibre." Karl Marx expresses himself similarly when he says in "Capital:" "As a matter of fact, not only the number of births and deaths but the absolute size of families is in reverse ratio to the height of wages, i. e., to the means of subsistence which the various categories of workmen have at their disposal. This law of capitalist society would sound absurd among savages, or even civilized colonists. It reminds us of the enormous power of reproduction among animals that are individually weak and much hunted down;" and Marx furthermore quotes Laing, who says: "If all the world were in comfortable circumstances, the earth would soon be depopulated." We see Laing's views are opposed to Malthus: he is of the opinion that a good living is not conducive to the increase but to the decrease of births. In the same vein says Herbert Spencer: "Always and everywhere progress and procreative capacity are opposed to each other. It follows that the higher development, that mankind looks forward to, will probably have as a result a decline in procreation."

Thus we see men, who otherwise differ, absolutely at one on this head, and their views coincide wholly with ours.