‘Like Christians they demand that a single man be united to a single woman; but they teach that the wife should become the equal of the husband, and that, according to the special grace with which God has endowed her sex, she should be associated in the exercise of the triple function of religion, the State, and the family, so that the social individual, which hitherto has been the man only, may henceforward be man and woman.
‘The religion of Saint-Simon seeks only to abolish the shameful traffic, the legal prostitution, which, under the name of marriage, at present so frequently consecrates the unnatural union of self-sacrifice and egotism, of intelligence and ignorance, of youth and decrepitude.
‘Such are the most general ideas of the Saint-Simonists on the changes which they demand in the arrangements of property and in the social condition of women.’
PROGRAMME OF THE SOCIALISTIC WORKING MEN’S PARTY OF GERMANY
Gotha, May 1875.
I. Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture, and as useful work in general is possible only through society, so to society, that is to all its members, the entire product belongs; while as the obligation to labour is universal, all have an equal right to such product, each one according to his reasonable needs.
In the existing society the instruments of labour are a monopoly of the capitalist class; the subjection of the working class thus arising is the cause of misery and servitude in every form.
The emancipation of the working class demands the transformation of the instruments of labour into the common property of society and the co-operative control of the total labour, with application of the product of labour to the common good and just distribution of the same.
The emancipation of labour must be the work of the labouring class, in contrast to which all other classes are only a reactionary mass.
II. Proceeding from these principles, the socialistic working men’s party of Germany aims by all legal means at the establishment of the free state and the socialistic society, to destroy the Iron Law of Wages by abolishing the system of wage-labour, to put an end to exploitation in every form, to remove all social and political inequality.