Socialism: Positive and NegativeLa Monte, Robert Rives
Philosophy
Socialism: Positive and Negative
La Monte, Robert Rives
Socialism
"What we may anticipate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of sexual
relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is
mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will
disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new
generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives
have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of
power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any
occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or
for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic
consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a
moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They
will follow their own practice and fashion their own public
opinion--only this and nothing more."[20]
Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration
of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing
forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the
conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on
"The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois
writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons
has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars.
Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical
notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was
compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by
the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow.
In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she
suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and
improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again
driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition
precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the
utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two
excerpts will illustrate these points sufficiently:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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