Woman under socialism

Governments – and not in Germany alone – are shaking like reeds in the wind. They must lean on something: without support they cannot exist: they now lean on this side, then on that. In no progressive country of Europe is there a Government with a lasting parliamentary majority, on which it can count with safety. Majorities are breaking up and dissolving; and the ever changing course, in Germany, especially, undermines the last vestige of confidence that the ruling class had in themselves. To-day one set is anvil, the other the hammer; to-morrow it is the other way. The one tears down what the other painfully builds up. The confusion is ever greater; the discontent ever more lasting; the causes of friction multiply and consume in a few months more energies than years did formerly. Along with all that, material sacrifices, called for by manifold taxes, swell beyond all measure.

In the midst of all this, our sapient statesmen are lulling themselves in wondrous illusions. With an eye to sparing property and the rich, forms of taxation are selected that smite the needy classes heaviest, and they are decreed with the belief that, seeing a large portion of the masses have not yet discovered their real nature, neither will they be felt. This is an error. The masses to-day understand fully the nature of indirect imports and taxes upon the necessaries of life. Their growing political education and perspicuity disclose to them the gross injustice of the same; and they are all the more sensitive to these burdens by reason of the wretchedness of their economic conditions, especially where families are large. The rise of prices in the necessaries of life – due to indirect imposts, or to causes that bring on similar results, such as the premiums on brandy and sugar that, to the amount of dozens of millions, a part of the ruling class pockets yearly at the expense of the poor of the kingdom, and that it seeks to raise still higher – are realized to be a gross injustice, a heavy burden, measures that stand in odd contradiction with the nature of the so-called Christian State, the State of Social Reform. These measures extinguish the last spark of faith in the sense of justice of the ruling classes, to a degree that is serious to these. It changes nothing in the final effect of these measures that the draining is done in pennies. The increase in the expenditure is there, and is finally sensible to the feeling and the sight of all. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions cannot be squeezed out of practically empty pockets, without the owners of the pockets becoming aware of the lifting. The strong pressure of direct taxation, directs the dissatisfaction among the poor against the State; the still stronger indirect taxation, directs the discontent against society also, the evil being felt to be of a social as well as political character. In that there is progress. Him whom the gods would destroy, they first make blind.

In the endeavor to do justice to the most opposed interests, laws are heaped upon laws; but no old one is thoroughly repealed, nor new one thoroughly enforced. Everything is done by halves, giving satisfaction in no direction. The requirements of civilization that spring from the life of the people, demand some attention, unless everything is to be risked; even the fractional way they are attended to, demands considerable sacrifice, all the more seeing that our public institutions are overrun by parasites. At the same time, not only are all the unproductive institutions, wholly at variance with the trend of civilization, continued in force, but, due to the existing conflicts of interests, they are rather enlarged, and thus they become all the more burdensome and oppressive in the measure that increasing popular intelligence ever more loudly pronounces them superfluous. Police, armies, courts of law, prisons, the whole administrative apparatus – all are enlarged ever more, and become ever more expensive. And yet neither external nor internal security is obtained. The reverse follows.

A wholly unnatural state of things has gradually arisen in the international relations of the several nations. The relations between nation and nation multiply in the measure that the production of goods increases; that, thanks to improved transportation, the exchange of this mass of merchandise is facilitated; and that the economic and scientific achievements of each become the public possession of all. Treaties of commerce are concluded; expensive routes of traffic – Suez Canals, St. Gotthard Tunnels – are opened with international funds. Individual countries support with heavy subsidies steamship lines that help to promote intercourse between several nations. The Postal Union – a step of first rank in civilization – is established; international conventions are convoked for all imaginable practical and scientific purposes; the literary products of genius of any nation are spread abroad by translations into the leading languages. Thus the tendency is ever more strongly marked toward the internationalizing, the fraternizing of all peoples. Nevertheless, the political, the military state of the nations of Europe stands in strange contrast to this general development. The hatred of nation against nation, Chauvinism, is artificially nourished by all. The ruling classes seek everywhere to keep green the belief that it is the peoples who are hostilely inclined toward one another, and only wait for the moment when one of them may fall upon another and destroy it. The competitive struggle between the capitalists of several countries, together with their jealousy of one another, assume upon the international field the character of a struggle between the capitalists of one country against those of another, and, backed by the political blindness of the large masses, it conjures into existence a contest of military armaments such as the world has never seen before. This contest has brought forth armies of magnitudes that never were known; it produced implements of murder and destruction for land and naval warfare of such perfection as is possible only in an age of such advanced technique as ours. The contest drives these antagonisms to a head, it incites a development of means of destruction that finally destroy themselves. The support of the armies and navies demand sacrifices that yearly become larger, and that finally ruin the richest nation. Germany, for instance, had, according to the imperial budget of 1894-95, a regular army and navy outlay of nearly 700 million marks – inclusive of pensions and of interest on the national debt, which amounts in round figures to two milliards, incurred mainly for purposes of war. Under these war expenses, the appropriations for educational and other purposes of culture suffer severely; the most pressing needs in this direction are neglected; and that side of the State, devoted to so-called external defence, acquires a preponderance that undermines the original purpose of the State itself. The increasing armies absorb the healthiest and most vigorous portion of the nation; for their improvement all mental and physical forces are enlisted in a way as if education in mass-murder were the highest mission of our times. Furthermore, implements of war as of murder are continuously improved: they have attained – in point of swiftness, range and power – a perfection that renders them fearful to friend and foe. If some day this tremendous apparatus is set in operation – when the hostile forces of Europe will take the field with twelve or fourteen million men – the fact will appear that it has become uncontrollable. There is no general who could command such masses; there is no field vast enough to collect and set them up; no administrative apparatus that could nourish them for any length of time. If battles are delivered, hospitals would be lacking to shelter the wounded: the interment of the numerous dead would be an impossibility.

When to all this is added the frightful disturbances and devastations, produced to-day by a European war on the economic-field, there is no exaggeration in the saying: "the next war is the last war." The number of bankruptcies will be unparalleled; export stops – and thereby thousands of factories are condemned to idleness; the supply of food ceases – and thereby the prices of the means of life rise enormously. The number of families whose breadwinner is in the field runs up into the millions, and most of them must be supported. Whence shall the means come for all that?

The political and military state of Europe has taken a development that cannot choose but end in a catastrophe, which will drag capitalist society down to its ruin. Having reached the height of its development, it produces conditions that end with rendering its own existence impossible; it digs its own grave; it slays itself with the identical means that itself, as the most revolutionary of all previous social systems, has called into life.

Gradually a large portion of our municipalities are arriving at a desperate pass: they hardly know how to meet the increasing demands upon themselves. It is more particularly upon our rapidly growing large cities, and upon the localities situated in industrial districts, that the quickened increase of population makes a mass of demands, which the generally poor communities can come up to only by raising taxes and incurring debts. The budgets leap upward from year to year for school buildings, and street paving, for lighting, draining and water works; for sanitary, public and educational purposes; for the police and the administration. At the same time, the favorably situated minority makes the most expensive demands upon the community. It demands higher institutions of education, theatres, the opening of particularly fine city quarters with lighting, pavement, etc., to match. However justly the majority may complain of the preference, it lies in the very nature of modern affairs. The minority has the power and uses it to satisfy its social wants as much as possible at the expense of the collectivity. In and of themselves nothing can be said against these heightened social wants: they denote progress; the fault is only that their satisfaction falls mainly to the lot of the property classes, while all others should share them. A further evil lies in that often the administration is not the best, and yet is expensive. The officials often are inadequate; they are not sufficiently equipped for the many-sided demands made upon them, demands that often presuppose thorough knowledge. The members of Aldermanic Boards have generally so much to do and to attend to in their own private affairs that they are unable to make the sacrifices demanded for the full exercise of these public duties. Often are these posts used for the promotion of private interests, to the serious injury of those of the community. The results fall upon the taxpayers. Modern society cannot think of undertaking a thorough change in these conditions. It is powerless and helpless. It would have to remove itself, and that, of course, it will not. Whatever the manner in which taxes be imposed, dissatisfaction increases steadily. In a few decades, most of our municipalities will be unable to satisfy their needs under their present form of administration and of raising revenues. On the municipal as well as on the national field, the need of a radical change is manifest: it is upon the municipalities that the largest social demands are made: it is society in nuce: it is the kernel from which, so soon as the will and the power shall be there, the social change will radiate. How can justice be done to-day, when private interests dominate and the interests of the commonweal are made subservient?

Such, in short, is the state of things in the nation and in the municipality. They are both but the reflection of the economic life of society.

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The struggle for existence in our economic life grows daily more gigantic. The war of all against all has broken out with virulence; it is conducted pitilessly, often regardless of the weapon used. The well-known French expression: "ote-toi de la, que je m'y mette." (Get away, that I may step in) is carried out in practice with vigorous elbowings, cuffings, and pinchings. The weaker must yield to the stronger. Where physical strength – which here is the power of money, of property – does not suffice, the most cunning and unworthy means are resorted to. Lying, swindle, deceit, forgery, perjury – the very blackest crimes are often committed in order to reach the coveted object. As in this struggle for existence one individual transgresses against the other, the same happens with class against class, sex against sex, age against age. Profit is the sole regulator of human feelings; all other considerations must yield. Thousands upon thousands of workingmen and working-women are, the moment profit demands it, thrown upon the sidewalk, and, after their last savings have been spent, turned to public charity or forced to emigrate. Workingmen travel, so to speak, in herds from place to place, criss-cross across the country, and are regarded by "decent" society with all the more fear and horror, seeing that the continuity of their enforced idleness deteriorates their external appearance, and, as a consequence, demoralizes them internally. Decent society has no inkling of what it means to be forced, for months at a stretch, to be denied the simplest exigencies of order and cleanliness, to wander from place to place with a hungry stomach, and to earn, generally, nothing but ill-concealed fear and contempt, especially from those quarters that are the very props of this system. The families of these wretches suffer all along utmost distress – a distress that not infrequently drives the parents, out of desperation, to frightful crimes upon their own children and themselves. The last years have furnished numerous shocking instances of whole families falling a prey to murder and suicide. Let one instance do for many. The private correspondent, S – , in Berlin, 45 years of age, with a still handsome wife 39 years old, and a daughter of 12, is without work and starving. The wife decides, with the consent of her husband, to turn prostitute. The police gets wind thereof. The wife is placed under moral control. The family, overcome with shame and desperate, agree, all three, to poison themselves, and carry out their resolve on March 1, 1883.160 A few days before, the leading circles of Berlin celebrated great court festivities at which hundreds of thousands were squandered.

Such are the shocking contrasts of modern society – and yet we live in "the best of all possible worlds." Berlin has since then often witnessed the holocaust of whole families due to material want. In 1894 the spectacle was frequent, to an extent that called forth general horror; nor are the instances few, reported from large and small towns within and without Germany. This murder and suicide of whole families is a phenomenon peculiar to modern times, and an eloquent sign of the sorry economic state that society is in.

This general want also drives women and girls in increasing numbers into the arms of prostitution. Demoralization and crime are heaped up, and assume the most manifold forms. The only thing that prospers is the jails, penitentiaries and so-called houses of correction, no longer able to accommodate the mass that is sent to them. The crimes of all sorts and their increase are intimately connected with the economic state of society – a fact, however, that the latter will not have. Like the ostrich, it sticks its head in the sand, to avoid having to admit the incriminating state of things, and it lies to the point of deceiving itself into the belief that the fault lies with the laziness of the workingmen, with their love of pleasure, and with their irreligiousness. This is a self-deception of the most dangerous, or a hypocrisy of the most repulsive, sort. The more unfavorable the state of society is for the majority, all the more numerous and serious are the crimes committed. The struggle for existence assumes its rudest and most violent aspect: it transfers man into conditions where each sees a mortal enemy in the other. The social bonds become looser every day.161

The ruling classes, who do not probe matters to the bottom, or do not like to, seek to meet the evil after their own fashion. If poverty and want, and, as a result therefrom, demoralization and crime increase, the source of the evil is not searched after, so that it may be stopped; no; the products of the conditions are punished. The more gigantic the evils grow, and the numbers of evil-doers multiply in proportion, proportionately severe penalties and persecutions are deemed necessary. It is sought to drive out the devil with Beelzebub. Prof. Haeckel also considers it proper to proceed against criminals with the severest punishments possible, and that capital punishment, in particular, be stringently applied.162 By this stand the Professor places himself in sweet accord with the re-actionists of all shades, who otherwise are mortally opposed to him. Haeckel is of the opinion that incorrigible scape-graces must be uprooted like weeds that take from plants light, air and space. Had Haeckel turned his mind slightly toward social, instead of engaging it wholly with natural science, he would know that these criminals could, in most instances, be transformed into useful members of human society, provided society offered them the requisite conditions of existence. He would also find that the annihilation of individual criminals or the rendering of them harmless, prevents as little the commission of fresh crimes in society, as the removal of weeds on a field would prevent their returning if the roots and seeds are not likewise destroyed. Absolutely to prevent the forming of harmful organisms in Nature is a feat man never will be able to achieve but to so improve his own social system, a system produced by himself, that it may afford favorable conditions of life for all, and furnish to each equal freedom to unfold, to the end that they no longer need suffer hunger, or be driven to satisfy their desire for property, or their ambition at the expense of others – that is possible. Let the cause of the crimes be studied, and let that be removed; then will the crimes themselves be wiped out.163

Those who would remove crimes by removing the causes thereof, cannot, as a matter of course, sympathize with a plan of brutal suppression. They cannot prevent society from protecting itself after its own fashion against the criminals, whom it cannot allow a free hand; but we demand all the more urgently the radical reformation of society, i. e., the removal of the causes of crime.

The connection between social conditions, on the one hand, and evildoing and crimes, on the other, has been frequently established by statisticians and sociologists. One of the misdemeanors nearest at hand – one that, all Christian charitable tenets to the contrary notwithstanding, modern society regards as a misdemeanor – is begging, especially during hard times. On that subject, the statistics of the Kingdom of Saxony inform us that, in the measure in which the last industrial crisis increased – a crisis that began in Germany in 1890, and whose end is not yet in sight – the number of persons also increased who were punished for begging. In 1889, there were 8,566 persons punished for this crime in the Kingdom of Saxony; in 1890, there were 8,815; in 1891, there were 10,075; and in 1892 the figures rose to 13,120 – quite an increase. Mass-impoverishment on one side, swelling affluence on the other – such is the sign-manual of our age. In Austria, in 1873, there was one pauper to every 724 persons; in 1882, to every 622 persons. Crimes and misdemeanors show similar tendency. In Austria-Hungary, in 1874, there were 308,605 persons sentenced in the criminal courts; in 1892, their number was 600,000. In the German Empire, in 1882, there were 329,968 persons sentenced for crimes and misdemeanors under the laws of the land; that is to say, to every 10,000 inhabitants of twelve years and over there were 103.2 criminals; in 1892, the number of criminals was 422,327, or 143.3 – an increase of 39 per cent. Among the persons punished, there were, for crimes and misdemeanors against property: —

We think these figures speak volumes. They show how the deterioration of social conditions intensify and promote poverty, want, misdemeanors and crimes.

The basis of our social state is the capitalist system of production. On it modern society rests. All social, all political institutions are results and fruits of that system. It is the ground from which the whole social and political superstructure, together with its bright and dark sides, have sprung up. It influences and dominates the thoughts and feelings and actions of the people who live under it. Capital is the leading power in the State and in Society: the capitalist is the ruler of the propertyless, whose labor-power he buys for his use, and at a price, that, like all other merchandise, is governed by supply and demand and oscillates now above, then below the cost of reproduction. But the capitalist does not buy labor-power out of "sweet charity," in order to do a favor to the workingmen, although he often so pretends. He buys it for the purpose of obtaining surplus wealth from the labor of the workingmen, which he then pockets under the name of profit, interest, house and ground rent. This surplus wealth, squeezed out of the workingmen, and which in so far as the capitalist does not squander it in dissipation, crystallizes in his hands into more capital, puts him in a condition to steadily enlarge his plant, improve the process of production, and occupy increased labor forces. That, at the same time, enables him to step up before his weaker competitors, like a mailed knight before an unarmed pedestrian, and to destroy them. This unequal struggle between large and small capital spreads amain, and, as the cheapest labor-power, next to that of children and lads, woman plays therein a role of increasing importance. The result is the ever sharper division of a smaller minority of mighty capitalists and a mass of capital-less male and female lack-alls whose only resource is the daily sale of their labor-power. The middle class arrives hereby at a plight that grows ever graver. One field of industry after another, where small production still predominated, is seized and occupied to capitalist ends. The competition of capitalists among themselves compels them to explore ever newer fields of exploitation. Capital goes about "like a roaring lion, seeking whom it may devour." The smaller and weaker establishments are destroyed; if their owners fail to save themselves upon some new field – a feat that becomes ever harder and less possible – then they sink down into the class of the wage earners, or of Catilinarians. All efforts to prevent the downfall of handicraft and of the middle class by means of institutions and laws, borrowed from the lumber-room of the musty past, prove utterly ineffective. They may enable one or another to deceive himself on his actual condition; but soon the illusion vanishes under the heavy weight of facts. The process of absorption of the small by the large takes its course with all the power and pitilessness of a law of Nature, and the process is sensible to the feeling and the sight of all.

In the period between 1875-1882, the number of small industries decreased in Prussia by 39,655,164 although the population increased in this period by about two million heads. The number of workmen employed in small industries sank, during that time, from 57.6 per cent., to 54.9 per cent. The industrial statistics for 1895 will furnish much more drastic figures. The development of large production stands in close relation to the development of steam machine and steam horse-power. And what is the picture presented by these? Prussia had: —

The Kingdom of Saxony had: —

In 1861, a steam engine in Saxony had, on an average, a 15.5 horse-power; in 1891, it had 19. All Germany had in 1878 about three million horse-power in operation in industry; in 1894, about five million. Austria had in 1873 in round figures 336,000 horse-power; in 1888, about 2,150,000. Steam power spreads daily, and stronger steam machines drive out weaker ones – large production drives out small. The fact is shown emphatically in the industries in which steam has become the general power, the brewery industry, for instance. In the German brewery tax department, exclusive of Bavaria, Wuertemburg, Baden and Alsace-Lorraine, there were: —