Is Revolution the Remedy?
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 the 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 millenium. 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 prediction s 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 fulfiled
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.
