Sex in the Soviet Union - Peter Myers, October 3, 2001; update January 21, 2007. My comments are shown {thus}.

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For the last 30 years, the West has been experimenting with the abolition of marriage, as was done in the Soviet Union until Stalin reversed it. This policy has been brought to the West under the label "Feminism", but it is merely "Communism" by another name. Yet, given that the USSR was "Stalinist" for most of its history, the word "Communism" is misleading, since Trotskyism and Stalinism are diametrically opposed.

When co-habitation between the sexes is treated the same as marriage; when "Gay" relationships are called "marriage"; then marriage has been abolished. The only difference is that this step was done openly in the USSR, but our leaders in the West are less straightforward.

Trotsky is associated with the abolition of the state and the family; Stalin with their reintroduction. To re-introduce marriage is not oppressive, as Trotskyists and Feminists argue, but merely a return to the age-old custom of all human societies: a recognition of human nature. Trotskyism, with its promotion of Gay Marriage, reduces the two sexes to one, and Marriage to the status of sexual partner.

Trotsky advocates abolishing the Family; Stalin its restoration: trotsky.html.

Marxists, faced with the imperfection of the Soviet Union, often see it as "not living up to Marxist Principles". They are thus able to remain believers in Marxism as an ideal, while criticising the USSR in practice. This criticism was often directed at Stalin, the scapegoat for all that went wrong.

There is nothing in Marxist theory that says that Jews will rule, yet the USSR was created by a faction of atheistic Jews: zioncom.html. When Lenin died, a triumvirate took power (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin), of whom Stalin was the only non-Jew: ginsberg.html.These Jewish conspirators wanted to appear incognito, and this helped Stalin gain power. He purged the usurpers and restored Russia to the Russian people - although in the end he was murdered: death-of-stalin.html. He is blamed for all the evils of the system, yet after the fall of Communism, when the West bestowed economic "liberalism" on Russia, the Russian people have come to see that Stalin did some good for them.

We in the West are already half-way through a Trotskyist Revolution, which is shattering our family life. Stalinism fell, but the West is in the grip of Trotskyists promoting open borders, Gay Marriage, etc: xTrots.html.

Most of the writers presented here are Trotskyists, condemning Stalin's crackdown on sodomy and his tightening of the marriage laws. One must sift out their "spin" from the historical data they provide. If they do not mention Stalin by name, they insinuate him by referring to "bureaucracy". Thought control was introduced to the USSR by Lenin and Trotsky; because of it, one often had to use indirect means of conveying information, but one can read Newspeak if one has the right dictionary.

Why destroy the family? Karl Kautsky explains, "communism ... tries to convert its community into a new family, for the presence of the traditional family tie is felt as a disturbing influence": http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/works/1900s/christ/ (Book Four, Part I). The whole society is to be one big family, with communal husbands & wives.

H. Kent Geiger's book The Family in Soviet Russia is the definitive study of family life in the Soviet Union. The "feminist" West is following the same path.

(1) Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny (2) Alix Holt, tr. & ed., Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai (3) Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage (4) Fannina Halle, Women in the Soviet East (5) Ekaterina Alexandrova, Why Soviet Women Want to Get Married (6) Igor S. Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia (7) Alison M. Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (8) H. Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, Cambridge, Mass., 1968

The selections begin with Germaine Greer, who somewhat outgrew her earlier Trotskyist ("UltraLeft") orientation; in these selections, my comments are enclosed {thus}:

(1) Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny, Secker & Warburg, Melbourne, 1984.

{p. 228} The received idea of the ultra-left is that Soviet moves to weaken the family, by the institution of state nurseries, the facilitation of divorce, the ideology of free love, and the legalisation of birth control and abortion, were modified because the family was found to be the necessary training ground for the submissive citizen, and so it is, but not in quite the way that revolutionary Marxist orthodoxy sees it. What state capitalism realised was that the nuclear family is the most malleable social unit; houses were built for it, social services catered to it, and its descendants were drawn off into training institutions and its parents into state care. State capitalism and monopoly capitalism necessitate the same patterns of consumption, mobility and aspiration. The idea is simple and irrefutable; if all men are to be brothers, then nobody can be anybody else's brother. It is as true for Western Europe and America as it is for those parts of the Soviet Union where Family has been shattered. The operation of the process in the Soviets may be cruder, more brutal

{p. 229} than in, say, Australia, but it is only therefore slightly less likely to succeed. ... If we whittle Family down to nuclear families, the nuclei will continue to act in their own interest, but by division the quotient of self-interest will be reduced to a manageable level. ... Rooted in territoriality, self-defensive, disciplined in aggression, the Family is resistant to any authority but its own, while the biddable nuclear family propitiates its children, unable to check their insistent demands for gratification without experiencing guilt, because self-indulgence is the creed on which their fragile social micro-organism is built. The Marxist-Leninist attack on the Family was inevitable but its attack on the nuclear family was half-hearted and was soon abandoned. {end}

(2) Alix Holt, tr. & ed., Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, London 1977. The back cover says, "Alexandra Kollontai - the only woman member of the Bolshevik central committee and the USSR's first Minister of Social Welfare - is known today as a historic contributor to the international women's movement, and as one of the first Bolshevik leaders to oppose the growth of the bureaucracy in the young socialist state", i.e. she supported Trotsky. Kollontai enables the reader to see that the day care centres, creches etc we now have in the West were copied from the early Soviet Union.

{p. 226} The individual economy which springs from private property is the basis of the bourgeois family.

The communist economy does away with the family. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat there is a transition to the single production plan and collective social consumption, and the family loses its significance as an economic unit. The external economic functions of the family disappear, and consumption ceases to be organised on an individual family basis; a network of social kitchens and canteens is established, and the making, mending and washing of clothes and other aspects of housework are integrated into the national economy. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat the family economic unit should be recognised as being, from the point of view of the national economy, not only useless but harmful. The family economic unit involves (a) the uneconomic expenditure of products and fuel on the part of small domestic economies, and (b) unproductive labour, especially by women, in the home - and is therefore in conflict with the interest of the workers' republic in a single economic plan and the expedient use of the labour force (including women).

Under the dictatorship of the proletariat then, the material and economic considerations in which the family was grounded cease to exist. The economic dependence of women on men and the role of the family in the care of the younger generation also disappear {day care centres, creches etc: the conspirators steal our children, to mould them as they see fit}, as the communist elements in the workers' republic grow stronger. With the introduction of the obligation of all citizens to work, woman has a value in the national economy which is independent of her family and marital status. The economic subjugation of women in marriage and the family is done away with, and responsibility for the care of the children and their physical and spiritual education is assumed by the social collective. The family teaches and instils egoism, thus weakening the ties of the collective and hindering the construction of communism. However, in the new society relations between parents and children are freed from any element of material considerations and enter a new historic stage.

Once the family has been stripped of its economic functions and its responsibilities towards the younger generation and is no longer central to the existence of the woman, it has ceased to be a family. The family unit shrinks to a union of two people based on mutual agreement.

{p. 227} Thus the workers' collective has to establish its attitude not to economic relationships but to the form of relationships between the sexes. What kind of relations between the sexes are in the best interests of the workers' collective? What form of relations would strengthen, not weaken, the collective in the transitional stage between capitalism and communism and would thus assist the construction of the new society? The laws and the morality that the workers' system is evolving are beginning to give an answer to this question.

Once relations between the sexes cease to perform the economic and social function of the former family, they are no longer the concern of the workers' collective. It is not the relationships between the sexes but the result - the child - that concerns the collective. The workers' state recognises its responsibility to provide for maternity, i.e. to guarantee the well-being of the woman and the child, but it does not recognise the couple as a legal unit separate from the workers' collective. The decrees on marriage issued by the workers' republic establishing the mutual rights of the married couple (the right to demand material support from the partner for yourself or the child), and thus giving legal encouragement to the separation of this unit and its interests from the general interests of the workers' social collective (the right of wives to be transferred to the town or village where their husbands are working), are survivals of the past; they contradict the interests of the collective and weaken its bonds, and should therefore be reviewed and changed.

The law ought to emphasise the interest of the workers' collective in maternity and eliminate the situation where the child is dependent on the relationship between its parents. The law of the workers' collective replaces the right of the parents, and the workers' collective keeps a close watch, in the interests of the unified economy and of present and future labour resources. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat there must, instead of marriage law, be regulation of the relationship of the government to maternity, of the relationship between mother and child and of the relationship between the mother and the workers' collective (i.e. legal norms must regulate the protection of female labour, the welfare of expectant and nursing mothers, the welfare of children and their social education). Legal norms must regulate the relationship between the mother and the socially educated child, and between the father and the child. {end}

(3) Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, Jonathan Cape, London 1982.

{p. 34} The makers of Soviet Russia were in a somewhat different situation. Like the early Christians, many of the old Bolsheviks were hostile or indifferent to marriage, though of course for opposite reasons. They often believed in free love, which was regarded as a 'Gift of the Revolution'. Many nineteenth-century socialists had subscribed to the view that sex was or ought to be as simple and trivial a satisfaction of physical needs as drinking a glass of water. As for the family, at one time or another, Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Lunacharski and Krylenko all subscribed to the view that it would wither away in due course. The radical view was summarised by A. Slepkov, an influential Leningrad party member:

{quote} Bourgeois ideologists think that the family is an eternal, not a transitory organization, that sexual relations are at the basis of the family, that these sexual relations will exist as long as the two sexes, and since man and woman will both live under socialism just as under capitalism, that therefore the existence of the family is inevitable. That is completely incorrect. Sexual relations, of course, have existed, exist, and will exist. However, this is in no way connected with the indispensability of the existence of the family. The best historians of culture definitely have established that in primitive times the family did not exist . . . Similar to the way in which, together with the disappearance of classes, together with the annihilation of class contradictions, the state will disappear, similarly to that, together with the strengthening of the socialist economy, together with the growth of socialist relationships, together with the overcoming of earlier pre-socialist forms, the family will

{p. 35} also die out. The family is already setting out on the road to a merging with Socialist Society, to a dissolution into it. An openly negative attitude toward the family under present conditions does not have sufficient grounding, because pre-socialist relationships still exist, the state is still weak, the new social forms (public dining rooms, state rearing of children, and so forth) are as yet little developed, and until then the family cannot be abolished completely. However, the coordination of this family with the general organization of Soviet life is the task of every communist, of every Komsomolite [member of Communist Youth League]. One must not shut oneself off in the family, but rather, grow out of the family shell into the new Socialist Society. The contemporary Soviet family is the springboard from which we must leap into the future. Always seeking to carry the entire family over into the public organizations, always a more decisive overcoming of the elements of bourgeois family living - that is the difficult, but important task which stands before us. {endquote; Quoted, H. Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, pp. 44-5}

Lunacharski, the Commissar of Education, wrote as late as the early 1930s:

{quote} Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children. It would be idiotic to separate children from their parents by force. But when, in our communal houses, we have well-organized quarters for children, connected by a heated gallery with the adults' quarters, to suit the requirements of the climate, there is no doubt the parents will, of their own free will, send their children to these quarters, where they will be supervised by trained pedagogical and medical personnel. There is no doubt that the terms 'my parents,' 'our children,' will gradually fall out of usage, being replaced by such conceptions as 'old people,' 'children,' and 'infants.' {endquote; Ibid., pp. 47-8}

This, according to Lunacharski, was to be an essential part of the transition to the new society - 'that broad public society which will replace the small philistine nook, that little philistine apartment, that domestic hearth, yes, that stagnant family unit which separates itself off from society.' {ibid., p. 68} A genuine Communist would avoid such a permanent pairing marriage and would seek to satisfy his needs by ' ... a freedom of the mutual relations of the husbands, the wives, fathers,

{p. 36} children, so that you can't tell who is related to whom and how closely. That is social construction.' {ibid.} ...

The after-effects of civil war and the new sexual freedoms combined to produce social chaos, a great number of unwanted and abandoned children, venereal diseases and also - a factor not to be underestimated - millions of shocked and puzzled peasants, particularly women, who regarded the new freedoms as dangerous and unhealthy. The Communist Party began rapidly to change its tune.

{p. 37} In 1935, 1936 and 1944, new laws were introduced to compel divorced parents to contribute towards the maintenance of their children, to make abortion illegal and divorce itself more difficult and expensive. Homosexuality {I think only sodomy} became a criminal offence in 1934. In 1936, Pravda commented that, 'Marriage is the most serious affair in life.' {Geiger, Family in Soviet Russia, p. 94} Stalin had changed direction and everyone else had to change too. Entirely spurious interpretations were dredged up to prove that Marx and Engels had never been against the family. The new scapegoats came in handy here:

{quote} The enemies of the people, the vile fascist hirelings - Trotsky, Bukharin, Krylenko and their followers - covered the family in the USSR with filth, spreading the counter-revolutionary 'theory' of the dying out of the family, of disorderly sexual cohabitation in the USSR, in order to discredit the Soviet land. {endquote; Quoted, ibid., p. 104}

Why did Stalin turn? No doubt it was partly because the family had stubbornly refused to die out, and its official revival would be generally popular and help to deal with genuine social problems; but the main reason was surely that the regime had simply allowed too large an area of Soviet life to escape its control. It was not only that the

{p. 38} Soviet concept of 'free marriage' - involving divorce and abortion at will - had proved a social failure. It was rather that no fully articulated Soviet attitude towards marriage and the family existed at all. The only answer was, so to speak, to 'patriate' the family - to glorify it as a popular, essentially Russian institution.

In other words, on this question as on so many others, Stalin resorted to compromise between Marxism-Leninism and the Russian tradition. The family was good because it was created by the Russian people; hence it was good because it was socialist too.

{end}

The West, however, did not learn from the Russian experience, because the Trotskyist & Fabian forces in the West regarded Stalin as a traitor.

A longer extract from Ferdinand Mount's book The Subversive Family is at mount.html.

(4) Fannina Halle, Women in the Soviet East, Martin Secker & Warburg, London 1938. This book shows that Polygamy was abolished, just as other writers (below) show that Homosexuality was being legalised. Also, native i.e. non-Russian peoples had to give up their own traditions about family life, a fate that awaits our own native peoples if the forces of "Tolerance" and "Multiculturalism" win.

{p. 130} WOMEN IN THE SOVIET EAST

So, too POLYGAMY is rendered a penal offence, and is punishable with hard labour for the period of a year or a fine not exceeding a thousand roubles.

{p. 131} Certain republics even used the formulation of supplementary paragraphs to the code for purposes of propaganda, and created a new legal language, not uncommon in the Soviet Union, markedly different from the dry legal style in use in other states. Thus a special law of the Kirghiz against polygamy reads as follows: Only such persons may marry as are living in no other registered marriage nor in a relation similar to registered marriage. Polygamy is absolutely forbidden, as an evil custom, highly injurious to the moral dignity of Kirghiz women, and leading to their enslavement and the exploitation of their persons. Thus the law resolutely attacked all the antiquated forms of social life, for without their abolition no real liberation of Eastern women could be conceived. The manner in which the courts applied the penal paragraphs, especially during the early transition period, bore witness to their good will to make an end of the relics of the past and to clear the way for new developments.

BYT CRIMES IN THE COURTS {"byt" is a Russian word meaning domestic conditions, human relations - p. 127}

It was, of course, not possible to abolish byt crimes at the first attack, in spite of vigorous threats of punishment and an increasingly intense propaganda campaign. Frequently the conditions which made them possible, and in certain cases even inevitable, persisted, and, moreover, the customs now more or less plainly branded as byt crimes were too deeply rooted in the people's lives. At first, especially, there was not the slightest sense of guilt, and the prisoners who experienced the full severity of the law could not understand for what misdeed they were being punished. Nevertheless, some undoubted success has been achieved in abolishing out-of-date marriage forms.

(5) Ekaterina Alexandrova, Why Soviet Women Want to Get Married in Tatyana Mamonova (ed.), Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union, Beacon Press, Boston 1984. Peter Myers, July 16, 2001; {Trotskyist}.

{p. 39} Let us now turn to a discussion of the laws that regulate family and marital relations in the U.S.S.R.

As is well known, a series of laws governing such topics was

{p. 40} passed in 1917-1918, immediately after the October Revolution. The main result of these laws was the secularization of marriage. Since then, as far as the government is concerned, the only valid marriage is a civil marriage, not a religious one. Therefore, when a Soviet woman speaks of marriage, she always means civil marriage; the word marriage has been used only in this meaning in this article.

In addition, the following policies were proclaimed: (1) freedom from restrictions that had formerly been imposed on marriage (for example, the religious denomination of the bride and groom); (2) freedom and ease of divorce; and (3) equality in every respect between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children. In the next round of legislation - the Laws of Marriage of 1926 - the "freedom" of marriage was expanded even further, practically to the point that it was of no legal consequence whether the marriage was registered or not.

In order for a marriage to be considered as legitimate, it was "sufficient that a man and women living together considered their liaison marriage and not debauchery." 2 Grounds for divorce were even broader and obtaining a divorce was made even easier. Divorce occurred without recourse to a court; it was not even necessary to be physically present. Divorce occurred in the absence of one of the spouses, by the declaration of the other. The equality of legitimate and illegitimate children was underscored. But with the new law of 1926, the period of "revolutionary experiments" in relations between the sexes came to an end. {Stalin came to full power about 1928}

The next legislative acts concerning the family and marriage - the Decree of 1936 and the Edict of 1944 - were pervaded by an entirely different spirit. In the first place, in contrast with everything that had gone before, the new laws emphasized that

2. I. Kurganov, Sem'ya v SSSR, 1917-1967 (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1967), p. 89.

{p. 41} the only marriage considered valid in the eyes of the government was a registered marriage. The Edict of 1944 stated directly, "Only a registered marriage gives rise to the rights and duties of a husband and wife, as envisioned in the legal code of marriage, family, and child custody."

In the second place, the Decree of 1936 and the Edict of 1944 turned divorce into a difficult and expensive process. Furthermore, the Edict of 1944 pointedly began to separate "legitimate" children from "illegitimate" children. According to the law, the father of an illegitimate child had no responsibilities for his child, just as if he had no relationship to the child whatsoever. He was not obliged to help the mother support the child.

One measure that became highly controversial was the requirement by the Edict that a slash be drawn across the blank marked father on the birth certificate of an illegitimate child. This slash is the first thing that catches your eye when you pick up one of these documents. That requirement alone put both mother and child in a "special," extremely degrading position.

The 1936 Edict also banned abortions; these were permitted again in 1955 for medical reasons, and in 1968 without restrictions.

The other measures were eased only toward the middle of the 1960s when divorce was simplified and the slash on the birth certificate of an illegitimate child was no longer required.

(6) Igor S. Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia, tr. James Riordan, Free Press, NY 1995. {Kon does not name Trotsky, but appears to be a Trotskyist, being very critical of the 1930s and the crackdown on sodomy. Kon articulates his own "liberal" views on p. 246.}

{p. 59} Lenin was sceptical of and even frankly hostile to all theories touting the absolute importance of sexuality, above all Freudian theory. {the synthesis of Marx & Freud is a badge of the New Left and associated with Trotskyism}

{p. 70} In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the antisex crusade was all-pervasive. When Wilhelm Reich, the influential German protege of Freud and admirer of Marx {the Marx-Freud synthesis is a badge of Trotskyism}, visited Moscow in 1929, hoping to find there a Mecca of sexual freedom, he was surprised and shocked by its new "bourgeois moralistic attitudes."6 One repressive measure followed another.

The first measure was an official restoration of criminal penalties and reinforcement of persecution for male homosexuality. The initiative for revocation of the antihomosexual legislation, following the February 1917 Revolution, had come not from the Bolsheviks but from the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and the anarchists. Nonetheless, once the old criminal code had been repealed after the October Revolution, Article 516 also ceased to be valid. The Russian Federation criminal codes for 1922 and 1926 did not mention homosexuality, although the corresponding laws remained in force in some places where homosexuality was traditionally the most prevalent - in the Islamic republics of Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan, as well as in Christian Georgia.

Soviet medical and legal experts were very proud of the progressive nature of their legislation. At the Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, held in Copenhagen in 1928, Soviet legislation was cited to repre-

{p. 71} sentatives of other countries as an example of progressivism. In 1930, medical expert Mark Sereisky wrote in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: "Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest."7

The official stance of Soviet medicine and law in the 1920s, as reflected in Sereisky's encyclopedia article, was that homosexuality was not a crime but a disease that was difficult, perhaps even impossible, to cure:

While recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development, society does not and cannot blame those who bear such traits. . . In emphasizing the significance of sources that give rise to such an anomaly, our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective.8

Sereisky pinned indefinite hopes for a future "radical cure" for all homosexuals on the possibility of transplanting testicles from heterosexual to homosexual men, as had been suggested by the German biologist E. Steinach.

During the 1920s, the status of Soviet homosexuals was relatively tolerable. Some homosexuals - Mikhail Kuzmin, Nikolai Klyuev, and Sophia Parnok, among others - played major roles in Soviet culture, although the opportunity for an open, philosophical, and artistic discussion of the theme, which had opened up at the start of the century, was gradually whittled away.9 On December 17, 1933, however, the government announced the change in law, which would be compulsory in all the republics in March 1934: accordingly, muzhelozhstvo (buggery) once more became a criminal offense. An item to that effect was inserted in the criminal codes of all the Soviet republics. According to Article 121 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, muzhelozhstvo, sexual relations between men, was punishable by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to five years, and, in cases involving physical force or the threat thereof, or exploitation of the victim's dependent status, or in relation to a minor, a term of up to eight years.

In January 1936, Nikolai Krylenko, people's commissar for justice, announced that homosexuality was a product of the decadence of the exploiting classes who knew no better ...

{p. 78} The middle 1930s saw a gradual, deep, and radical change in official language. Whereas the sexophobia of the 1920s had been reinforced by arguments about class interests and by mechanistic theories ahout the possi-

{p. 79} bility and necessity ot channeling indivldual "sexual energy" into more exalted social goals, the authorities now propagated a strict morality camouflaged as concern for shoring up marriage and the family.

Bourgeois and peasant families that owned private property were not dependent on the state, so the Bolsheviks tried to destroy or at least weaken them through the process of socialization of everyday life and especially the education of children. As the American historian Richard Stites notes, in the 1920s, this policy of "defamilization" of everyday life had been motivated by the noble mission of "rescuing housewives from the slavery of kitchen life," kitchen life being "the strongest symbol of a nuclear family"25 But the state's provision of food and preschool education turned out to be much less effective than domestic family provision. "Student communes," which had been widespread in the 1920s, were also shortlived, one of the difficulties being that "the open-door policy interfered with sexual activity"26

The Soviet return to the ideals of stable marriage and family life in the 1930s seemed a retreat from the original ideology of the Revolution, and many Western scholars trumpeted noisily about it. Yet the appeal for the stabilization of marriage and the resurrection of "family" ideology was merely a manifestation of the growing conservatism of Soviet society {another attack on Stalin}. Having no private property, the "new Soviet family" - all income and living arrangements of which depended exclusively on the state - not only could not be independent of the state but was itself becoming an effective instrument of social control over the individual. To fulfill that mission, the "strong family" had to be an administratively controlled and regulated union.

In 1936, the procedures for dissolution of marriage became more complicated. This change was in certain ways quite reasonable, inasmuch as previously divorce had been practically unregulated - one spouse could dissolve the marriage by a simple declaration at the registry office, without even informing the other. But actually, the increasing difficulty of obtaining a divorce was just one more way in which the state could legally intrude into the life of the individual. After 1944, divorce could be effected only through the courts, which was relatively expensive (although much less so than in the United States) and time-consuming. The court could delay the granting of a divorce considerably, and in some cases could even refuse to grant one. The degree of the judges' liberalism depended upon the instructions given by the Supreme Court. During one period of time, they tried to prevent the granting of any divorces at all, whereas at other times, they acted more liberal.

{p. 246} Homophobia, irrational fear of homosexuality, and hatred of gays constitute one of the main problems in present-day Russian sexual culture {Kon is here showing his Trotskytist allegiance}. ... As cross-cultural research shows, the level of homophobia in a given society depends on a wide range of factors. First, it depends on the overall level of a society's social and cultural tolerance. Intolerance of differences, typical of any authoritarian regime, is ill-suited to sexual or any other kind of pluralism. ... The more antisexual the culture, the more sexual taboos and fears it will have. The former USSR in this respect was, as ever, an extreme case.

Third, homophobia is closely linked with sexism {wrong: the Gay movement is Heterophobic}, and sexual and gender chauvinism. Its major function in social history has been to uphold the sanctity of the system of gender stratification based on male hegemony and domination. Obligatory, coercive heterosexuality is intended to safeguard the institution of marriage and patriarchal relations; under this system,

{p. 247} women are second-class beings, their main- perhaps even sole- function is to produce children {a Gay put-down of Heterosexuality}.

(7) Alison M. Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Rowman & Littlefield, Totowa NJ, 1983. This book is very important, for it shows that the New Left/Trotskyist/Feminist rejection of Human Nature and the Sexual Division of Labour explicitly contradicts Marx and Engels, supporting my case that Trotskyism is a conspiratorial movement lurking beneath a Marxist mask.

{p. 67} The radical call to abolish sexual distinctions in the market (and, apparently, distinctions based on age as well) represents the dominant tendency in traditional Marxist theorizing about women. But another side to Marxist theory does

{p. 68} emphasize the significance of the biological differences between women and men. On this view, expressed mainly in "asides" rather than in explicit argument, the biological differences between the sexes have not only determined a sexual division of labor in the past, but mean that the future can never be totally androgynous.

Marx and Engels believe that there has always been a sexual division of labor and that this, at least until the advent of capitalism, has taken a remarkably constant form. Apart from "the division of labour in the sexual act," they believe that women have always been concerned primarily with the household and men with obtaining "the food and instruments necessary for the purpose." In many passages Marx and Engels refer to this division of labor as "natural" or "spontaneous." For instance, in The German Ideology they write about the origins of the division of labor as being "originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or 'naturally' by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength, needs, accidents, etc.)."36 On the following page, they refer again to "the natural division of labour in the family." These remarks are not just youthful slips. In his mature work, Capital, Marx several times repeats the suggestion that there is a sexual division of labor in the family that is natural. For instance, he writes about the "spontaneously developed" system of organizing labor in "the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use." This family

{quote} possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour-time of the several members, depends as well upon the differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons.37 {end quote} {note 37: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 77-78.}

Later in the first volume of Capilal, Marx repeats the point. "Within a family . . . there springs up naturally a division of labour, caused by differences of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physiological foundation."38 {note 38: ibid., p. 351}

Marx and Engels clearly believe that the division of labor within the family is natural because it is biologically determined, "based on a purely physiological foundation." Yet they never explain just what the division is, why it occurs nor whether it can be overcome in future forms of the family. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, moreover, Marx even seems to reconsider his call to abolish the sexual division of labor in the market. He writes:

{quote} The standardization of the working day must include the restriction of female labour insofar as it relates to the duration, intermissions, etc., of the working day; otherwise it could only mean the exclusion of women from branches of industry that are especially unhealthy for the female body or objectionable morally for the female sex.39 {end quote} {note 39: Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 334}

This passage carries the alarming suggestions that women's capacity to enter public industry is limited both by biological and by moral factors. The latter suggestion is repeated in Marx's apparent endorsement of the view of the British factory inspectors that one of the most deplorable effects of the factory system was the moral degradation it imposed on women and girls. It caused them to be dirty, to drink, to swear and to wear men's clothes - none of which Marx considered to be especially injurious for men.40 {note 40: Compare Capital, pp. 257(n), 399, 464, 498-99. I owe these references to Sandra Bartky.}

One more aspect of gender needs to be considered, the "division of labor" that is supposed to occur in sexual activity. In the passage quoted already from

{p. 69} The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that the social division of labor originates in "the division of labor in the sexual act." If we take this remark seriously, it implies that, no matter how much society may seek to abolish the division of labor, such divisions are always likely to reemerge so long as "the division of labor in the sexual act" remains. Whether or not it is true that divisions of labor, such as the class division and the division of mental from manual labor, will always be regenerated by "the division of labor in the sexual act," it does seem at least plausible that a division of labor in sexual activity will always encourage a regeneration of the more extensive sexual division of labor that constitutes the basis of the institution of gender. This is because, in capitalist society though perhaps not in all others, sexual orientation is one of the defining features of gender identity. If an individual's primary sexual and emotional interest is in members of her or his own sex, then her or his gender identity is conventionally called into question. Thus, gay men are considered conventionally to lack masculinity, to be less than men, and lesbians to lack femininity, to be less than women. If gender is to be eliminated entirely, then, it seems that it may be necessary to abolish normative heterosexuality, the notion that heterosexual relations are more "natural" and legitimate than homosexual relations. In other words, "the division of labor in the sexual act" will have to be abolished. Neither Marx nor Engels, however, considers seriously and explicitly the radical implications of their own suggestion in The German Ideology. In an admittedly early work, Marx writes that "the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being,"41 and Engels always assumes that normal sexual relations are heterosexual. For instance, he condemns the Athenian men who "fell into the abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede,"42 and his discussion of the "mutual sexual love" that will be possible for us all only under socialism is conducted exclusively in heterosexual terms.

From this examination of Marx's and Engels' writings, I conclude that there is considerable ambiguity and even inconsistency in their view of women's nature. They waiver between the radical ideal of full female participation in every area of life and the assumption that, while women's biology may allow for considerable participation, the complete achievement of this goal is impossible. The compromise view seems to be that, under socialism, women's nature would be much more like men's nature than it is under capitalism, especially among the capitalist class, but would not be identical with it. Certain unspecified biological differences between women and men would mean that there could never be a complete abolition of the sexual division of labor, either in the family, in the workplace, or in bed. Consequently, while gender differences under socialism would be considerably muted, complete psychological androgyny would be impossible. {end of selections}

(8) H. Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

{p. 10} In some ways what men believe to be true is more important than the truth. The statements of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels about the family, though they were often false or misleading, have had great influence on the way the Soviet rulers have dealt with the Soviet family and have also inuenced, we may be sure, the Soviet man in the street.

Since the time when the notions of the founders of marxism were elevated to social dogma, their scientific validity, or lack of it, has ceased to be of primary importance. I shall therefore often be more interesed in exploring the relation of an idea to other ideas, especially to the underlying structure and spirit of Marx's and Engels' thought, than to the real world it purports to represent.

The positions, inconsistencies, and errors of marxism have all been significant because they constitute a large portion of the prologue to the present Soviet attitude toward the family.

{p. 11} ONE | THE FAMILY FROM THE ARMCHAIR OF MARX AND ENGELS

WHEN MARX AND ENGELS wrote about the family from time to time over a forty-year period, they described the family as they saw it about them under capitalism, discussed the family in the past, and were interested in the family's future. The main point about the family which drew their interest was the relation of husband and wife and the way it is affected by property relations and other aspects of economic life in the larger society. The most complete discussion of the marxist theory of the family was published by Engels in 1884, after Marl's death, in the book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan.

Although Engels was the author of this work, he noted in the preface to the first edition that Marx himself had hoped to undertake the task and had made extensive extracts which he, Engels, had reproduced "as far as possible." Actually, many of the ideas in The Origin can be found in the first joint work of the two writers, The German Ideology, not published during their lifetimes. Quite clearly, then, this, like most other products of their collaboration, was in the main a joint work of the two founders of marxism and points to an impressive unity and continuity over four decades in the basic outlines of their thought. Knowledge of this collaboration makes the involved exposition easier to follow. There were apparently some differences between the two men about the family, but since we are unaware of precisely what they were, for the purposes of this book their ideas will be assumed to be both in agreement with one another and of mutual origin.

The Marxist Approach to the Family

One of the conclusions to which Marx and Engels were led, with the support of Morgan's researches, was that the family assumed many different forms as it evolved through history and thus constitutes a "series in historic development," as Marx wrote in Capital. They also felt that these different forms were in rough correspondence with the

{p. 12} principal stages of social development postulated in their vision of human history.

The final typology, developed largely by Morgan and endorsed by Engels (presumably also by Marx), included four major forms of relations between the sexes.

The first form was a stage of unrestricted sexual freedom or complete promiscuity. In the beginnings of human history, in fact, as man became human in the transition from the animal, there was no family or marriage whatsoever. The second form was group marriage, which developed very early and had several subtypes. The main characteristic of group marriage as a whole was the absence of the incest taboo, and the earliest subtype in Engels' system, based on his understanding of the moiety system of the Australian aborigines, was essentially "mass marriage" whereby "not the individuals, but the entire groups are married, moiety with moiety" (p. 38). Since there were in existence only two moieties, the range of sexual choice was indeed a wide one. The next subtype was the "consanguine family," with mating taboo between the generations but in which "brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and sisters of one another, and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and wives of one another" (p. 32, Engels' italics). The third and highest subtype was the "punaluan family," whose essential feature was "mutually common possession of husbands and wives" by a number of the same sex, same generation, consanguineal relatives on one side, but in which the incest taboo, already effective between generations, was now etended to brother and sister and to opposite-sex cousins (p. 34 et passim). It is interesting to note that the social mechanism proposed by Morgan, and endorsed by Engels, which was to explain the gradual etension of the incest taboo and thus the gradual evolution of the relation between the sexes, was simply the principle of natural selection: "the tribes among whom inbreeding was restricted ... were bound to develop more quickly and more fully" (p. 34).

The third major form of relationship between man and woman was the monogamous family, corresponding to civilization, the era of history in which Marx and Engels were most interested; this form will be discussed at length. Finally, the whole spirit of Marx's and Engels' thinking provides a fourth major type, which I shall call simply "the pattem of the future," under communism. Hence, there are four main stages in the

{p. 13} "historical series": sexual promiscuity, group marriage, monogamy, and the pattern of the future.

The variable element in these forms does not correspond very closely with that of the main typology of evolutionary social orders developed by Marx and Engels and expressed in terms of the division of labor and property forms: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. In fact, the correspondence of family form with the major historical epochs of Morgan is also forced: to the period of savagery corresponds group marriage, to barbarism the "pairing family," and to civilization monogamy (pp. 47, 66). In the pairing family, neither fish nor fowl, one man lives with one woman but polygamy and "occasional infidelity" remain his right, though not hers. Furthermore, the marriage tie can be easily dissolved by either partner (p. 41).

Engels notes that the pairing family had already been appearing in group marriage or even earlier, and also that it is a "form of monogamy" (pp. 40, 25). Consequently, it is best considered a transitional form between group marriage and monogamy. Moreover, since the principle of natural selection had taken full responsibility for the earlier development of the family, as the really central principle of the tide of history began to take over the pairing family also represented the transitional form between primitive communism and slavery. With the rise of private productive property, the temporary alliances of the pairing family were no longer adequate. When property existed and had to be transmitted, heirs were needed. Hence still another transitional form appeared, this time a clear subtype of the monogamous family, the patriarchal family. It is the first family form to be found in written history (pp. 50-53).

The concept of a transitional family form will be encountered once more in the proletarian family. First, however, the reader should understand that the rather tortured system of types to which Engels (and Marx) subscribed has, it is agreed at present, little validity as a chronological series. It is perhaps most useful simply to note the main theme and key principle of the relations between the sexes before the advent of private property. The theme is the progressive narrowing of the "circle of people comprised within the common bond of marriage, which was originally very wide, until at last it includes only the single pair, the dominant form of marriage today" (p. 276). The key interpretive principle is natural selection. There is also a trace of another mechanism, a product of the rationalistic spirit of the times - the surrender of the

{p. 14} "woman's" right to complete chastity before marriage and of monogamous intercourse in marriage for the observance of monogamy (partial at least) on the part of the man (pp. 10, 447).

The family owes its origin, it would seem, to the operation of these two principles. In the beginning there was only promiscuity and then came group marriage (pp. 15, 30). Later the pairing family, combining characteristics of both group marriage and monogamy, appeared before the rise of history's main determining principle, private property.

Although the monogamous family, the only one found in civilization, represents a higher stage of historical development than the earlier forms, Engels (and apparently Marx as well) was quite fascinated by the sexual lot of primitive man. Group marriage, for instance, he said, "seen at close hand, does not look quite so terrible as the philistrnes, whose minds cannot get beyond brothels, imagine it to be" (p. 39). "The Australian aborigine," Engels continued, "wandering hundreds of miles from his home among people whose language he does not understand, nevertheless often finds in every camp and every tribe women who give themselves to him without resistance and without resentment" (p. 58).

With civilization, however, "monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other." In fact, while "a great historical step forward," it, "together with slavery and private wealth ... opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and, development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others" (p. 58).

As the social role of the man in using tools and transforming things into property for other than immediate consumption assumes the center of the stage, it leads to the form of monogamy known to the present. But a difficulty is presented by the fact that Engels sometimes uses the concept monogamous family to refer variously to the pairing family (in a matrilileal gens [clan] in which women are dominant), to the patriarchal family, to the family of the bourgeois, to the proletarian family, and even to the family of the future, while elsewhere he uses it to refer quite exclusively to the bourgeois family under capitalism. I shall avoid this difficulty by concentrating on family types in relation to the structure of property relations.

Clearly, Marx and Engels felt that property played the central role in civilized society, and it was indeed the civilized historical present in which

{p. 15} they were most interested. But the image of the future as they saw it, also constitutes part of the marxist heritage with which the Soviet regime had to deal. Hence, I shall examine at length their concepts of the bourgeois family under capitalism, the proletarian family under capitalism, and the family in the society of the future, when private property ownership would be abolished. The details of each of these types reveal important aspects of marxist thought, as does the role played by the family in Marx's and Engels' social theory, historical materialism.

Marx and Engels eagerly seized upon the ideas of Morgan, ideas which later research has shown to be inaccurate or, at best, unprovable hypotheses, because he, in the name of respected scholarship, supported some of their ideas which were most bitterly contested by their contemporaries: the central role of the forms of economic development and private property in causing social change, the notion that society develops or evolves in a relatively orderly fashion through a series of stages, and a concept of which more will be said later, the "survival." Marx and Engels were particularly happy to analyze the family because it was such a small, manageably observable unit - "a society in microcosm." If it could be proved that the various family forms constituted a historical series, the point would lend not inconsiderable support to their contention that society, too, had had and would take different forms in past and future. Hence the founders of marxism were most receptive to the ideas of a man who, in the modern verdict, is adjudged as no more than another nineteenth-century evolutionist now thoroughly discredited on empirical grounds.

The Bourgeois Family Corrupted

Marx and Engels spoke of the family life of the bourgeoisie in terms of greed, oppression, exploitation, boredom, adultery, and prostitution. The bourgeois family was quite corrupt, but, and this was for them a main point, it pretended to be something quite different. In fact, "boredom and money are the binding factor, ... but to this ... dirty existence corresponds the sacred conception of it in official phraseology and in general hypocrisy." Again and again they stress that the bourgeois family is in a state of de facto dissolution (Auflosung). The "inner bond" of the family ties of "obedience, piety, marital troth" were all gone. Nothing was left but "property relations" and their consequences.

{p. 16} Thoughts of property and money, the spirit of exchange, dominated the ties of the bourgeois with his wife and with his child. Future husbands haggled with future fathers-in-law over the size of the dowry, while fathers and sons sparred greedily over the question of inheritance. Under these conditions there could be no true love between husband and wife a fact institutionalized, claimed Marx and Engels, in the "marriage of convenience." Hence, marriage among the bourgeoisie amounted to forced cohabitation, or, as a favorite phrase had it, de facto prostitution, in which the woman "only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery" (p. 63). In addition to exploitation of the helpless wife - both of her labor in open or concealed domestic slavery" as "head servant" in the household, and of her body as producer of an heir or simply as an object of loveless lust - there were broader developments. The first, about which gels seemed rather ambivalent, was adultery. The second, about which he had nothing good to say, was prostitution. Both were said to be part and parcel of bourgeois family life, an assertion that is apparently to be understood in quite a literal sense. Of course, Marx and Engels conducted no field studies on these matters, but Engels confidently describes the supplanting of feudalism by the bourgeois social order in France: "The right' of the first night' passed from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution assumed proportions hitherto unknown. Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and was besides supplemented by widespread adultery."

Another concept derived from this situation is the notion of "an exclusive attitude" toward other families. Though a minor theme in the thought of Marx and Engels, it is found repeatedly at both beginning and end of their careers and serves to introduce an idea which came to be more central in the early years of Soviet history - the family as a divisive force in the larger society.

Within the family, as Engels' memorable aphorism put it, the husband is the bourgeois and the wife is the proletarian. And it was not only property ownership which brought inequality of power. In the bourgeois family the husband earns the living and supports the family, a situation which, said Engels, "in itself gives him a position of supremacy" (pp. 65-66). From this twofold advantage of the bourgeois husband Mar and Engels deduced, came the "domestic slavery" of the wife and

{p. 17} all the other sad consequences it entails. The fact that there are some differences between the various types of bourgeois families, that sometimes the German philistine's wife revolts and "wears her husbands trousers," that the French husband often "wears horns," and so on, are all minor eddies in the pool of bourgeois pestilence (pp. 60, 63).

Nevertheless, the concept of the family was indispensable to the bourgeois in order to preserve control over his property. For this reason the greedy, lusty bourgeois fiercely defended the idea of the family as embodied in law and religion. Nothing was the equal, avowed Marx and Engels, of the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality.

{echoing Engels' theme, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, "... if women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system. The weapon I suggest is that most honoured of the proletariat, withdrawal of labour" (Paladin, p.21). Greer was calling on women to destroy Marriage.}

The Proletarian Family

The marxist image of the proletarian family is ambiguous. Perhaps it is akin to a more general ambivalence in marxist thought toward wealth, power, and other things of this world. While there was no question about the depravity of the bourgeois in his relation to wife and children, or about the reason for it, the social relations of the proletarians were free of the corrupting influence of private property. The proletarian was, for instance, more generous than the bourgeois; although he was poor, beggars turned to him, wrote Engels, rather than to the stingy bourgeois. On the other hand, the proletarian family was poverty-stricken. Since the worker was at best an exploited wage earner and at worst a member of the "reserve army of unemployed," his family lacked not only property but income. Food, clothing, and decent shelter were short. The emergence of capital accumulation, monetary exchange, commercial competition, and the concentration of property ownership had left him helpless and exposed. His lot was one of starving, stealing, and suicide, and in his family life were drunkenness, brutality, and sexual irregularity. In fact, his family was "torn asunder by modern industry" to the point where there occurred a "perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralizing for parents and children alike." Engels repeatedly used such phrases as "the ruin of all domestic relations" or asserted that "no family life was possible." He did not blame the workers for this, though; since they were denied all other privilege by the system which gripped them, no one could blame them for turning to those pleasures which were left, drink and sexual indulgence. "The workingmen, in order to get something from life, concentrate their whole

{p. 18} energy upon these two enjoyments, carry them to excess, surrender to them in the most unbridled manner."

The breakup, factual dissolution, or practical absence (all terms used synonymously by Engels) of proletarian family life was owing in the first instance to economic need, but also to one of its immediate consequences - the employment of women and children in industry. Under the conditions of capitalism painted by Marx and Engels, the liberating influence of social production was only a portent. At the moment proletarian women and children were exploited mercilessly, with long hours, low wages, and unbelievable working conditions. Thus, said Engels, the employment of women breaks up the family. As the mother grows away from the children, they are neglected and grow up as savages, and are then, of course, unprepared to form and maintain decent families when they become adults. So the cycle repeats.

From this central thesis, Marx and Engels deduced several subsidiary patterns. The proletarian tends to marry early as a means of self-protection, for then, in true Darwinian fashion, he can procreate many children and put them to work in the sweatshops and the mines. The fact that "the absolute size of the families stands in inverse proportion to the height of wages ... calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down," wrote Marx.

Moreover, complained Engels somewhat incongruously, the employment of the wife is likely to "turn the family upside down." A situation is created in which the husband cannot find work, but his wife can because she will work for less. Thus he sits at home while she becomes the breadwinner. Engels then treats the reader to the "outrageous episode" of poor Jack who must sit at home and mend his wife's stocking with the bodkin while she is off at work.

But, in positive terms, the absence in the proletarian family of the original source of all the trouble, private property, can have only a salutary effect, in view of the havoc it creates among the bourgeois family. In deference to the logic of their analysis of the bourgeois family, Marx and Engels also conclude that among the proletarians the family is "based on real relations" (reale Verhdltnisse). In the beginning of their collaboration real relations seem to mean several more or less vaguely stated natural or environmental conditions - not only property but social, ecological, and physiological factors. A typical excerpt refers to the "real body of the family" and includes relationships given by "the presence of children, the construction of the contemporary city, for

{p. 19} mation of capital."In Engels' later writing, however, real relations increasingly mean personal preference and mutual love, or as Engels liked to call it, true or mutual "sex love."

Engels also asserted that marital equality existed in the proletarian family. This situation results from the absence of property and also from the fact that the wife is frequently employed, two conditions which give her the power to dissolve the marriage if she wishes and also bring her the position and respect associated with a productive economic role. Among the proletarians, who regard the norms of religion and laws as no more than embodiments of bourgeois interest, "if two people cannot get on with one another, they prefer to separate." Obviously there is also no reason for adultery, prostitution, or religion, and they "play an almost vanishing part" (p. 64).

The positive side of the proletarian family thus contains true love marital equality, willingness and freedom to divorce on appropriate occasion, and disregard of the traditional morality as merely an expression of class interests. In all of these, as well as in the determining conditions, freedom from property ownership and the employment of the wife, the proletarian family approaches Marx's and Engels' image of family life under communism.

Unde capitalism there are important differences, to be sure. When Engels says that the family is still an "economic unit of society," he refers to the continuing fetter imposed upon the wife by the tasks of housekeeping and the care of children. These place her in a position in which "if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out her family duties" (p. 65 ).

In spite of this seemingly crippling defect, in his last major work Engels paints a positive picture of the proletarian family. Freely contracted marriage and true love are the rule. Perhaps there is, concedes Engels, "something of the brutality toward women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy" (p. 64), but he apparently now thinks of it as a pure survival, with no source in the conditions of proletarian life.

In general, Engels' thoughts on the proletarian farnily constitute a clear example of the conflict between analytical principles that work in opposite directions. On the one hand, there is the corrosive effect of exploitation and poverty: "The great overturn of society through com-

{p. 20} petition, which dissolved the relationship of the bourgeois among themselves and to the proletarians into relationships of money, changed the various 'sacred things' listed above into items of commerce, and destroyed for the proletarians everything natural and traditional, for eample, family and political relationships together with their entire ideological superstructure." Turning the coin over, the absence of private property makes social equality and love possible: "Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat" (p. 63).

In his first work, The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Engels emphasized the first principle and neglected the second. In his last work, he emphasized only the liberating absence of private property among the proletarians. There is scarcely a reference to the dire effects of poverty in the entire book. Because of his tendency to impute concreteness to an analytical notion, Engels' propositions have outstripped him, a fiaw that frequently appears in the writing of Engels and Marx. In this case, the interpretive principles clash in the direction of infiuence they are supposed to exert to such a degree that one of them tends to push the other completely out of the picture.

The Pattern of the Future: Equality, Freedom, and Love

Under communism life would be better. Classes would disappear, the state would be unnecessary and would wither away, and the antagonisms between town and country and between physical and mental work would end. There would be no such deadening division of labor with its strict and narrow work specialization as eisted under capitalism, and there would be no religion, because the social contradictions from which it had risen would have disappeared. Marx and Engels were quite explicit about what would happen to the family under such conditions. A good part of it would disappear, consigned like the state to "the museum of antiquities." Property-holding, work, consumption, and the rearing and education of children would be surrendered to society. All these activities, according to the founders of marxism, in one way or another breed inequality within the family and hence oppression, marital or parental.

Curiously, other than to note that all children would be reared on

{p. 21} a communal basis, Marx and Engels had little to say about the future relationships of parents and children. Apparently they would not continue to live together, because society was to rear and educate. Whether they would see each other and, if so, how frequently are questions left unanswered. It is only asserted that the communal rearing of children would bring "real freedom" among all members of the family. The union of man and woman clearly would continue to be a close one, however. The promise discernible in the proletarian family would then be unmistakably fulfilled, and its two defects, poverty and maintenance of a private household, would have ended. Women would have been drawn into the liberating sphere of "social production" and freed from the domestic slavery of the individual family household. As a first approximation, then, it seems that under communism the family would disappear, but marriage would remain.

Rather than marriage, perhaps the word love should be used - love purified and exalted, free from all economic considerations which "exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left except mutual inclination" (p. 72). But would inclination not lead to the "free love" or "sexual communism" that horrified the nineteenth century. Engels replied to this criticism early in his career, in 1847, by answering the question: What will be the influence of communist society on the family?

It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage, the dependence, rooted in private property, of woman on the man and of the children on the parents. And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the "community of women." Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.

In other words, it will be nobody's business but the man and woman concerned; and, since things can hardly get worse, they have to get better.

Later a more substantial clue was given. Relations between the sexes would revolve around the nature and significance of love, about which

{p. 22} Engels had very definite ideas. He considered it "by its nature exclusive." Hence, a marriage based on it would be an "individual marriage" (p. 72). But he did not see such a bond as indissoluble: marriage would continue only so long as love continued, and "the intense emotion of individual sex-love varies very much in duration from one individual to another, especially among men" (p. 73). Obviously, then, and Engels makes this explicit, if love comes to an end or is supplanted by a "new passionate love," separation will benefit all concerned. Divorce will not be needed, however, only separation. As a matter of course, under such conditions both adultery and prostitution will also disappear, for they will simply be unnecessary. Complete sex equality, complete freedom of choice, perfect love - such was the promise of communism.

Further than this - the emergence of those features of family life which were emphatically absent in the bourgeois monogamous family - Engels did not go, but he reiterated his stand of the early years with these words: "But what will there be new? This will be answered when a new generation has grown up ... When these people are in the world, they will ... make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual and that will be the end of it" (p. 73).

Moreover, in the family of the future, after the abolition of private property ownership and the assumption of social responsibility for children, there would be no anxiety about the material consequences of unwanted pregnancy. Similarly, illegitimacy would carry no stigma, for society would care for legitimate and illegitimate alike. And, of course, there would be no anxiety about inheriting and bequeathing wealth.

The thoughtful reader will perceive some difficulties in these formulations. Parenthood, for instance, is given short shrift. The question of mutuality in love, a very troublesome matter, and the related fact that in Engels' own words men are "by nature" more polygamous than women are not adequately settled (pp. 10, 447, 73). Neither is the question of whether there will be individual dwellings for men and women.

But the founders of marxism had written in The Communist Manifesto that "the theory of the Communist may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." And now, it seems, they were seeking to be consistent in drawing out the implications of this commitment. Hence the concepts of the family and marriage were

{p. 23} greatly overshadowed by the concern with liberation of the individual from all external constraint. The family of the future was essentially a naturalistic unit rather than a social institution, for social relationships were regarded as little more than the extension of the individual's potentialities for equality, freedom, and love.

{p. 24} TWO | HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE FAMLY

THE FAILURE OF Marx and Engels to clarify the eact relation of the family to historical materialism left the main axiom of historical materialism unbowed but led to weakness and ambiguity in the marxist theory of the family. As a result, the gates were open wide for a rich tide of supplementary theories as well as legislative experimentation in the post-revolutionary USSR.

On the Withering Problem

Historical materialism clearly extends priority, if not exclusive reign, to the influence of economic factors. In the causation of social change, the "mode of production" is seen as the prime mover. In marxian terminology, the conditions constituting this force have come to be designated as the "base" (Unterbau) and the phenomena of change which are dependent upon it as the "superstructure" (Vberbau).

Although this conceptual scheme dramatizes effectively the determinist facet of Marx's and Engels' theories, it is unfortunate and misleading and does not reflect the best thinking of the two originators of marxism. Not only does it suggest an overly rigid notion of the direction in which causal influence is exerted from base to superstructure but it also leads to an unproductive dualism in ordering social forces. That is, it suggests only two conceptual dimensions: the economic (sometimes, more broadly, materialistic) base and all those other phenomena dependent on it, the superstructure. Actually, Marx and Engels most frequently thought in terms of a three-dimensional scheme made up of cultural forms or patterns of social institutions, the proper realm for "survivals"; social relations as they "really exist" (for example, in the proletarian farnily under bourgeois capitalism); and economic or materialistic conditions. Unfortunately, because of the base-superstructure scheme, apparently taken from the building trade, and because of the presence of careless or elliptical statements in which Marx and Engels seem to be working with a dualistic scheme, in marxist theory only the first and third elements

{p. 25} can be identified with certainty as superstructure and base. The middle element, social relations, responds to changes in the third and also can be seen as itself causing changes in the first. Hence, it can be located according to desire either in base or in superstructure.

Marx and Engels made use of Morgan's term "survival" to refer generally to components of an outmoded superstructure. The state, law, religion, morality in general were all part of that superstructure, and, consequently, since superstructural elements were presumed to be the result of contradictions at a lower level, they would all disappear under communism. The fate Marx and Engels assigned to the family was not unrelated to their general discussion of life under communism. Their interpreters have frequently contended that they felt the family was also part of the superstructure, and hence that it took a form which was essentially a function of the state of economic forces at a given moment in history. As such, the family not only was a totally dependent institution, and therefore unimportant, but would ultimately disappear completely.

This conclusion is supported on at least four grounds. First, Marx and Engels do occasionally speak quite plainly of abolishing the family, as in the following: "That the abolition of [the] individual [household] economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident" (Ideology, p. 18). Another is found in the Communist Manifesto: "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie, but this shape of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital" (The Communist Manifesto, p. 77).

Secondly, Marx and Engels suggest an analogy between social classes and state on one side and spouses and family on the other. The state, clearly a superstructural element that was developed by the bourgeoisie to protect its property interests inevitably falls with the fall of classes (Origin, p. 158). The family would suffer the same fate, for its function apparently was analogous to that of the state. It was an institution to protect the husband's interest in exploiting the wife. He was the bourgeois and his wife the proletarian.

{p. 26} Thirdly, at both the beginning and the end of their writing careers Marx and Engels made statements that seem to treat the family as a survival from an earlier era. The cultural ideal (or social institution) of the family no longer corresponded with the underlying reality they saw. Thus, Marx wrote that under capitalism the exercise of parental control over children became anachronistic, indeed evil. "The capitalist mode of production, through the dissolution of the economic basis for parental authority, made its exercise degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power" (Capital, I, 535). And Engels felt the accepted relationship between man and wife was no longer possible in a case where the wife took outside employment. In fact, their relationship was turned "upside down"; the reason - "simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed" (Origin, p. 147). Such instances could easily be multiplied, for time and again the founders of marxism seemed to forget the complexity of the conditions and forces determining a given concrete phenomenon and to attribute the properties of necessity and sufficiency to a single factor.

Finally, the student of marxism knows that the pattern of the future is not without its precedent in the past. The merging of future and past is especially prominent in The Origin. Ostensibly on the basis of Morgan's research into the North American Iroquois and other preliterate societies, Marx and Engels concluded that primitive man was in a happier condition than his civilized cousin. They wrote of the Iroquois:

{quote} And a wonderful order [Verfassung] it is, this gentile order, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves ... Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications ... There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free - the woman included ... And what men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians. [Origin, pp. 86-87.] {endquote}

{p. 27} Against the "simple moral greatness" of the old "gentile" society Marx and Engels juxtaposed the corrupt civilization they saw around them, with its "base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth" (Origin, p. 88). The cause, of course, was the development of private property and classes, as Marx and Engels had long since concluded. Morgan's research was doubly attractive to them because it detected a pattern of life in the past which corresponded in many respects with the hopes nourished by Marx and Engels for the future and hence united a happier future with a happier past in a comforting similarity. This point is explicitly stated on the last page of The Origin, where Engels cites with approval Morgan's judgment of the coming "next higher plane of society," and even underlines the book's concluding words: "It will be a revival in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes" (p. 163).

The unification of the two utopias - past and future - is not without significance to our interest. For, "under the gentile order, the family was never an organizational unit [Organisationseinheit], and could not be so, for man and wife necessarily belonged to two different gentes" (Origins, pp. 991). This statement anticipates the ultimate prediction of Marx and Engels. It almost but not quite explicitly indicates that there will be no family under communism. Again, Engels resorts approvingly to ideas of Morgan:

{quote} When the fact is accepted that the family has passed through four successive forms, and is now in a fifth, the question arises whether this form can be permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is that it must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in the past. It is the creature of the social system, and will reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved greatly since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in modern times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained. Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements of society ... it is impossible to predict the nature of its successor. [Origin, p. 74.] {endquote}

This passage very strongly implies that the monogamous family will indeed fail to answer society's requirements in the future.

All of the above lends support to the view that Marx and Engels felt that the family would wither away. However, passages can also be found which suggest that they thought of and used the term family in two distinct senses: (1) to refer to the social relations clustering around

{p. 28} the facts of sex and age differences, sexual attraction, sexual intercourse, and reproduction; and (2) as a strictly cultural or institutional entity, a survival of the past in relation to the conditions appearing on the scene with modern bourgeois capitalism. Examples of the second usage have alredy been given, and the following is an example of the first, more general, connotation: "Modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes" (Capital, I, 536; my italics).

This semantic problem caused difficulties similar to those brought on by the dualism suggested in the concepts of base and superstructure. The family would indeed wither away if the term meant the cultural forrn of the detested "monogamous family of civilization," but it would not wither, at least not entirely, if the term referred to the observable clustering of certain kinds of behavior and social relations around sex, age, and reproduction. In addition to the semantic confusion, there were other complexities.

Underlying Thought-Models: An Emerging Multi-Factor Theory

Marx's and Engels' major concept was the central place of economic factors in social change. But the world of facts is stubbornly complex, and the marxist treatment of the family has been particularly shaky because of certain facts relating to biological ties and to sexual reproduction which seem to be materialistic but yet are not economic. This clash of social theory, with its inherent press toward completeness and closure, and the world of observable facts resulted in two fissures, possibly a third, in the structure of economic determinism, both of which are of the greatest interest for students of marxism and students of social theory in general. Two of these "underlying thought models" are presented in some detail in this section, and a third is briefly alluded to. Neither of the first two was ever made very explicit in the writing of Marx and Engels, thus have led to considerable confusion and uncertainty among marxists about the role of the family in historical materialism. The third analogy is almost entirely latent.

As noted previously, the tendency in Marx's and Engels' writings on the family is to treat the family principally as a function of economic

{p. 29} developments. Throughout Engels' major work on the subject there are references to the determining effect of property relations, the division of labor, the employment of women, and, as an extension of the latter, a kind of "reflection" theory of the family. For example, Engels argued that as wealth increases, the man overthrows the traditional order of inheritance - reckoned in the female line, according to him, a fact which "was the world historical defeat of the female sex" (Origin, p. 50; Engels' italics). Two different but closely related economic factors are held directly to influence the positions of husband and wife: an increase in wealth, with subsequent change in the inheritance role, and the wage-earning work role of the husband. In both cases an advantageous economic position is seen as inevitably leading to unbalanced personal power which in turn leads to oppression and inequality. This mode of analysis is certainly consistent with the main thesis of Mar and Engels' thought.

At first sight, then, it does not seem inconsistent to find such depictions of the family as the following, in which Engels is speaking of the monogamous family: "It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied" (Origin, p. 58). Such descriptions can easily and conveniently be interpreted simply as elements in a reflection theory of the family, for they are explained entirely by the portrayal of the economic circumstances reigning in society as a whole.

But this leads us to our first underlying analytical model. Early in their career the two collaborators spoke of the "latent slavery in the family" (Ideology, p. 21), and in Capital Marx wrote about a division of labor in the family which "spontaneously developed" and which depends upon or is caused by "differences of age and sex" (pp. 90, 386). Surely these must be reckoned as references to a noneconomic factor, unless Marx and Engels are simply being elliptical, which seems unlikely. To call "differences of age and sex" aspects of property relations, or of economic forces of any kind, would be stretching the meaning of this latter concept to the breaking point. More likely, Engels and Marx saw age and sex differences in themselves, that is, as facts of nature, as a source of inequality (ultimately of power) and oppression. From this point of view, then, insofar as Marx conceived them to be capable of variation, as is implied by the use of the term slavery (which obviously could not be eternal), family relationships can be seen as a superstructure over a biological base.

{p. 30} A further analogy, also focusing on a biological fact, is found in the earliest exposition of historical materialism made by the two writers (Ideology, pp. 127). There they assert that three basic premises support their analysis: (1) the production of material things to enable man to live; (2) the infinity of human needs - as soon as one is satisfied, new needs appear; and (3) reproduction. They then continue their exposition to develop the idea that to each mode of production or industrial stage - see premise (1) - there corresponds a "mode of cooperation" or "social stage." This mode of cooperation (Weise des Zusammenwirkens) is, they say, itself a force of production (Produktivkraft) and thus becomes also a condition (fact, moment, premise), the fourth, of the historical process.

These ideas were considerably refined in later writings. The important fact in the present context is what appears to be the assignment by Marx and Engels of an independent and fundamental role to the process of reproduction, premise (3). There is little doubt that this is what they meant. They wrote: "The production of life, both of one's own in labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other hand as a social relationship" (Ideology, p. 18; my italics). If The German Ideology were the only place in which such an idea was presented, one would be inclined to assume that they later thought better of it. But the notion recurs in similarly explicit form in the last major work of the founders of marxism, The Origin of the Family, and again in a letter of September 21, 1890, from Engels to Bloch. In The Origin Engels referred to the earlier book and repeated with approval the following: "The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children" (p. 58). Engels did not propose to abolish this division of labor, though he may have wished to, but he did consider reproduction to be of such importance to historical materialism that it receives explicitly equal weight with production. In the preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, he wrote:

{quote} According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular

{p. 31} historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other. The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the farnily is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history. [Pp. 5-6; Engels' italics.] {endquote}

Apparently Marx and Engels vere inclined somehow to look upon reproduction as part of the base. It seems quite clear that they were on the verge of an analogy between the mode of production and the mode of reproduction, to which would correspond, respectively, two separate and parallel sets of modes of cooperation or social stages.

The social stages which correspond to the different stages of development of the mode of production were of course the stages in the historical development of society: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and so forth. The social stages which presumably would correspond to "variations" in the mode of reproduction were the different forms of social relationship, group marriage, monogamous family, and so on, which Marx and Engels saw as clustering around sex and reproduction a line of thought much encouraged by Morgan.

The analogy is obviously faulty, since the process of reproduction is hardly a variable in the same sense as the process of production. Moreover, Marx and Engels never developed it in any explicit and systematic way, and to their followers it has proved to be either embarrassing or mystifying. Heinrich Cunow, for example, found it "almost incomprehensible how Engels could have made such a mistake," and soberly asserted that the "production of men" had always been accomplished "in the same way and with the same means." His colleague, Karl

{p. 32} Kautsky, noted that the phrasing in The Origin corresponded almost word for word with that in The German Ideology and found it "very remarkable" that nothing more was said about it in the intevening years. Even Lenin, in reply to criticism by the sociologically inclined N. K. Mikhailovski about this phrase of Engels' was not able to give an effective defense or explanation. Nor have efforts by Soviet theorists been very successful. For some time it was simply dismissed as a mistake or an inaccuracy on the part of Engels, while more recently the view has been taken that Engels' reference in The Origin to the determining importance of reproduction was meant to refer to the earliest period of human history, when "people were still more like beasts than people" and the means of production had little influence on their relations.

In fact, however, a careful reading of the quotation above makes such an interpretation dubious. The forthright manner of its presentation and the persistence of the idea over forty years of more or less continuous thinking and polemical activity by the two founders of marxism strongly suggests that the family was not seen by them as of the same ilk as the state, religion, and so forth - that is, as an element of the superstructure dependent entirely on contradictions arising out of material circumstances - and that they felt the family, insofar as it was a part of the superstructure, was "originally tied" with a base other than an economic one.

It is not impossible to conclude from this review that Marx and Engels were for their time unusually acute sociological analysts and were close on the track of the essentials of modern sociological theory. In these scattered comments they seem to be moving in the direction of a multifactor theory of the determination of concrete social structure. Thus their thoughts about the family tended to lead them in a direction opposite to that in which they wanted to move, which was toward economic determinism, a single-factor theory. But Marx and Engels were moralists and political activists as much as they were social theorists, and these interests had their influence on the theories they developed. Admittedly, even the most indignant of men are unlikely to become very exercised over the injustice arising from the division of labor in reproduction.

According to still a third pattern, implicit in the writings of Marx and

{p. 33} Engels, the family can be analyzed in terms of an analogy with the main axiom of historical materialism. This belief extends the parallel between the mode and relations of production (in the economic realm) to the mode and relations of reproduction. In both cases important needs are involved, certain objects can satisfy those needs, and rights are at stake. To the need for food, clothing, and shelter correspond the sexual need of the individual and the (derived) need of society for new members. To the means and instruments of production correspond the sexual characteristics and organs of men and women. And to the economic commodity and to property rights correspond both seual satisfaction and sexual rights and the fruit of intercourse - a new life - and parental rights.

Carrying the analogy further, the element corresponding to socialization of the means of production is clearly the socialization of the bodies of men and women and of their children or, if one prefers, the abolition of private sexual and parental rights. Ad, of course, to the economic greed and exploitative nature of the bourgeois correspond the sexual jealousy and sense of parental ownership which are part and parcel of the institution of the monogamous family.

Marx and Engels were clearly willing to consider a certain abolition of parental rights, since under communism the rearing of children would be the responsibility and right of society as a whole; but the abolition of sexual rights (which they tended to see as simply the right of the husband to his wife's body) was another matter. As a problem in their scheme, it was solved by means of an image of what would happen once women were freed from their economic and legal inferiority. Marx and Engels apparently felt that once women had obtained a position of equality with men, there would be no need for any kind of rights, for natural man and natural woman would engage in sexual relations strictly according to mutual inclination. This naturalistic humanism protected them against the charge of proposing a onesided socialization of women. They did not, however, envisage the possibility that in the future society women themselves might wish, in numbers large or small, to treat their own bodies as public property, in which case the criteria of both naturalism and mutuality would be satisfied. Their presumption that sexual love is individual is one of the unscientific elements present in their ideas.

{p. 41} II THE SOVIET REGIME CONFRONTS THE FAMILY

{p. 44} In Pursuit of the Marxist Theory of the Family

Perhaps the most lively question posed by the writing of Marx and Engels, and the one receiving the most ambiguous response, was on the future of the family: Would the family, like the state, religion, and other institutions, wither away with the attainment of the classless society? More specifically, three questions, or at least three elements of the issue, seemed to be at stake here: Would the family disappear at some future, unspecified, time? If so, what implication did this have for the young socialist society; that is, would the disappearance or withering begin immediately? And again, if so, should the party and its followers take an active role in bringing about such a process? Among the positions taken on the far left was that of the leader of Bolshevik feminism Alexandra M. Kollontai, who tended to answer all three with a vigorous yes. On the far right were those who, like the German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky, argued that the family would not disappear, now or in the communist future, and that in any case little could or should be done by the communists themselves, for such action would be "unmarxist." For example: "The communists see the only lever to a real transformation of human relations in a change of the productive base, the economic foundation of social life, over which the various ideological forms constitute multiform superstructures in which are clothed human consciousness, morals and customs."

Somewhere between these two extremes, but closer to Kollontai, the views of the majority can probably be found. In the years between 1917 and 1934 most party members apparently subscribed to the following formulations, written by an influential member of the Leningrad party organization:

{quote} Bourgeois ideologists think that the family is an eternal, not a transitory organization, that sexual relations are at the basis of the family, that these

{p. 45} sexual relations will exist as long as the two sexes, and since man and woman will both live under socialism just as under capitalism, that therefore the existence of the family is inevitable. That is completely incorrect. Sexual relations, of course, have existed, eist, and will exist. However, this is in no way connected with the indispensability of the existence of the family. The best historians of culture definitely have established that in primitive times the family did not exist ... Similar to the way in which, together with the disappearance of classes, together with the annihilation of class contradictions, the state will disappear, similarly to that, together with the strengthening of the socialist economy, together with the growth of socialist relationships, together with the overcoming of earlier pre-socialist forms, the family will also die out. The family is already setting out on the road to a merging with Socialist Society, to a dissolution into it. [But] an openly negative attitude toward the family under present conditions does not have sufflcient grounding, because pre-socialist relationships still exist, the state is still weak, the new social forms [public dining rooms, state rearing of children, and so forth] are as yet little developed, and until then the family cannot be abolished completely. However, the coordination of this family with the general organization of Soviet life is the task of every communist, of every Komsornolite [member of Communist Youth League]. One must not shut oneself off in the family, but rather, grow out of the family shell into the new Socialist Society. The contemporary Soviet family is the springboard from which we must leap into the future. Always seeking to carry the entire family over into the public organizations, always a more decisive overcoming of the elements of bourgeois family living - that is the difficult, but important task which stands before us. {endquote}

To summarize, the family will eventually die out, is in fact starting to do so now, but nonetheless will be needed for the duration of the transition period, and the party and its followers should take an active role in helping things along, mainly by setting a good eample.

Preconditions for the new social ordering of the relations between the sexes were required. The most crucial was the entrance of woman into social production, which would give her economic independence and hence social equality. Her work in social production would then have to be balanced by society's assumption of the responsibilities of childrearing, supplying and preparing food, washing clothing, and so on. All such patterns - the entry of women into the labor market, the socialization of household chores, the assumption of public responsibility for childrearing - were originally subsidiary links in the causal chain

{p. 46} leading to the end of the family, and to equality and freedom for the individual, but in early Soviet writing they tended to assume the status of end-goals in themselves, and to be justified in their own terms.

Lenin himself elaborated slightly the position of Marx and Engels on social equality for women. He was as strongly opposed as they, perhaps even more so, to the individual household with its "stinking kitchen," and, like them, asserted that only socialism and an end to small households could "save woman from housewifery." Also, like Fourier, Marx, and Engels, Lenin saw in the liberation of women, the weaker sex, a symbol of a more general liberation, though he placed more stress on the psychological factor of participation in social production as a source of personality development, which would then serve generally to put women on a more equal footing with men. Conversely, Lenin seemed more irritated with the specific nature of the housewife's tasks than Marx and Engels had been when they had confined themselves more to the general factors of property relations in the family and the wife's entry into social production. Lenin wrote: "Women grow worn out in the petty, monstrous household work, their strength and time dissipated and wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly, their will weakened." In this, he continued, it is not only the woman who suffers: "The home life of a woman is a daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. The old master right of the man still lives in secret. His slave takes her revenge, also secretly. The backwardness of women, their lack of understanding for the revolutionary ideals of the man, decrease his joy and determination in fighting. They are like little worms which, unseen, slowly but surely rot and corrode." These subtleties constituted a relatively small shift of explanatory emphasis. For the rest, Lenin agreed that the development of public restaurants, creches, and similar facilities was crucial, and that the abolition of the small household economy was, in the words of one of his colleagues, E. A. Preobrazhenski, "theoretically indisputable for every Communist."

Further arguments in support of the socialization of household chores were that the maintenance of an individual household was uneconomical and perpetuated the small, isolated, shut-off family unit, a source of hostility toward the new socialist way of life. During the 1920's, considerable effort was expended in the calculation of how many hours of labor were required to run an individual household, and a comprehensive survey of the life of Moscow workers conducted in

{p. 47} 1923-1925 reported that some twelve working hours per day were needed, on the average, to carry on individual family life. At one time it was estimated that in Russia 36,000,000 work hours were spent every day only on the preparation of food in individual households, whereas centralized production would have required only 6,000,000 work hours. Later, in the middle of the First Five Year Plan, the complaint was made that 30,000,000 individuals were giving their full time to unproductive household work.

As a corollary to such information, the liberation of women in itself was seen as a condition for economic development. Thereby the family became by implication a direct obstacle to the "development of the base." Trotsky went even further, reversing the usual order of precedence in the marxist theory of the relation between family and economic life: "Until there is equality in the family, there will be none in social production."

The rearing of children by society was hailed by all not only because it saved time and released the mother for outside work, but because it could be more scientific, more rational, more organized than rearing within the individual family. Some carried the argument even further and contended that in a society organized around a collective work system it was more appropriate to accustom a child from the earliest years to life in the collective rather than to train him in the individualistic small family. Kollontai's early formulation is characteristic: "The contemporary family, as a specific social collective, has no productive functions and to leave all care for posterity in this private collective cannot be justified by any positive considerations ... Logically speaking, it would seem that care for the new generation should lie with that economic unit, with that social collective, that needs it for its further existence."

To many observers the most striking feature of early Bolshevik family theory concerned the future of parent-child relations. Marx, Engels, and even Lenin had left the field open for the most radical pretensions of the leftists. Perhaps it is significant that neither Engels nor Lenin ever became a father. In any event, the writing of Marx and Engels clearly disregarded the positive contribution to society of motherhood and fatherhood. As a result, A. V. Lunacharski, Commissar of Education, could write in the early 1930's: "Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children. It would be idiotic to separate children from their parents

{p. 48} by force. But when, in our communal houses, we have well-organized quarters for children, connected by a heated gallery with the adults' quarters, to suit the requirements of the climate, there is no doubt the parents will, of their own free will, send their children to these quarters, where they will be supervised by trained pedagogical and medical personnel. There is no doubt that the terms 'my parents,' 'our children,' will gradually fall out of usage, being replaced by such conceptions as 'old people,' 'adults,' 'children,' and 'infants.' Kollontai, prominent opponent of motherhood, saw it as an unjust burden and, in her zest for feminine emancipation, seemed to want to see women and men placed in identical social roles.

{Feminism in the West has developed 'benchmarks' for 'equality', meaning 'sameness'}

At times the radical image of the future took on very concrete form. In a series of publications of the late 1920's L. M. Sabsovich urged an immediate and complete change in all phases of everyday life - a radical cultural revolution. He advocated complete separation of children from parents from the earliest years and said that those who argued for recognition of such concepts as the natural biological tie between parents and children, were "soaked in petit bourgeois and 'intelligentsia-like' prejudices." He held that social and economic factors accounted entirely for the feeling of exclusive love toward one's own children: in the future society there would be only love for children in general. Moreover, he pointed out that since the child was the property of the state, not the individual family, the state therefore had the right to compel parents to surrender their children to special "children's towns" to be built "at a distance from the family." This was but one element in a broader scheme devised by Sabsovich for the construction of a new type of "socialist city" (the contemporary form of city was a "capitalist invention") in which not only work but all aspects of leisure and consumption activities were to be organized on a collectivist basis. The family dwelling would be completely eliminated, to be replaced by individual rooms for individual persons (though married persons could have adjoining rooms). Sabsovich urged that such reorganization of life into a "truly socialist" form start immediately: "Down with so-called 'transitional forms'!" The workers should not be furnished with gas, electricity, and other conveniences, but instead provided with a thorough socialist reconstruction within the next five to eight years.

We may doubt that such views were widely shared. One opponent of Sabsovich referred to "various strange ideas about home life under

{p. 49} socialism," such as, "all individual home life (not only family life) will disappear under socialism," and, "the whole life of a person, physical and mental, can be lived within the collective." Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin's widow, noted that children belonged neither to parents nor to the state, but to themselves. Furthermore, the state was due to wither away, and "the parental sense will not be suppressed, but will flow in another channel; it will afford much more joy to children and to parents." Hence, parents would be justified, she wrote, in refusing to turn their children over to children's towns in the manner proposed by Sabsovich.

All in all, on the level of ideology the first decade or so of post-revolutionary thought brought a rich and often quite interesting tide of theories about the family. With no official party line on the subject, the writings of Marx and Engels were ambiguous enough to elicit a variety of theories, and the emerging problems seemed to justify the number of them evoked.

Property and Inheritance

Some marxist ideas about the family found concrete embodiment in the realm of legal actions. Since marxist thought insisted so vigorously on the corruptive influence of private wealth, it was only natural that its presumed power should be curtailed. On April 27, 1918, it was decreed: "Testate and intestate succession are abolished. Property of an owner (movable as well as immovable) becomes after his death the domain of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic." Other legal measures were taken to forestall immediately the detested "marriage of calculation." The 1918 family code proclaimed that "marriage does not establish community of property" and that "agreements by husband or wife intended to restrict the property rights of either party are invalid, and not binding."

Nevertheless, the retreat from the abolition of inheritance began immediately, even in the very decree in which it was abolished. Though succession was repealed in principle, immediate relatives who had been living with the deceased were permitted to inherit if the value of the estate did not exceed 10,000 rubles, close relatives who were incapable of working were to receive an amount necessary for support, and so on. This situation was an early example of one which was to be

{p. 50} come prototypical: the bolsheviks were simply not in a position to carry out their declared aims. In 1919 the Commissariat of Justice decreed that the 10,000-ruble limit did not apply to peasants' farmsteads, in 1922 the Civil Code explicitly permitted inheritance up to 10,000 rubles to specified persons, and in 1926 the upper limit was abolished entirely. However, hostility to the principle of inherited property continued and was expressed by a strongly progressive inheritance tax until 1943, when the tax itself was abolished. All that remained after that was a fee, progressive but never higher than 10 per cent.

The abolition of the concept of community property of husband and wife was also a source of trouble to the Soviet leaders. Motivated largely by the desire to abolish marriage for money, the decree seemed a logical corollary to the marxist devaluation of household labor. All agreed in principle that women must be drawn out of the home and into social production, but the difficulty was that many married women could not, or would not, be so drawn out. There were large families to care for, there were not enough creches and kindergartens, and there was unemployment during most of the years of the New Economic Policy from 1921 to 1928. But in those families where the wife did not work, such goods and money as were acquired after marriage could be interpreted as the legal property of the husband. In case of divorce, a phenomenon of increasing frequency in those days, the purpose of the law - to protect both spouses, but especially the woman, from exploitation - could boomerang to the disadvantage of the housewife. Thus, practice showed that laws of good intention could lead to bad results. So, in 1926 the principle that property acquired after marriage is community property of the spouses was restored to the code of laws on marriage and family.

One of the main functions of private wealth in most societies, whether accumulated or inherited, is to provide for times of sickness, old age, or other need for self or relatives, and the 1918 code recognized that legal responsibility for maintenance of children, the aged, and the invalid would have to continue for a time. In the 1918 decree on inheritance, for example, certain relatives (if propertyless and disabled) were authorized to receive, from an estate exceeding 10,000 rubles in value, a sum necessary for self-support. This exception was justified by a condition - "until a decree for universal social insurance is issued." Although the idea of societal support for the individual was central to marxist socialism, it is an index of developing problems that in the 1926 code the individual's legal responsibility for support of

{p. 51} needy relatives, instead of being narrowed, was widened to include brother, sister, grandparents, and grandchildren. Presumably "marriages of calculation" continued with much the same frequency as before, though as time went on the determining factor came to be more a matter of selecting a husband who was a "big specialist" rather than wealthy. The continuing importance of money in famly life was also shown by the large number of lawsuits about problems of alimony.

Parents: A Hotbed of Traditionalism

Though the theme is barely present in Marx and Engels, largely because of the limited importance of the transition period in their thinking, it was not long before their Soviet followers decided that the family was definitely not on the side of the Revolution. Kollontai put it very well: "The family deprives the worker of revolutionary consciousness." She, like many of her colleagues, fulminated against the "small, isolated, closed-in family" and awaited the time when first loyalty would be to society, while family, love, all of personal life would come second.

Such theorists saw not only that in the family the spirit of acquisition and the sense of private property were born and nourished, but also that the family was intimately connected with religion. Life's most significant personal events - birth, marriage, and death - were after all those of family life, and somehow even the most convinced Communists found it hard to see the revolutionary "Dead March" supplant a Christian burial. Among the rank and file clearly there was nothing to take the place of the church, as the party members complained among themselves, and so the struggle against religion often was carried over into antagonism toward its everyday social context - the family.

One can gain an understanding of the spirit of the time by looking more closely at the strand of bolshevik social thought which might be called "totalism." The search for a total, though as yet voluntary, monopoly of the individual's personal loyalty is an early harbinger of the political totalitarianism that came later. The rationalistic Bolsheviks simply had no use for the "anarcho-individualistic disorganization" of the family, which demanded loyalty and time that they felt to be due the Revolution and the Cause. In fact, one influential party leader, A. A. Solts, even pointed to a contradiction between sexual needs, a "very individual matter," and the building of a collective society.

{p. 52} The intractability and hostility of the family were demonstrated when it became apparent that it was not only the peasant and worker masses who stubbornly clung to their traditions. Trouble developed in the party itself. The old-fashioned family explained why workers did not join the party in the first place, and family pressure as well as church weddings caused misunderstandings among party members and exclusions from the membership ranks. There was some discussion in the early years about what to do with Communists who took wives from an "alien class." In those years revolutionary political activity, especially at the lower levels, was a masculine one to which wives often responded with lack of enthusiasm. In 1923, one author argued, probably with considerable truth, that since only 10 per cent of the party members were women, the bulk of party wives must be politically unresponsive and "philistine."

This