The World Significance of the Russian Revolution/Section 11
XI. The Significance of Communism.
Communism is, psychologically, economically and morally, a return to the primitive and barbarous. Socialistic and communist writers, consequently, when they write and show that communism in any form is workable because it has worked, are bound to revert for their instances to an immature and primitive civilization, just as Marx does. What they advocate is therefore regression—in truth they become "extreme reactionaries," This return to the primitive and crude inevitably affects every department of life. It affects most vitally the "family"—the keystone of civilization.
Woman and the Family.
Anthropologists are now generally agreed that man's original state was one of comparative sexual promiscuity. The earliest attempts at organization brought about the Mother Age or Matriarchy. The uncertainty of paternity resulting from sexual promiscuity naturally thrust the mother, the only known parent, into the position of prominence. Group marriage, where the men of one tribe or clan make common use of the women of another {probably the original form of exogamy) is merely a socially limited form of promiscuity. It is still based upon a form of matriarchy in which the women must be to some extent communized and the offspring become the children of the tribe. It represents the period antecedent to, but incompatible with, the family system, upon which all true culture and civilization rests. From the organization of society on the family basis, sprang the ideas and customs of property and inheritance. Hence was developed the father's care for his progeny, and his sense of responsibility for their future welfare, even after his decease. The development of these sentiments caused enormous strides to be made in the progress and welfare of the race; it lengthened men’s Visions, and induced them to subordinate present pleasure to future racial welfare.
All communists in their mad desire for a return to the primitive (clearly to be distinguished from a desire for simplification, which might indeed be a great step forward) sooner or later have to direct their attacks against the family system, which they seek to undermine. Every attempt at communism that has ever taken place, has, logically enough, sought to establish a communisation of women. The idea of community of wives appears in Plato's Republic, and Dante makes a brief reference in the "Inferno" to a friar, Dolcino, who, in 1305, led a company of some 3,000 men and women into the mountains of Lombardy. They lived by depredation for two years and practised community of property and wives. Their leader eventually died at the stake in Novara in 1307.
Perhaps the best known practical attempt at Communism was that made by the Perfectionists of Oneida in America in 1847. Here again, community of women was practised and taught, as an indispensable feature of communism. Appeal was made to the Bible, which teaches that in the Kingdom of Heaven, the institution of marriage, which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man, does not exist. They affirmed in words almost identical with those used by the Bolsheviks to-day—(though the latter refrain from quoting the Bible) that "there is no intrinsic difference between property in persons and property in things; and that the same spirit which abolished exclusiveness in regard to money, would abolish, if circumstances allowed full scope to it, exclusiveness in regard to women and children. St. Paul expressly places property in women and property in goods in the same category. … amativeness and acquisitiveness are only different channels of one stream."[1]
This last observation is indeed true; and it is as absurd and unnatural to deny or to pervert the normal and beneficent expression of the one as of the other. The endeavour should be to direct both in the general interests of society. The total suppression or fanatical interference with either has always led to the most serious consequences.
It may be remarked that one of the greatest differences between these early attempts to communize women and property and the attempts made by the Bolsheviks consists in the fact that the former communists have usually been content to communize their own property and their own women. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, while professing the same principles, have systematically appealed to the cupidity, acquisitiveness and lust of those with little or nothing to lose, by holding out to them the prospects of enrichment, at the expense of those to be dispossessed, and of acquiring their women. In the words of the decree of the Soviet of Kronsdat posted in Saratoff in East Russia and in Ekaterinberg in the beginning of 1919, "Social inequalities and legitimate marriages having been a condition in the past which served as an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie, thanks to which all the best species of all the beautiful have been the property of the bourgeoisie, the proper continuation of the human race has been prevented. All women according to this decree are exempted from private ownership, and are proclaimed to be the property of the whole nation." What, therefore, was merely voluntary promiscuity in the earlier communisms became rape in Bolshevik Russia. "Bolshevism" is in fact an extreme form of regression—of lapsing back to the primitive and undeveloped. It is the Rousseauesque retour à l'état de nature.
To realize his communistic ideals one thing Lenin saw to be absolutely necessary, the existing State and all rival classes capable of leading and governing, and with them democracy itself must be completely annihilated. And in order to attain this end all means must be adopted to undermine the existing State, all revolutionary movements encouraged, and economic depression, commercial exploitation and everything tending to produce discontent, unrest and misery, must naturally be fostered. On this subject Lenin is perfectly candid, and equally clear about the means to be adopted. The first stage is simply one of breaking up. The working classes must be incited to break up the State, and to clear away all its native leaders who stand in the way of foreign and international exploiters. Without leaders and men of integrity and superior ability, the masses are helpless and fall an easy prey to the organized invaders. Thus Lenin writes on p. 39 of his "State and Revolution," "The working class must break up, shatter the available machinery of the State," and on p. 84, he reminds us that "it is constantly forgotten that the destruction of the State involves also the destruction of democracy." But according to Lenin, the value of democracy is instrumental. Its catch-words are good propaganda, and it constitutes a necessary phase by hastening the wrecking process, just as Capitalism has to be encouraged and hastened in order to destroy "Feudalism." He writes, "The immense significance of the struggle of the proletariat for equality, and the power of attraction of such a battle-cry are obvious, if we rightly interpret it as meaning the annihilation of classes" (p. 102)—with the exception, of course, of the Internationalists and some of their Jew friends! The attainment of a dead-level of equality by the simple method of exterminating all classes with the capacity to lead and direct, endows the confederation of secret conspirators with absolute power, when the time comes, to exert a despotism without fear of rivalry or interference.
- ↑ See J. H. Noyes' History of American Socialisms, p. 624, 625.