4. Problems of Married Life
In the modern contractual marriage, which takes place at the desire of husband and wife, marriage and love are united. Marriage appears morally justified only when it is concluded for love; without love between the bridal couple it seems improper. We find strange those royal weddings which are arranged at a distance, and in which, as in most of the thinking and acting of the ruling Houses, the age of violence is echoed.
5. Free Love
Free love is the socialist’s radical solution for sexual problems. The socialistic society abolishes the economic dependence of woman which results from the fact that woman is dependent on the income of her husband. Man and woman have the same economic rights and the same duties, as far as motherhood does not demand special consideration for the woman. Public funds provide for the maintenance and education of the children, which are no longer the affairs of the parents but of society. Thus the relations between the sexes are no longer influenced by social and economic conditions.
6. Prostitution
The communist manifesto declares that the ‘complement’ of the ‘bourgeois family’ is public prostitution. ‘With the disappearance of capital’ prostitution would also disappear.
A chapter in Bebel’s book on woman is headed ‘Prostitution, a necessary social institution of the bourgeois world’.
The stock market is at all-time highs. Argentina, a serial defaulter just sold $2.75 billion worth of debt with a 100-year maturity. Commercial real estate is booming again. All of this irrational exuberance while the world’s government’s are over indebted, economies are punk, and hostilities are prevalent everywhere.
Are memories too short? Or testosterone too high? Therese Huston, cognitive psychologist at Seattle University, writes for The New York Times,
Chapter 3: The Social Order and the Political Constitution
1. The Policy of Violence and the Policy of Contract
The domination of the principle of violence was naturally not restricted to the sphere of property. The spirit which put its trust in might alone, which sought the fundamentals of welfare, not in agreement, but in ceaseless conflict, permeated the whole of life. All human relations were settled according to the ‘Law of the Stronger’, which is really the negation of Law. There was no peace; at best there was a truce.
2. The Social Function of Democracy
In internal politics Liberalism demands the fullest freedom for the expression of political opinion and it demands that the State shall be constituted according to the will of the majority; it demands legislation through representatives of the people, and that the government, which is a committee of the people’s representatives, shall be bound by the Laws. Liberalism merely compromises when it accepts a monarchy. Its ideal remains the republic or at least a shadow-principality of the English type.
3. The Ideal of Equality
Political democracy necessarily follows from Liberalism. But it often said that the democratic principle must eventually lead beyond Liberalism. Carried out strictly, it is said, it will require economic as well as political rights of equality. Thus logically Socialism must necessarily evolve out of Liberalism, while Liberalism necessarily involves its own destruction.
4. Democracy and Social-Democracy
The view that democracy and Socialism are inwardly related spread far and wide in the decades which preceded the Bolshevist revolution. Many came to believe that democracy and Socialism meant the same thing, and that democracy without Socialism or Socialism without democracy would not be possible.
5. The Political Constitution of Socialist Communities
Beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat lies the paradise, the ‘higher phase of the communist society’, in which, ‘with the all round development of individuals, the productive forces will also have increased, and all the springs of social wealth will flow more freely’.
In this land of promise ‘there will remain nothing to repress, nothing which would nec
