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Lunacharsky Articles and speeches on international politicsMorality from a Marxist point of view
This report is called "Morals from a Marxist Point of View" not because I want to keep the word "morals" in our vocabulary. If the upheaval, of which our revolution is the decisive beginning, comes to an end and the significant changes we expect in social life take place, then the very word "morality" itself will probably have to be discarded. In any case, in the eyes of most bourgeois thinkers, "morality" to this day remains a mysterious phenomenon, not of this world, contrary to all other natural forces. Why did this opinion arise and take root so firmly? To approach the elucidation of the theory of morality, I will take such a major thinker, who for the first time began to clearly understand the foundations of bourgeois society, as Adam Smith, the author of the book On the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith proceeds from this notion: in order to in order to build a social science of the economy of human societies, it is necessary to proceed from the position that each person is an egoist and strives for his own benefit. True, Smith later published another book in which he speaks of the social manifestations of morality, of philanthropy, pity, a sense of fraternal solidarity, but he did not attach much importance to all this. If it were possible to build a correct doctrine reflecting the economy, that is, the basis of human society, putting egoism as the basis; if, taking a person for a pure-blooded egoist, it was possible to create a picture that coincides ninety-nine hundredths with reality, then it is clear that every person is ninety-nine hundredths really an egoist. It was not an artificial construction of Adam Smith, it was an exact reflection of what was emerging in humanity at that time, and it is in vain that admirers of antiquity tell us that this was the case only in the 18th century in England, when the capitalist system began to finally take shape, and earlier, in previous centuries, as if this had not happened. It is not true. Already in the 17th century, the Englishman Hobbes said that if there were no state and if it did not fetter people with the chains of the police regime, then they would devour each other. Doesn't this remind us of the old Roman proverb: man is a wolf to man, a monumental expression of the same truth? then they would devour each other. Doesn't this remind us of the old Roman saying: man is a wolf to man, a monumental expression of the same truth? then they would devour each other. Doesn't this remind us of the old Roman saying: man is a wolf to man, a monumental expression of the same truth?
Of course, research could be done in remote antiquity, and we would come to the conclusion that in the most ancient inscriptions, which we have, for example, on Egyptian tombs, we already find traces of the deeply established fact that one’s shirt is closer to the body, that man takes care of himself, which results in a clash of interests, which sets man against man, people against people, and class against class. It is common for every person to want to be fed, clothed, have a home, everything necessary for life and, if possible, a surplus, and this is the most basic thing. The consciousness of every individual, be it an intellectual, a bourgeois, a clerk, a farmer, has the idea that this is a natural, normal, natural need, that it is natural for a person to be an egoist.
But the point is that if egoism is fully put into practice, no human cohabitation would be possible. It is necessary to somehow create a compromise, it is necessary that people do not quarrel with each other, otherwise life would become dangerous and even impossible. For the purpose of self-defence, people must enter into defensive alliances, and we see these alliances at every step in the form of a family, clan, workshop, community, state. Within each such association, some kind of contract, some kind of beginning, an agreement dominates, in which I give up my egoism, you give up yours; an agreement by virtue of which we combine our individual egoism into a common group egoism. It would seem that one can come to the conclusion that this is also natural.
Indeed, ten years after Adam Smith came Jeremiah Bentham, who tried to explain all morality purely scientifically. He said that every person is an egoist, but this does not mean that he is a fool. An egoist, he is an egoist, but smart. He knows perfectly well that if he behaves like a beast, the neighbors will gather and kill him. Therefore, it is impossible to affect the interests of others. From this clash of interests flow some rules of conduct. What are they? The fact that a person, being an egoist, always acts in such a way as to get more benefits at the lowest cost and sacrifice. But with all this, conspiracies were necessary, compromises were necessary, and from this it becomes clear that each individual person can find satisfaction in his egoism the sooner, the more allies he has, the more such people who, in turn, she is served in some way, as she is served them. The accounting of each individual person remains favorable to the social system and follows from this utilitarian calculation. In the end, it rests, according to Bentham, on this rule: every individual strives to realize such a social system in which the greatest number of people would receive the greatest happiness. If a person has directed his activity in such a way as to win the greatest happiness of all, and everyone will think the same way, then such a society will be internally solidary, and as a result, each person will receive the greatest benefits. each person strives to realize such a social system in which the greatest number of people would receive the greatest happiness. If a person has directed his activity in such a way as to win the greatest happiness of all, and everyone will think the same way, then such a society will be internally solidary, and as a result, each person will receive the greatest benefits. each person strives to realize such a social system in which the greatest number of people would receive the greatest happiness. If a person has directed his activity in such a way as to win the greatest happiness of all, and everyone will think the same way, then such a society will be internally solidary, and as a result, each person will receive the greatest benefits.
Another English thinker, J. Stuart Mill, went further than Bentham. In fact, the rule says: "We must strive for the greatest happiness of the majority." And if this happiness requires me to die, to sacrifice life itself? Let us take a simple example: if England is attacked by enemies, one must defend her, one must go to war, one must kill and die. How can this be combined with selfishness? How can self-sacrificing patriotism be derived from a person's desire for self-defense? It turns out that in him the natural sense of self-preservation turns out to be weaker than the collective defense of the whole. But this cannot be deduced from selfishness. Here, it is not calculation that comes to the fore, but a feeling that does not ask whether it is beneficial or not, but grabs a person by the heart and leads to where it is extremely unprofitable for an individual to be.
In this sense, Bentham's attempt seemed to collapse, because, in fact, we see such phenomena at every step. The state is extremely interested in educating citizens in the spirit of selfless patriotism. His first rule: know how to defend your homeland with your blood! If we delved a little deeper and uncovered the roots of bourgeois morality, we would see that not only the fatherland demands such a sacrifice, but often individuals sacrifice for their class if this is required by class solidarity. Essentially speaking, even under patriotism lies a class feeling. For when a person, for whom the fatherland is the pedestal of his greatness, says that every person is obliged to defend his homeland, this means that he is thus convincing thousands of people for whom the homeland has done nothing, for whom the homeland is a pyramid that puts pressure on their shoulders. , to defend this fatherland, to develop a patriotic feeling for a country where patriotism actually benefits a minority. Consequently, the minority is interested in the development of these non-critical feelings, which could push the individual to a series of actions that are useful to society, it is interested in people not criticizing, but taking it on faith and sacrificing themselves for this. This is precisely the area of morality in the broadest sense of the word.
Morality is such a force, according to the bourgeois, that makes a person get away from his egoism, give it up for something higher and greater. Bentham's attempt to derive such a construction from a simple calculation failed. What is it to get out of?
In human societies, in relation to which we have just established that the consciousness of the egoism underlying them has been characteristic of man since ancient times, moral force has been at work in these societies, for not a single society based on simple egoism, where no one would compromise his own interests, could not exist.
Society presupposes solidarity, connection, sacrifice, and we see that it is impossible to explain this by consciousness, by the contract of egoists. This means that we must come to the conclusion that some other force, extraneous to egoism, is at work here.
Bourgeois consciousness to a large extent pushes one to recognize oneself as an egoist, because the practice of the bourgeoisie is egoistic. She is inclined to judge in this way: if I were left to myself, then I would be an egoistic beast, but there is something higher in me that forces me to rise above the beast. In barbarian societies, morality acquires a religious character. Society does not realize where morality came from, although it knows what kind of morality suits its interests. Morality is beneficial for the ruling classes, and, therefore, the ruling classes of primitive societies are interested in the fact that morality exists and serves the conscious upper classes. In essence, all the dogmas of religion, considering them from the point of view of social relations, are reduced to sanctioning, to the illumination of a certain morality. Truth, the state has another way of compelling obedience and sacrificing individual interests for the whole, even when a person is forced to serve all his life without any opening, when his personal interests resist the public interests that suppress him; even so, the executioner's sword, the overseer's whip, or some other instrument of torture may force him into submission. The state itself, according to Marx, is the organized violence of the ruling class over the subordinate.
But can violence achieve everything? It is not in vain that we find the phrase in Holy Scripture that it is good when a servant serves not only out of fear, but also out of conscience. This is what morality seeks to achieve. She understands that it is impossible for the eye of the police to penetrate everywhere, that it is practically impossible to discover every bad thought, that it is practically impossible to stop with the sword the uprising of the masses who are conscious of their right. Therefore, it is desirable to poison the consciousness of people with the concept of conscience, which would prompt a person, even when he is alone, to refrain from committing an undesirable act. To obey such and such an order is good, not to obey is evil. It is necessary to establish such a conscience first of all in the lower classes, and then in the higher ones. In the upper classes, say, in the feudal system, suzerains and vassals swear allegiance to each other. Where would such an alliance fit? if everyone will inflate? It is necessary that they conscientiously keep their covenants. True, if a vassal cheats his overlord, then the latter will go to war against him and punish him, but this is violence. It is better if the vassal is imbued with a sense of duty, knightly honor, which makes him give up his benefits. This whole system of rules must be made sacred, immutable. Primitive barbarian societies do this through religion. The benefits of conscience lie in the fact that with it you do not need to follow a person. How does religion turn this question? It calls into service the inner feeling of man; this watchful eye teaches that there is an all-seeing god and invisible spirits, who make sure that all the laws of our society, given to us by our ancestors, are exactly fulfilled. Anyone who adheres to these laws finds the grace of God, and whoever does not adhere, bears punishment. A bright type of the god Varun, who sees in the most remote corner and knows what you think. The eye of Varun is in yourself, in every person, there is also the mouth of Varun. His eye notices when a person does wrong, and his mouth warns. There are teeth behind the mouth; these teeth producepangs of conscience. With these inner teeth, Varun gnaws at the guilty soul when it does not fulfill his precepts. The consciousness that the soul has darkened itself is the source of inner torture. We have a supreme legislator, a policeman and an executioner, who, on the one hand, observes laws from heaven and punishes from heaven, and on the other hand, lives in a person’s soul, watches from there and also punishes. This is what a magnificent chief of police society acquires in the person of God and his saints - from the most important saints to angels performing curious service, of which one is assigned to each person.
In order to consolidate this even better, ideas have been developed about the opposite beginning - evil. When a person is very hungry, he would willingly steal a piece of meat belonging to the master, but he is afraid of Varun, who sees everything and knows everything. Yes, perhaps it is not he who desires this piece of meat at all, but a demon speaks in him, which confuses and tempts him; therefore, he must resist this desire with all his might, since the demon subjects him to temptation, wanting to destroy him. They say that with every person there is a demon-tempter; besides, there are many of them in the air. Demons always subject a person to temptation. Under the influence of this thought, a person from any free movement of his passion is seized by horror, and he himself begins to be afraid of himself. He feels in himself the whisper of the serpent, beginning to destroy him, like the forefather of Adam, and, surrounded by these religious images,
The only trouble is that religious morality is not eternal; it is true that even now it holds millions of people, but its pincers gradually, as the formation grows, lose their strength. Now, even in a provincial village, we rarely meet a peasant who, if he wants milk for fasting, would say that Satan is tempting him. Rather, he will say that the flesh is weak, and this is already a step forward, because the “weaknesses of the flesh” are asserting their rights more and more, and a person begins to be critical of morality itself. He starts to ask, is it true that God said this? He begins to doubt all religion; all books, all scripture turns out to be a falsification; faith in the supreme legislator, in some kind of heavenly guards - saints, goes out.
Dostoevsky has a wonderful portrayal of rebellion against religious morality. If Ivan Karamazov, who has shaken off his religious morality, does not have a big misfortune, because he is supported by another, new, higher morality, and he dares to say that everything is allowed (knowing that this does not mean that one must act badly) , then Dostoevsky warns: “Look at your brother Smerdyakov; if you liberate him from religious morality, then you make him a criminal - everything is allowed for him, which means that everything bad can be done. The entire bourgeoisie, private owners, members of the ruling class trembled and tremble from the realization that the fall of faith in God can immediately impel them to crime, to the destruction of the social system dear to them. Let me give you a typical example: Voltaire struggled with the clergy all his life; his favorite phrase was: "We must crush the bastard" (écrasez l'infame), we must crush the bastard dad with all his priests. But at the same time, Voltaire said to his friend: "If you had such a large estate as I do, then you would understand that God is necessary." Based on this, he argued that if God did not exist, then he would have to be invented. In other words, the enlightened bourgeois thinker Voltaire and his ilk, as far as the society of proprietors was concerned, failed to complete the struggle for the liberation of morality from religion, since it was risky to refuse the heavenly chief of police. then it would have to be invented. In other words, the enlightened bourgeois thinker Voltaire and his ilk, as far as the society of proprietors was concerned, failed to complete the struggle for the liberation of morality from religion, since it was risky to refuse the heavenly chief of police. then it would have to be invented. In other words, the enlightened bourgeois thinker Voltaire and his ilk, as far as the society of proprietors was concerned, failed to complete the struggle for the liberation of morality from religion, since it was risky to refuse the heavenly chief of police.
However, education took its toll. Faith itself changed: from the most barbaric forms it passed to more subtle ones. At this stage of development, the advanced philistinism became convinced that religion could not last long. A person ceases to believe in heaven and hell, but remains moral, his conscience is alive in him - a fact that needs to be explained. In addition to this fact, there is a need for morality. The bourgeois realizes that if this morality did not exist, the philistines would devour each other, like those fabulous crocodiles, of which only their tails remained. There is morality, but there is no religion, it fizzles out; religion has become shaky, and to rely on it is to fail with it.
The great spokesman for this revolution was Kant, the creator of the deepest system of morality that the bourgeoisie ever created. He carefully proves that morality has nothing to do with God, it is autonomous. Kant said in his soul: “Duty sits on the throne; he tells you in a loud voice rules that you cannot disobey. The heavenly eye, heavenly mouth and heavenly teeth - conscience - are now turning into an inner mysterious force that lives in a person. As a philosopher, Kant said: “This is not like deceptive feelings of love, friendship, pity; no, debt has a certain rule; duty is an imperative voice, imperative, categorical, it does not allow doubt.
Kant proceeds from this rule: "Let your every action be such that it can be made a rule for all people." In other words, if we would say what actions can be made a rule for all people, then we would indicate to them what good is. If we were to establish as a permanent rule actions that are harmful to people, then society would perish. Hence the conclusion that it is necessary to act in a way that is useful for society. Act as a member of society should act, desiring its greatest well-being. This is the essence of Kantian morality.
A person may not do this: I am an egoist, I am a wolf, I want to snatch as much as I can. The tradesman will say: I am a merchant - “you can’t deceive - you won’t sell”, you can only make money at the expense of another; in him lives a social force that tries to spread about others. This is a “devourer” person, this is a type of aggressive philistine who can answer Kant: “Back off with your categorical imperative, I don’t want to obey him; I am guided solely by my appetite!”
What would Kant say to him? His main argument was that he tenaciously held on to the other world, to the mystery, inaccessibility and indisputability of morality. He said, “You are wrong; your instincts and desires are a mortal thing. You can get carried away in vices, but society will punish you in order to restore the balance of your soul. Huge masses of normal people are not like you. As our heart beats independently of our will, so the work of our conscience and duty is done; just as we cannot stop our heart and breath and not die, so we cannot stop this voice that defends the highest interests of human society before our passions.
Kant said that there are two miracles: the infinite world of stars above us and the voice of conscience within us. Both are manifestations of a deity, though unprovable, but foreseeable by our intuition.
So, comrades, this idea of morality has survived to this day with various variations; it could not fail to survive to this day, because the owner feels that he is an egoist, and that, on the other hand, he has a conscience, brought up by generations, that it is necessary; therefore he is eternally struggling between these contradictions.
Take such a colossal moralist as Leo Tolstoy: both his religiosity and all the subtlest ramifications of his teaching flow from this construction; he believes that there is no other proof of the existence of God, as the fact that everyone feels a good beginning in himself, that goodness is inherent in man from the very beginning. But if you told Lev Nikolaevich: “Well, it’s good that there is a good beginning; consequently we may not need any god; everything is good if deep down everything turns out to be good.” Tolstoy would not agree to this. He said that man is an evil animal; if we take nature as it is, then we will stumble upon egoism, animal instincts; morality is a miracle, it is proof of the existence of God, proof that in man there is a spark of God. This spark, the spark of divinity, is brought in from outside, and therefore Tolstoy divides the world into matter, which is transient and eternally dies and turns into nothing, and into the spark of God, which never goes out, so that each person, having seized this spark, i.e. his conscience, fanning it into a whole flame, can warm around him and others, warm himself through this inner image-conscience and realize his immortality. From this teaching of Tolstoy, all his other positions with obligatory logic branch out and, therefore, at the root of Tolstoy lies the recognition of the existence of morality, the inability to explain it in a natural way, the unwillingness to explain it in this way, but, on the contrary, the need to prove that morality is a thing not from this world and, like the sky above the earth, rises above everything earthly and material.
Now let's see how things really are, and ask ourselves: are the animals really egoists, or maybe they also have a spark of God?
Tolstoy may be offended by this, but I will give a simple example: what principle makes a cat feed its kittens and protect them from a dog to the point of self-sacrifice, even a chicken makes it throw itself at a hawk, saving its chickens? The chicken is a living being, but since it has a spark of divine fire, this spark makes it, with the help of the categorical imperative, act as any chicken should act in its place. It's very tight. It would be much more natural to say this way: “If the hen did not protect her chickens, then the breed of chickens would soon be bred. If the cubs were born helpless and if they were not protected in every way, then they would have been exterminated from the very first days. From this it is clear that a simple adaptation for the protection of the species - instinct - gives heroic courage for the selfless defense of their young. Just as the selection of natural development creates a certain system of apparatuses and tools, which is called an organism, the same applies to instincts, including the instinct of self-preservation. Animals have a sense of great solidarity; they live in herds, societies, and we see an example of adult males guarding the entire herd, examples of sentinel signaling that require individuals to sacrificeall interests for the benefit of the whole, for the good of all.
There are ants, some of which are adapted to protect the anthill. Their foreheads are thick; they stand near the door and cover it with their foreheads for as long as their society requires. This is where selflessness goes to the extreme. Is it possible that, together with the copper forehead, the spark of God penetrates into the selfless behavior of the ant? No, this is an instinct for an ant, and it cannot but make this movement, just as we cannot stop the movement of the heart. There is no miracle here, it's just the functioning of the ant as a member of society. A simple scientific approach says that the main element in the selection of evolution here is not an individual at all, but a whole society. If there are wolves and horses in the area, then the wolves have an instinct to attack the horses. If horses didn't have the instinct to stand in a circle, put their hooves out and fight off a wolf attack, then such horses would die out very soon. The presence of a certain herd instinct is as necessary for the preservation of the individual as fast legs, thick hair and all sorts of other devices of self-defense.
Is it possible to approach a person from the same point of view? Of course. It is clear that at the very dawn of mankind, people already showed this herd instinct. Of course, we do not know the pages of the life of the first people, this is hidden from us. Of course, even then primitive man did not live alone with a female and cubs; people from the very beginning lived in whole groups, in which there were several old and young males and females and small individuals. It was a closely knit group that had its own hunting territory so as not to clash with other societies. And from here, from this primitive cell, mankind began to develop. Of course, if there was no solidarity here, within the clan, people would die.
We see this gregariousness in monkeys too. There is no reason to think that man developed differently. There is no need to put the primitive man below the monkey. The simplest instinct that apes have has existed from the very beginning in humans. Moreover, after a person descended from a tree and freed his hands, adapted for climbing trees, for grabbing, after enriching his brain with experience, after he had developed a monkey signaling into a more complex speech, he had to understand morality in a different way. We find very soon a religious explanation of morality. There are no classes yet, but we can see at once how semi-class tendencies are emerging. Old people hold on to traditions, they teach young people and children how to exist in the world at all. These old people have their own interests. These weak members of society who do not work physically, who need to be fed - this is the original intelligentsia - this group of old people has been an exploiting power force for a very long time in savage life. “The old people have decided” is often heard in such a society. They have a desire to refer to their ancestors and their souls, to consolidate those features of society that are beneficial for these old people, and, of course, stupid old people could only ruin their society, but they listened to smart old people. Such smart old men were supposed to give rules that, in general, were beneficial for society. Thus, the original legislation, technology, morality, science, law and rituals were developed.
Of course, when we consider savage morality, law, science and everything connected with this, we see so much rubbish and nonsense that we are horrified and wonder how humanity could exist with such ideas. But if we knew the old way of life, we would be convinced that there is logic here, and the most valuable rules, deep, weighty, were those that were of great vital importance. This is how morality was developed. Morality existed, it evolved, it changed, took on different forms, but man remained. The "zoon politicon" remained a social being. As a member of society, he cannot look indifferently at the suffering of his fellow citizens. He rejoices when he sees the joy of an employee or neighbor; out of this feeling of rejoicing and compassion, without which primitive herds could not exist, out of this feeling of solidarity, morality is developed.
We can now reverse what bourgeois thought says. We can say that primitive man had to be brotherly-loving, solidary. He almost did not differ in his personality from others. He had no personal property. In this sense, people represented the communist herd, and the more communist they were, the more everyone stood for everyone and everything for everyone, and the more such a society had a chance to survive.
The great thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that with the advent of private property came selfishness. The point is not how to explain that a person is in solidarity with others (a herd instinct is simply inherent in a person), but how to explain that, together with the herd instinct, “man is a wolf to man?” After all, a wolf is a wolf only for a ram, and a man is a wolf for a man ! How did it come about? We know this, and there is nothing to spread about it.
Now I will move on to another band of phenomena. We know that now morality is a natural thing, but in bourgeois society it occupies an unnatural position, not only because it is considered something divine and supernatural, but also because it functions in a highly strange way. The soul of the bourgeois is divided, like Goethe's Faust, one soul - the soul of a private owner and a predator.
Every owner seeks to grow, to expand; hence every bourgeois, according to Smith's position, dreams of pocketing someone else's. On the other hand, he does not want a stranger to pocket his goods. Therefore, he is inclined to ensure that everything is possible for him, but others would be bound by the rules. But this cannot be allowed: such a person will be kicked out. So other rules are needed. It's annoying. Is it possible to get around this embarrassing rule? As long as faith exists, a way out of this is found in repentance, indulgences. Some argue like this: let it be bad in the next world, but in this world you want to sin. And when there is no God, things are even better. There is no need for any repentance, one must be afraid only of the court, which will put him in the dock, and of public opinion, which can stigmatize this bourgeois. Public opinion might say: this man deviates from the rules of life, without which human society is impossible. Moreover, these rules may not only be provided for by state law, but also relate, for example, to decency, etc. Therefore, of course, if you come to the bourgeois and take away the silver spoon, he can drag you to court. But if you secretly seduce his wife from him, he will not take you to court, because it is embarrassing. In this case, that part of the bourgeois heart, which, because you can’t give anything of your own, says: seducing my wife is a terrible crime on the part of a neighbor, but if I seduce his wife, then it’s not so bad. However, this cannot be made a general rule. Therefore, the bourgeois says: wives must be faithful. Who seduces does not follow the rules. From this comes one bookkeeping - external, which condemns sin, and the other allows it, with a certain respect for decency. Hence the hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue: vice is committed, but it feels that it intrudes into the realm of virtue; vice hides itself, it invents self-justifying sophisms. The bourgeois split into two camps, into two bodies, into two souls. The bourgeois knows that in every city there are brothels, drinking houses, gambling houses, and in the center of every city there is a temple of profit, called the stock exchange, where people cut each other without a knife and profit at the expense of others in the shortest possible time. If some legislator had come up with the idea of closing this exchange, he would not have succeeded, because a black exchange would immediately appear nearby. But next to all this are churches in which pious shepherds preach morality. Any bourgeois newspaper is ready to sign that rules are necessary, which every gentleman must observe, and this outward propriety affected the whole life of the bourgeoisie and imposed hateful traits on every bourgeois. The bourgeoisie, being a child-eater of workers in their factories, took off their cheerful multi-colored clothes that they wore during the Renaissance, and changed to black and gray jackets with white linen, pretending to be modest. This predator and lecher who pretends to be such a calm and peaceful Quaker is the duplicitous bourgeois.
In this state of affairs, morality is powerless, it is remembered only on the seventh day of the week. Observing the life of the bourgeois, we see a fierce outrage on his part over his own morality in his family life, in his daily manifestations.
What does Marxism, as the theory of proletarian peace-building, oppose to this morality? First of all, he denies any otherness of it; he says that morality is a peculiar form of the herd instinct with many ramifications. Should we deny this morality? No, we take her in, we're critical of her, we ask ourselves what to do with her .? True, Karl Marx, approaching Bentham's theory, cruelly ridicules the property of the bourgeois to consider life in an accounting way. Is it worth the sacrifice or not? A powerful national instinct, the instinct of a class or group, whose interests a person is a spokesman, sometimes pushes a person to death. Each personality can be embraced by a mass idea when it ceases to be conscious of itself as a personality. Here she is capable of the most heroic self-sacrifice. Although Marx opposed Bentham's calculation with a living feeling that is capable of impelling us to a great feat, he knew that this feeling can also impel us to stupidity. It is good when this feeling takes possession of a Red Army soldier who goes to defend the fatherland, but it is not at all bad when it seizes his enemy, who goes to extinguish the revolution. In the first case, a holy feeling seizes the Red Army soldier, and he does his great work; in the second case, the soldier is a victim of deception or self-deception.
Therefore, Marx demanded that the class become aware of its interests. He believed that the class would try to criticize the impulses of its actions with its thought. We demand that human morality become conscious .
Where should this conscious morality take us? First of all, it is clear that human egoism has an enormous foundation. Marx in one place spoke out against one intellectual thinker who said that in the future system people will not think about themselves. Marx said that this was a lax, invented doctrine of a thin-legged intellectual who had no real power. A person has the right and duty to protect his interests; he must live a full, flourishing, self-affirming life. A person has the right to the comprehensive development of his feelings; all the organs of his body, like his brain, must be properly developed. This may be the basis for the development of his tastes, needs and knowledge. He has the right to demand that his clothes and dwelling be comfortable for him; he has the right to demand that society be built in such a way that the demands it proposes to him
The socialist ideal must be constructed in such a way as to promote the highest development of every individual. From this point of view, in the future, the personality will unfold harmoniously and society will promote it, but in the present, as long as such a situation is formed, a person has the right to all-round happiness. No one has to say, "Man, you've got toto be an ascetic, you dare not eat your fill, get such and such pleasure”, on the contrary, everything that a person likes, he has the right to do. But right now it is necessary to make a certain reservation: does the thirst for pleasure really guide a person correctly? We will not talk about conscience. We know what happens to the conscience. A person commits a vulgar act, because at the moment the act gives him pleasure. Pleasure passes, but the feeling of violated self-esteem remains, passion becomes quieter, and the voice of conscience does not stop, and the person begins to regret, repent that he did so. You can love to smoke, no morality should forbid this pleasure, as if innocent, but I can not guarantee that by the fiftieth year you will not know that you have shortened your life by ten years, that your lungs are polluted, that you have ruined your health , that you will not say: "What a fool I was that I was engaged in this stupidity." Morality should not condemn a person for drinking alcohol, but the fact is that when drinking alcohol, a person is mistaken: it seems to him that by doing this he supports the body, while in fact the body is destroyed.
It turns out two floors in a person: direct instincts that guide him in his actions at the moment, and a judgment about what the results will be. What moral type, from our point of view, is higher? Impulsive, who is given to pleasures at the present time, or one who knows how to take into account the results of his actions? - Of course, the second type is higher. At the very least, biologically impulsive people will destroy their health, they will do things that are harmful to others. Those who consider the results of their actions will do whatever it takes to be healthy, wise, cheerful, respected; such a person has a chance of being a higher type and being recognized by society.
We can form our hygienic morality in this way: a person has the right to any pleasure, except for those that bring him obvious harm. Suppose now that he performs an act that brings him pleasure, but harms others. For example, let's say that a person enjoys all the pleasures of life, but these pleasures undermine his body in the sense that a bad heredity is created. There is a person's behavior that pollutes him, because it is reflected as a vice on the newly born generation. There may be actions that go directly to the detriment of others. This is not harmful to an individual person, it even gives pleasure, but it curtails another person in his rights and pleasures.
A society in which solidarity reigns is stronger; in the further selection of society itself, the society that is not in solidarity perishes rather. But the fact is that the lack of solidarity is determined by private property. Private property is what creates enmity between people. If there were no private property, if the worker had a cheerful rest and healthy work, then he would have no impulses to harm others, but, on the contrary, there would be the deepest consciousness that he contributes to the great happiness of the whole society.
A person can have a triple assessment of an act: 1) a judgment about its immediate results (pleasure); 2) a judgment about its results for the entire life of the individual (whether the act contributes to the growth of forces) and 3) a judgment about its social results.
A person can be aware that I will not be saved from death, but my immortality lies in the fact that the result of my actions does not disappear. This is how a new morality is built.
It will easily triumph when there is no private property. Now she is. So now the third stage of this morality, the rules of conduct leading to the good of the whole, are up in the air. This morality would have remained hanging in the air if there were not a class that, through its whole life, is impelled to serve the good of society. A proletarian fighter, a proletarian revolutionary, brought up by life in this direction, cannot say that he should not think about the welfare of society, that it is better for him to arrange his own life, his personal happiness. He cannot arrange his own happiness. He is poor, ignorant, oppressed; as a unit, he is a miserable atom that anyone can abuse. He feels that there are many oppressed proletarians like him, and that when they unite under the slogan: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" they become a huge force: he understands that then he is the power, the savior of the world. Therefore, the collective beginning in his soul grows. He is ready to sacrifice his happiness for an important common cause and receives a certain psychologicalpremiumfor this collective cause, for he knows the happiness of a tremendous sense of solidarity, the prospects for the future victories of mankind, which console him in his mournful life. Since his life is meager and abandoned, this festive collective side becomes the main basis, the dominant force of his soul. This helps him, if not to get up, then to take the highest moral point of view. The proletarian will say: "Party discipline is needed in order to cultivate selflessness in battles." Every time a worker violates discipline, he turns out to be a coward and a selfish person, that is, a person who prefers his own benefit to the common good. No otherworldly voice is needed here; the proletarian consciousness in him tells him: “What have you done? You fell, you are nothing, you did not rise to the occasion!” On the contrary, when he casts aside this weakness, his cowardice, act according to discipline, he feels himself lifted up, and this gives him a great inner reward for what he has renounced. Of course, this does not mean that the proletarian always acts in this way, but it does mean that the situation, the whole system of material and Party life, draws him in this direction.
So, we have established that the highest criterion of morality for Marxism is the public. It is possible that publicity, sociality, will be called what has been called morality until now.
Now we need to take a short cut back and say: "Whatever does not harm the public is not prohibited by our morality."
What can be demanded from the point of view of the full development of personality? What is not only permissible, but also good, as well as everything that does not contradict the planned and most complete development of the personality and that may be required by instinct and a thirst for pleasure - all this is not forbidden to a person and is good.
Therefore, the behavior of the future person will be determined primarily by the fact that he is a person who exerts all his strength for the good of society. But in a harmonious socialist society his individual demands will not be denied at all. In our proletarian society, the situation will often require self-sacrifice, for we are in a period of struggle. Now to carry out what we have the right to only after achieving our victory is not only impossible, but it would also be a crime, because now it would turn out to be behavior that runs counter to the public.
Although the demands of the public often compel us to give up the interests of our personality, yet every communist at this time must set himself the following demand: since public duties allow this, I must strive with all my might to make myself the most exaggerated human personality. The communist must consider whether it is possible to impose on himself a heavy burden and duties that will undermine his health? He realizes that if he had kept his health, if he had learned, he could have become stronger for society itself. He must weigh it; often the only solution is to appeal to the party. He has a certain duty, he does not know what to do. He turns to his comrades with a request: "I could, having rested, be of much more use later than now, working without interruption." Very often the party says: “Although you need to rest, there is no one to replace you, pull your own weight,” and the communist remains at his post with a deep awareness of his height, his level, sufficient to be a true member of his society. But the party can also say this: "Although it is difficult for us to replace you, we need to save you, make you a great force, go, rest, get some treatment or study."
We often take this or that decision, and we are only dissatisfied with the individual Party member who decides such questions on his own. Here it is easy to fall into asceticism or selfishness, since under the pretext of rest and study, a person, in essence, sometimes defends his individual interests. It can easily be that, by flaunting his asceticism before himself, a person will thereby inflict the most severe damage on society and the party, therefore here the whole society, not an individual, but an organization, should be the judge - this is the line that separates us from any individualism.
I said that any satisfaction of instinct, if it does not contradict the goals of human development, is good. Of course, there may be controversial issues here, such as smoking. The man says that this gives him such help, such support during work, such rest, that he, perhaps, will not reckon with negative results.
This reasoning has its basis. There is no absolute contradiction of communist morality in this situation: a person has the right to enjoyment, a person must be happy. Should a person be an ascetic? Nothing like this! If he refuses pleasure, then only in those cases when it causes harm to the public or harms his personality. In general, he has the right to the pleasures that his body requires.
Comrades, I have already said that in a society where there will be no exploitation, the implementation of this morality will be natural. In a society where there is still no victory for labor, the exploited rise to the height of this morality, because society cannot arrange them satisfactorily; need drives them into solidarity unions and creates in them a kind of ethics of onslaught, raising fighters for this bright future.
But the exploiter just sends ninety-nine hundredths of all the strength of his soul against this morality. While this ideal morality carries the proletarian upward, the same force of the current carries the exploiter downward. If he is an honest man, then he will invent thousands of intricate religious philosophical sophistry to prove to himself that he has the right to ride on someone else's neck; he will invent an excuse for himself that this is a law established by God, established by nature, that this law justifies before others and in his own eyes the exploitation of another person.
In this sense, we have two moralities: those of the exploiters are deceitful and those of the exploited are leading forward. Between our morality and the morality of the exploiters lies a stratum: petty merchants, petty producers, petty bourgeois, and a considerable part of the intelligentsia. They do not feel exploited and cannot be called exploiters. Therefore, they deviate in one direction or another, they are intertwined between the one and the other: whoever is richer joins the exploiters, and whoever is poorer goes over to the exploited. Others shift from foot to foot and change their beliefs. They experience millions of painful torments, their conscience is sick, decomposed, they are dominated by one feeling, then another. They like to support themselves with metaphysical and mystical considerations, and those who seek an answer in the natural sciences fall into nihilism, on which you can't build solid morality. They stand in a swampy place; the only salvation for them is to go over to the left, climb out of the swamp onto the hard bank, and be swallowed up by the proletariat with its advanced morality.
I now want to dwell on one side of morality, which is of tremendous importance—on sexual morality, and not because our bourgeois society sees it as a piquant subject, but because it concerns the attitude of the exploiters to the exploiters, especially to women.
If we can say that the proletarian-peasant poor and middle peasants are being exploited, then the woman is especially exploited. Bourgeois society is built not only on the contradiction of class interests, but also on the contradiction of the interests of the sexes. Of course, this does not mean that all men are exploiters and all women are exploited. No. But in every given section, woman is inferior to man, so that in some respects a woman of even the highest order is more disenfranchised than a man of the lowest order. It is in all civilized countries. Let's take a look at the position of women. Only a man plays a role in social life: he creates the state, he governs, he judges, he produces, trades, directs. The number of women who take part in these cases is negligible. No wonder Schiller, who was not only a great poet, but the tradesman also said that the whole world for a man is his home, and for a woman her home is her world. A man is a breadwinner: he has capital, he also has earnings. A woman in a stable bourgeois society, in most cases, is not a breadwinner: she lives on capital, her husband's earnings and arranges his individual life. He is connected through his work with public life, where he is either a bricklayer, or a money changer, or a policeman, and after finishing work he goes to his house, to his private life, where his wife is pottering about.
I will talk later about those cases when the wife is not entirely living at the expense of her husband, but for now, for simplicity, let's take this, in most cases, the existing fact of such being a woman. Every man, when he gets the opportunity to start his own house by his work, his social position or inheritance, thinks about having his own individual environment, apartment, furniture, maybe a dog and a wife. Then he has his own comfortable private life. He goes to court, to the theater, to the bank, anywhere, but at home he is the master; let him not have maids, lackeys, but only his wife, but it will be his lawful subject. In the church, although it was said: “love one another”, but it was added: “let the wife be afraid of her husband.” When a man is able to have his own house, he looks around to find a wife; he wants to buy it. He says: “You, young lady, will become my wife, you will have such and such an apartment, such and such a way of life, give birth to so many children,” he offers these conditions to a woman who does not earn money. Some families have several daughters who can strum the piano, tap on a typewriter, dance, but what is their fate? It's best if they marry well. Therefore, a person on different shelves of society is looking for an appropriate young lady, for whom it would be happiness to receive his hand and heart and the maintenance that he can give her. It turns out a picture of a female market, almost the same as the picture of the slave market. They begin to take the girl out into the world to balls, small evenings, where men look out for brides. Public shows are being held. Women's competition here is very high. If a man remains a bachelor, then this will only be a plus for him, because he will find everything he needs for his "happiness" at a cheaper price. If a woman remains an old maid, then this will affect her not only morally and physiologically. A woman loses not only the satisfaction of her maternal instinct, but also the content that a man gives her. The competition among women is great, but it also happens among men that they shoot themselves because of the desired females.
The competition between women is more pronounced. All these fashions, dressings, embellishments, as well as arts such as singing and drawing, music and all kinds of exhibition of certain parts of the body - all this is done precisely in order to appear more attractive. "It's a butterfly fight," as Zuderman put it.
But now they got married. What's next?
Here women are divided into two types. The first case: the husband has no means and no servants. On such wives lies the whole burden of menial work.
The second case: the husband is so well endowed that he is able to hire a servant, a laborer, or several such people. Sometimes he frees a woman even from the need to feed her children. A woman is exempted from household duties, except for the duty to serve her husband. But these duties are not very burdensome and not very burdensome. A man is demanding under these conditions. He says: "I furnished you properly, so you must be such that I would be pleased to look at you." This pushes a woman to embellish herself, to domestic coquetry, which reduces her to the position of an odalisque, who devoted her whole life to pleasing her sultan. It fills the whole woman's life; the woman is so devastated that she begins to scour balls, theaters, arranges charity evenings, — generally spends time in humiliating idleness. She becomes a doll, internally empty, that contemptible creature, which is the majority of our secular ladies.
A hypocritical society has set a rule that says a woman must be faithful. As a matter of fact, this empty woman easily succumbs to the temptation of men, and the whole life of bourgeois society is so filled with the quadrille "chasse croiset", the change of gentlemen and ladies, that three-quarters of bourgeois literature is based on this material.
But there are families where a woman becomes the mistress. She wears a bunch of keys on her belt, she knows how many bottles of liquor she has, she feeds the children herself, she does not leave the kitchen, the nursery; she smells of diapers and burnt cutlets, these are the aromas that she carries everywhere with her. She does not look at her husband like a hetaera, like a desired female. She says: “but I feed him deliciously and do not cheat on him.”
Andreev has a wonderful expression. The wife comes out to her husband in a hood with thick mourning on her nails. The husband says: “you, at least, dear, dressed up somehow.” She replies: "Tea, I'm a decent woman."
This woman, who has devoted herself to the arrangement of the hearth, thinks only of making ends meet, so that her husband does not starve, in order to mend his worn trousers. The woman is immersed in this work. The lower we go down, the more we will see that a woman is turning into a hard worker, a crushed slave. This is already hard labor: a woman from a doll turns into a worker who has forgotten herself for her family. This image is touching, but terrible. This is a touching monument over a dead person.
Of course, the question is posed from a different angle if the woman is not wholly living at the expense of her husband. This happens when she brings a dowry. But the very process of marriage takes on new, deeply repulsive features when it is based on calculation. Here the point is that the young man looks out for his wife and says: “I have half an apartment, half a sofa, half a samovar, and I need a woman who would give the missing half; the point is not whether I like her or not, but whether I can establish my house with her on shares.
Gogol and Ostrovsky have wonderful scenes where they ask about the bride, how many featherbeds, pillows and so on she can have. This can be done on a different scale: how many stocks, how many ocean-going steamships, etc.? If you open an old newspaper, you will see numerous sentences: "an elderly lady is looking for an intelligent man no more than 40 years old" or "a young man with a higher education, promising a good future, is looking for an elderly lady with good capital." This is a direct sale. Here the man becomes equal to the woman. But bourgeois legislation is for men. A woman does not always become the mistress of the share that she contributed, but a man always does.
The situation is different when a woman stands on a par with a man, thanks to earnings. The husband went to one bank and the wife to another; sometimes she teaches. A slightly more normal attitude is created, but a wealthy man will say: "Drop your earnings and stay at home." Only an unsecured man goes for this alienation of interests and constant disputes between two people, each of whom has his own individual life. True, there are working-class families in which this is the general rule; there in rare cases a woman does not work. In most cases, the proletarian woman works. Of course, this work, which lasts 9-11 hours, tears her away from her husband. She comes home tired, like her husband. But the husband came and lay down to rest, and she peeled potatoes and cooked dinner. She has additional worries that her husband does not know. Husband can go to the meeting and the wife must completely kill the rest of her time. She must perform the duties of a cook and a nurse, who must fit into the rest left to her by the factory.
What is the answer to this terrible question? Each class brings its own solution. For the big bourgeois, this question does not exist, he is satisfied. The petty bourgeois decides this question in the following way: “It is impossible for a wife to work in a factory; the woman should be in the kitchen and near the children. It is only necessary to create this kitchen, this nursery, at least a little better. The man needs to earn more money. This is the disintegration of the family when a woman goes to work.” From this point of view, as early as during the First International, the Proudhonists posed the question as follows: the workers must strive for the legislative prohibition of women's work. At the same time, the tradesman pursued two goals: on the one hand, he wants to have a woman who completely serves him, and on the other hand, he does not want to have a cheap competitor. Women's labor is always cheaper. He feels that a competitor is being created for him and therefore he wants to sell a competitor,
This is not how the intelligentsia sees things. The male part of the intelligentsia, in most cases, looks at the lawyer, medical industry, etc., as their own, so it is not surprising that their literature becomes an arena of struggle. An intellectual, there is a very evil being. In order to justify his attitude towards competition, he develops a very coherent theory, for example, in relation to Jewry. As the dominant intellectual of a country feels that the Jewish population, with its habit of urban life acquired over millennia, is succeeding in the field of its proper social functions, it becomes imbued with a sense of competition, it wants to eliminate the competitor, and it creates special racial doctrines, proving that the Jews represent a special breed of people, etc. He wants to limit the rights of the Jew, he wants to put him in special conditions. In fact, he is calculating: he feels that if such and such Israelson did not practice law, he himself could get better clients. This will remain a stigma for a significant part of the intelligentsia for a long time to come.
The same applies to the intelligentsia and the woman. During the war, a woman occupied a lot of branches of labor and completely replaced a man in some of them. This means that here the man began to fight with his new competitor. The bourgeois intelligentsia invents policy books, such as Weininger's Gender and Character, where he says that a woman is a primordially evil and stupid creature, etc. That if any woman has good features, it is because she masculine. A real man is an angel, and a real woman is a witch. This whole theory has the basis that this philosophizing intellectual himself is a representative of hundreds of thousands of people fighting for their existence. “If we kicked a woman out of the office, from medical and legal practice, then we would earn more!” This feeling extends to marriage and changes views on it. The female doll flutters and is a tidbit, but, after all, she behaves this way for the surrounding men! And if she is a cook, then she cries: “You ruined me, tormentor. What have you made of me? When these two people are tired home, eternal quarrels begin, and then various theories about the baseness of the original sister Eve are mixed into this.
Intelligent women created the feminist movement; this movement is aimed at winning a place for itself in the public arena. This is fought for by women who have not settled down, or when they have poor husbands, and they need to win a social position. They create different leagues, up to the English suffragettes known for their energy. Then, in the hands of intelligent women, this theory also acquires a muzheophobic character. The woman declares that the man has been a tyrant from the beginning, that the struggle of the sexes is the original beginning. They create millions of fairy tales and stupid sophisms about this irreconcilable fight between a man and a woman. These theories by no means decorate our life, but often become an impetus for vulgar, life-crippling troubles.
The proletariat solves the problem quite differently. He says that man and woman are made for each other. They can be comrades in work and in struggle, they can bring the greatest pleasure to each other and they can give birth to children, which is a great happiness and the basis of the whole society. There can be no enmity between a man and a woman in the natural order of existence; on the contrary, Feuerbach said that in a normal society they would bow to each other and say: “Not me, but you,” and this will be the development of humanity. To this it must be added that usually a person looks for such a “you” in another person: a man looks for a complementary part in a woman, a woman looks for a complementary part in a man, which together with him creates a complete cycle of humanity.
In the future, it will be the collective love of the feminine for the masculine and the masculine for the feminine. A man will try to be wise, strong and beautiful, generous, to be a friend of a woman, to surround her with love and tenderness, because she gives him the greatest happiness and ensures the continuation of the species. In the same way, a woman will strive to complete her friend as a person of the opposite sex, not as a doll or a cook, but equal in spirit, only with other features of this spirit, no less than a man, capable of creative creations and scientific flights of thought and all other expressions of the fullness of the physical and mental being.
What is the path to this? Unlike the petty bourgeois, the proletariat says: “It's good that a woman went to factories and offices. All that is needed is for her to become quite close to the man, so that she goes both to her meetings and to general meetings with men. But at present, competition with men pushes her out of social life and makes her look for her circle, where she ceases to be chicken and butterfly, enters the wide road of human life. Our job is to help."
There is a big question ahead of us along the way. You can say: “Of course, it’s good that a woman began to work, that she joined the unions and the party, that she began to fight together with a man. But what about the family then? Let's imagine a family where the husband and wife work. After eight hours of work, they go to a rally. And the children, and dinner, and cleanliness? A woman still can not combine it. True, in a very good friendly environment, a husband can say: “I will cook on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and you on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.” Very often they laugh and say: "You, comrade, have turned into a woman." The conscientious worker answers: “But on some days it is necessary to turn into a woman so that my wife turns into a man these days. We want to share the burdens of our economy, just as we share the burdens of the common human economy. No need, in order for a woman to have the whole world in the kitchen, it is necessary that she also go out into the wide world. But what would happen if all our men went to host? It would be terrible. The general level of forward movement would have dropped from this, and we would have been delayed in our development for a very long time. That is why we in the bourgeois environment cannot give a final decision, but it is possible to outline it.
In our communist society, to help a woman, you have to kill the kitchen, and we will do it. And what needs to be killed and what needs to be done so that the fluttering butterfly of the highest circle turns into a person? This is not our concern! But as for the millions of working women, here it is necessary to kill a small kitchen, kill a small laundry room, a small nursery, irrationally arranged, with a tired mother, by no means a teacher, with rickety children. How to do it? You can kill the laundry, the kitchen, only by creating a huge public kitchen, laundry, nursery. Educated cooks will work there in the kitchens, specialists in this field, engineers using steam electric machines, in laundries, real doctors, pedologists and teachers in kindergartens and nurseries. If this were done, then we would free the woman from the weight of the oppression that lies on her, we would give her an extra impetus to get on a real public road. This is the technique by which we can make a revolution in the position of women.
On March 8, the whole world celebrates, at the call of the Comintern, the Day of the Worker. A tremendous effort will be made by all workers in front of all governments to help women get on the road. In this effort, Russia must not be left behind. Of course, with our poverty, it is difficult to carry out such reforms, but we must carry them out if we want to create the material basis for this revolution, which is so important, because, having accomplished it, we will draw into public life a whole half of human society.
The peasantry, of course, will remain in its former state for a long time. But since the cooperatively enlightened village will be drawn into the same social situation, into orphanages, into the public kitchen, it will gradually free the most long-suffering creature, that woman whom Nekrasov mourned with bitter tears, who deserves no less bitter tears from all the peoples of the world.
How do we view marriage? A man and a woman are necessary to each other and created in order to love each other, because nature gives the highest happiness to one through the other. Love does not need to take on an obstetrical character. Now they often say: “Chivalry created her poetry, and we must treat it simply as physiology, and that's it!” So to speak, it means to make a plane out of love, and to make our whole life gray. Love is the great ornament of life. It makes nature bloom, play with colors, sing wonderful songs, dance magnificent dances, and we know that humanity, freed from the yoke of labor and slavery, will not become prosaic and gray, but, on the contrary, will create such masterpieces of happiness and pleasure out of sexual love, about which the man and woman of previous generations could not even dream of. Men and women in the future will create a huge love poem. But they will do this on the basis of complete equality, on the basis of deep partnership. Will it be monogamy or polygamy, who cares? We say that every pleasure is permissible, as long as it is not harmful. Now, if a person indulges in sexual excesses, if he is mean, if he leaves a pregnant woman to the mercy of fate, then he brings great harm. But if he enters into an alliance with a woman and has lived his life with her, then this is fine. They created a strong union, harmony, and, conversely, if a man had to change a woman several times during his heyday and this cannot be harmful to him and society, there is no reason to stand for monogamy. The same applies to a woman. Will it be monogamy or polygamy, who cares? We say that every pleasure is permissible, as long as it is not harmful. Now, if a person indulges in sexual excesses, if he is mean, if he leaves a pregnant woman to the mercy of fate, then he brings great harm. But if he enters into an alliance with a woman and has lived his life with her, then this is fine. They created a strong union, harmony, and, conversely, if a man had to change a woman several times during his heyday and this cannot be harmful to him and society, there is no reason to stand for monogamy. The same applies to a woman. it does great harm. But if he enters into an alliance with a woman and has lived his life with her, then this is fine. They created a strong union, harmony, and, conversely, if a man had to change a woman several times during his heyday and this cannot be harmful to him and society, there is no reason to stand for monogamy. The same applies to a woman.
We know that jealousy with its monstrous scenes, when a woman says: “my husband”, or a husband says: “my wife” and are ready to scratch out the eyes of rivals, is disrespect for each other. Under the condition of respect for each other, it is clear that to put such reproaches as: "You do not love me, but I love you!" - impossible. How can you demand from another to sacrifice himself and cripple his life? You have to be courageous and find solace in another woman or in your own business. We must try to restrain ourselves and not shout: “Oh, I will take my life if you do not love me!” All this disappears, as does the idea that if a man lives with two women or a woman with two men, then this is a shame. In some societies there are facts of polyandry; of course, polygamy is much more common. Under conditions of equality, such combinations are possible, and no one can say
However, this freedom must be limited. Society may say: “I don't care how you arrange your happiness; arrange as you think is best, but do not offend a woman: she is weaker than you. After all, after all, a woman will always give birth to children and feed them, and the physiological structure of the body will always make her weaker; she will always have some prejudice compared to a man. Then it is clear that if a man enters into a temporary marriage with a woman and leaves, then it is difficult to prove that he is the father of this child. In the woman sees that there is nowhere to put him, if she does not throw him up or kill him. It will always be somewhat like this. The child loves the mother more and is more connected to the mother. Maternal feeling is more natural than paternal, so the protection of mother and child should be the responsibility of society.
When there is no state, we will not need a court other than public opinion. At that time, people will be re-educated in such a way that they will punish with public opinion a person who offended a woman in love, and will consider him a worthless person, a person of an inferior type. It will be so spontaneous, so natural, that in public opinion he will be no less repulsive than an alcoholic, a murderer.
Communist education is of great importance. In the genital area there can be all sorts of excesses, there can be numerous mistakes that harm a woman. It is worth remembering the story of abortion, which causes great damage to a woman. In order to prevent this from happening, you need to be able to subtly understand these issues, you need to discipline yourself, you need to be able to maneuver in such a way as to get maximum pleasure and not harm yourself and others. Communist education must first of all develop the subtlety of feeling in relation to others, develop the subtlety of the social instinct. A person will gradually rise, and we will have a transformation of both society and the person himself. Due to economic conditions and due to proper upbringing, introspection and self-discipline, he will understand that it is impossible to be a father and mother in vain, that this is one of the finest forms of creativity. Man will understand that it is necessary to improve humanity.
This is one of the types of eugenic degeneration of mankind, which goes in parallel with communism, it will lead to the fact that questions of sexual morality will be resolved in the direction of high public morality, in a high form of publicity.