Guy A. Aldred Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: PDF's from Marxists.org and OCR/Editing from RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Free love is impossible under capitalism. Yes: so is honor or truth of any description. Is that any reason why we should ask the priest to bless our sex-relationship, or the law to license our associations?
Woman is now a wage-earner. She suffers all the misery of free labor. She -bears all the chains of the past. Reduces her male colleague’s wages by competition, and then maintains his existence on the lesser income. Legally, she remains his inferior.
In order to remove these anomalies, some middle—class women have been urging on the State their right to vote, and thus assist in the making of the laws that govern them. Superficially, the claim is incontrovertible. There is no reason why woman should not enjoy the same social rights as man. If men boast a property franchise, so should women. If a small set of male parasites vote, not according to their intelligence, but in ratio to the houses they own, logically a select clique of female parasites should be entitled to the same privileges. If a man can sit in the House of Pretense, woman can also. The sexes are equal in honor and dishonor. The property male vote is not the enfranchisement of men.
The limited equal enfranchisement of women is not suffrage for women. To pretend so, is ridiculous. Short of out and out adult suffrage, women suffrage is impossible.
Whilst one is securing the part, one can be realizing the whole. It is as easy to win “adult suffrage” as its palliative, “woman suffrage.” The more loudly you demand the former, the more likely you are to secure the latter.
Adult suffrage, in its turn, is only a palliation-—the shadow of political power which will be granted, one day, to prevent the surrender of the substance of economic power. There is a futility in striving for anything short of Socialism; and the suffrage struggle embodies that futility.
So long as the workers are dominated by the capitalist class, so long as they remain the economic slaves of society, so long will they lack that industrial liberty, without which all suffrage is a.. farce. Economic determinism, the slow but sure awakening of the masses to their real position, are the factors governing the nature of capitalistic concession; so that the nearer the people come to the realization of their condition, the more advanced will be the nature of the palliatives we shall secure, Hence there is no necessity to concentrate our energies upon the securing of palliatives. Let us come out for Socialism, and as the Bible has it, “these other things shall he added unto us.” As with the limited franchise, so with adult franchise, both are equally absurd without economic conditions prevail that guarantee freedom from want, and are equally fraudulent, therefore, as battle-cries.
Free-love propaganda, if not discussed in the terms of its economic basis, may become an Utopian cause. Anti-State activity may prove the same. So may Atheist agitation. But free love is not a palliative. It is an expression of our Socialism, an avowal of our revolt. Anarchism is not a palliative. It either compromises to “direct action” and reforms itself into an abstraction, or remains revolutionary —— a statement of what Socialism politically and socially involves. Atheism is not a palliative Either it degenerates into a lifeless superstition of unreasoning reason, or just summarizes. the materialism of Socialism.
Socialism, then does not believe in votes under capitalism, petitioning to administer the capitalist system, either for men or women. It urges social freedom for both instead—a new economic order of living, social and industrial democracy.
These facts are commended to the attention of those who desire to hasten the dawn of the day when woman shall stand forth freed from the fetters of theological superstition and economic bondage. Let them but—
“See the blasting, burning shame of sex-oppression now,And with hearts and hands uplifted, swear a grand and God-like vow,
That despite the fangs of custom, and despite the Church’s frown,
Womanhood shall wield its scepter, womanhood shall wear its crown.
She hath borne with man his crosses, she has worn with him his chains,"
She hath shared in all his losses, she hath suffered all his pains.
She shall stand with him coequal, on the pure-exalted plains."