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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)Q Which of the Manifesto’sarguments are
the strongest? Which are the weakest?READING 30. 4
80 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style80
labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes
developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that
of women. Differences of age and sex no longer have any 170
distinctive social validity for the working class. All are
instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according
to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the
manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash,
than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the
landlord, and shopkeeper, the pawnkeeper, etc...II Proletarians and Communists... The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
traditional property relations; no wonder that its development 180
involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to
Communism.
We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by
the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the
proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the 190
total of productive forces as rapidly as possible....
III Position of the Communists... The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the
forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the
ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
Mill and Women’s Rights
While Marx and Engels criticized a society that made
middle-class women “mere instrument[s] of production,”
Mill described women of all classes as the unwilling
subjects of more powerful males. In the treatise The
Subjection of Women, Mill condemned the legal subordina-
tion of one sex to the other as objectively “wrong in itself,
and...oneofthechief hindrances to human improve-
ment.” Mill’s optimism concerning the unbounded poten-
tial for social change—a hallmark of liberalism—may have
been shortsighted, for women would not obtain voting
rights in Britain until 1928.
In the United States, the first women’s college—Mount
Holyoke—was founded at South Hadley, Massachusetts, in
1836; and in 1848, at Seneca Falls inupstate New York,
American feminists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–
1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), issued the first
of many declarations that demanded female equality in all
areas of life.The rights of women had been an issue addressed in the
literature of feminists from Christine de Pisan to Condorcet
and Mary Wollstonecraft (see chapter 24), but nowhere was
the plight of women more eloquently treated than in Mill’s
essay. Mill compared the subjection of women to that of
other subject classes in the history of culture. But his most
original contribution was his analysis of the male/female
relationship and his explanation of how that relationship
differed from that of master and slave.From Mill’s The Subjection
of Women (1869)
All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that 1
women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men.
They are so far in a position different from all other subject
classes that their masters require something more from them
than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of
women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most
brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected
with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave
merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in
practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves 10
rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear, either fear of
themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted
more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force
of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up
from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of
character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will and
government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the
control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty
of women and all the current sentimentalities that it is their
nature to live for others, to make complete abnegation of 20
themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by
their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to
have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to
the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie
between them and a man. When we put together three
things—first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending
entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of
human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition 30
can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it
would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had
not become the polar star of feminine education and formation
of character. And this great means of influence over the minds
of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness
made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of
holding women in subjection, by representing to them
meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual
will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual
attractiveness.... 40
The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show
that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case
no presumption and ought not to create any prejudice in favor
of the arrangements which place women in social and political
subjection to men. But I may go further, and maintain that the