Thermidor in the family

[Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.ex.ac.uk/Projects/meia/trotsky/Archive/1936-Rev/ch07.htm

Thermidor in the family

by Leon Trotsky

The October revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to
woman. The young government not only gave her all political and legal
rights in equality with man, but, what is more important, did all that
it could, and in any case incomparably more than any other government
ever did, actually to secure her access to all forms of economic and
cultural work. However, the boldest revolution, like the "all-powerful"
British parliament, cannot convert a woman into a man -- or rather,
cannot divide equally between them the burden of pregnancy, birth,
nursing and the rearing of children. The revolution made a heroic effort

to destroy the so-called "family hearth" -- that archaic, stuffy and
stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs
galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a
shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by
a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses,
creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries,
first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations,
moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the
housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist
society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to
bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from
the thousand-year-old fetters. Up to now this problem of problems has
not been solved. The forty million Soviet families remain in their
overwhelming majority nests of medievalism, female slavery and hysteria,
daily humiliation of children, feminine and childish superstition. We
must permit ourselves no illusions on this account. For that very
reason, the consecutive changes in the approach to the problem of the
family in the Soviet Union best of all characterize the actual nature of
Soviet society and the evolution of its ruling stratum.

It proved impossible to take the old family by storm -- not because the
will was lacking, and not because the family was so firmly rooted in
men's hearts. On the contrary, after a short period of distrust of the
government and its creches, kindergartens and like institutions, the
working women, and after them the more advanced peasants, appreciated
the immeasurable advantages of the collective care of children as well
as the socialization of the whole family economy. Unfortunately society
proved too poor and little cultured. The real resources of the state did
not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party. You
cannot "abolish" the family; you have to replace it. The actual
liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis of "generalized want."
Experience soon proved this austere truth which Marx had formulated
eighty years before.

During the lean years, the workers wherever possible, and in part their
families, ate in the factory and other social dining rooms, and this
fact was officially regarded as a transition to a socialist form of
life. There is no need of pausing again upon the peculiarities of the
different periods: military communism, the NEP and the first five-year
plan. The fact is that from the moment of the abolition of the food-card
system in 1935, all the better placed workers began to return to the
home dining table. It would be incorrect to regard this retreat as a
condemnation of the socialist system, which in general was never tried
out. But so
much the more withering was the judgment of the workers and their wives
upon the "social feeding" organized by the bureaucracy. The same
conclusion must be extended to the social laundries, where they tear and
steal linen more than they wash it. Back to the family hearth! But home
cooking and the home washtub, which are now half shamefacedly celebrated
by orators and journalists, mean the return of the workers' wives to
their pots and pans that is, to the old slavery. It is doubtful if the
resolution of the Communist International on the "complete and
irrevocable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union" sounds very
convincing to the women of the factory districts!

The rural family, bound up not only with home industry but with
agriculture, is infinitely more stable and conservative than that of the
town. Only a few, and as a general rule, anaemic agricultural communes
introduced social dining rooms and creches in the first period.
Collectivization, according to the first announcements, was to initiate
a decisive change in the sphere of the family. Not for nothing did they
expropriate the peasant's chickens as well as his cows. There was no
lack, at any rate, of announcements about the triumphal march of social
dining rooms throughout the country. But when the retreat began, reality
suddenly emerged from the shadow of this bragging. The peasant gets from
the collective farm, as a general rule, only bread for himself and
fodder for his stock. Meat, dairy products and vegetables, he gets
almost entirely from the adjoining private lots. And once the most
important necessities of life are acquired by the isolated efforts of
the family, there can no longer be any talk of social dining rooms. Thus
the midget farms, creating a new basis for the domestic hearthstone, lay
a double burden upon woman.

The total number of steady accommodations in the creches amounted, in
1932, to 600,000, and of seasonal accommodations solely during work in
the fields to only about 4,000,000. In 1935 the cots numbered 5,600,000,
but the steady ones were still only an insignificant part of the total.
Moreover, the existing creches, even in Moscow, Leningrad and other
centers, are not satisfactory as a general rule to the least fastidious
demands. "A creche in which the child feels worse than he does at home
is not a creche but a bad orphan asylum," complains a leading Soviet
newspaper. It is no wonder if the better-placed workers'
families avoid creches. But for the fundamental mass of the toilers, the
number even of these "bad orphan asylums" is insignificant. Just
recently the Central Executive Committee introduced a resolution that
foundlings and orphans should be placed in private hands for bringing
up. Through its highest organ, the bureaucratic government thus
acknowledged its
bankruptcy in relation to the most important socialist function. The
number of children in kindergartens rose during the five years 1930-1935
from 370,000 to 1,181,000. The lowness of the figure for 1930 is
striking, but the figure for 1935 also seems only a drop in the ocean of
Soviet families. A further investigation would undoubtedly show that the
principal, and in any case the better part of these kindergartens,
appertain to the families of the administration, the technical
personnel, the Stakhanovists, etc.

The same Central Executive Committee was not long ago compelled to
testify openly that the "resolution on the liquidation of homeless and
uncared-for children is being weakly carried out." What is concealed
behind this dispassionate confession? Only by accident, from newspaper
remarks printed in small type, do we know that in Moscow more than a
thousand children are living in "extraordinarily difficult family
conditions"; that in the so-called children's homes of the capital there
are about 1,500 children who have nowhere to go and are turned out into
the streets; that during the two autumn months of 1935 in Moscow and
Leningrad "7,500 parents were brought to court for leaving their
children without supervision." What good did it do to bring them to
court? How many thousand parents have avoided going to court? How many
children in "extraordinarily difficult conditions" remained unrecorded?
In what do extraordinarily difficult conditions differ from simply
difficult ones? Those are the questions which remain unanswered. A vast
amount of the homelessness of children, obvious and open as well as
disguised, is a direct result of the great social crisis in the course
of which the old family continues to dissolve far faster than the new
institutions are capable of replacing it.

>From these same accidental newspaper remarks and from episodes in the
criminal records, the reader may find out about the existence in the
Soviet Union of prostitution -- that is, the extreme degradation of
woman in the interests of men who can pay for it. In the autumn of the
past year Izvestia suddenly informed its readers, for example, of the
arrest in Moscow of "as many as a thousand women who were secretly
selling themselves on the streets of the proletarian capital." Among
those arrested were 177 working women, 92 clerks, 5 university students,
etc. What drove them to the sidewalks? Inadequate wages, want, the
necessity to "get a little something for a dress, for shoes." We should
vainly seek the approximate dimensions of this social evil. The modest
bureaucracy orders the statistician to remain silent. But that enforced
silence itself testifies unmistakably to the numerousness of the "class"
of Soviet prostitutes. Here there can be essentially no question of
"relics of the past"; prostitutes are recruited from the younger
generation. No reasonable person, of course, would think of placing
special blame for this sore, as old as civilization, upon the Soviet
regime. But it is unforgivable in the presence of prostitution to talk
about the triumph of socialism. The newspapers assert, to be sure
insofar as they are permitted to touch upon this ticklish theme -- that
"prostitution is decreasing." It is possible that this is really true by
comparison with the years of hunger and decline (1931-1933). But the
restoration of money relations which has taken place since then,
abolishing all direct rationing, will inevitably lead to a new growth of
prostitution as well as of homeless children. Wherever there are
privileged there are pariahs !

The mass homelessness of children is undoubtedly the most unmistakable
and most tragic symptom of the difficult situation of the mother. On
this subject even the optimistic Pravda is sometimes compelled to make a
bitter confession: "The birth of a child is for many women a serious
menace to their position." It is just for this reason that the
revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion, which in
conditions of want and family distress, whatever may be said upon this
subject by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is one of her most
important civil, political and cultural rights. However, this right of
women too, gloomy enough in itself, is under the existing social
inequality being converted into a privilege. Bits of information
trickling into the press about the practice of abortion are literally
shocking. Thus through only one village hospital in one district of the
Urals, there passed in 1935 "195 women mutilated by midwives" -- among
them 33 working women, 28 clerical workers, 65 collective farm women, 58
housewives, etc. This Ural district differs from the majority of other
districts only in that information about it happened to get into the
press. How many women are mutilated every day throughout the extent of
the Soviet Union?

Having revealed its inability to serve women who are compelled to resort
to abortion with the necessary medical aid and sanitation, the state
makes a sharp change of course, and takes the road of prohibition. And
just as in other situations, the bureaucracy makes a virtue of
necessity. One of the members of the highest Soviet court, Soltz, a
specialist on matrimonial questions, bases the forthcoming prohibition
of abortion on the fact that in n socialist society where there are no
unemployed, etc., etc., n woman has no right to decline "the joys of
motherhood." The philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers
of a gendarme. We just heard from the central organ of the ruling party
that the birth of a child is for many women, and it would be truer to
say for the overwhelming majority, "a menace to their position." We just
heard from the highest Soviet institution that "the liquidation of
homeless and uncared for children is being weakly carried out," which
undoubtedly means a new increase of homelessness. But here the highest
Soviet judge informs U8 that in A country where "life is happy" abortion
should be punished with imprisonment -- just exactly as in capitalist
countries where life is grievous. It is clear in advance that in the
Soviet Union as in the West those w ho will fall into the claws of the
jailer will be chiefly working women, servants, peasant wives, who find
it hard to conceal their troubles. As far as concerns "our women", who
furnish the demand for fine perfumes and other pleasant things, they
will, as formerly, do what they find necessary under the very nose of an
indulgent justiciary. "We have need of people," concludes Soltz, closing
his eyes to the homeless. "Then have the kindness to bear them
yourselves," might be the answer to the high judge of millions of
toiling women, if the bureaucracy had not sealed their lips with the
seal of silence. These gentlemen have, it seems, completely forgotten
that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion,
and not force her into the "joys of motherhood" with the help of a foul
police interference in what is to every woman the most intimate sphere
of life.

The draft of the law forbidding abortion was submitted to so-called
universal popular discussion, and even through the fine sieve of the
Soviet press many bitter complaints and stifled protests broke out. The
discussion was cut off as suddenly as it had been announced, and on June
27th the Central Executive Committee converted the shameful draft into a
thrice shameful law. Even some of the official apologists of the
bureaucracy were embarrassed. Louis Fischer declared this piece of
legislation something in the nature of a deplorable misunderstanding. In
reality the new law against women -- with an exception in favor of
ladies -- is the natural and logical fruit of a Thermidorian reaction.

The triumphal rehabilitation of the family, taking place simultaneously
-- what a providential coincidence! -- with the rehabilitation of the
ruble, is caused by the material and cultural bankruptcy of the state.
Instead of openly saying, "We have proven still too poor and ignorant
for the creation of socialist relations among men, our children and
grandchildren will realize this aim", the leaders are forcing people to
glue together again the shell of the broken family, and not only that,
but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred
nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the
scope of this retreat.

Everybody and everything is dragged into the new course: lawgiver and
litterateur, court and militia, newspaper and schoolroom. When a naive
and honest communist youth makes bold to write in his paper: "You would
do better to occupy yourself with solving the problem how woman can get
out of the clutches of the family," he receives in answer a couple of
good smacks and -- is silent. The ABCs of communism are declared a
"leftist excess." The stupid and stale prejudices of uncultured
philistines are resurrected in the name of a new morale. And what is
happening in daily life in all the nooks and corners of this measureless
country? The press reflects only in a faint degree the depth of the
Thermidorian reaction in the sphere of the family.

Since the noble passion of evangelism grows with the growth of sin, the
seventh commandment is acquiring great popularity in the ruling stratum.
The Soviet moralists have only to change the phraseology slightly. A
campaign is opened against too frequent and easy divorces. The creative
thought of the lawgivers had already invented such a "socialistic"
measure as the taking of money payment upon registration of divorces,
and increasing it when divorces were repeated. Not for nothing we
remarked above that the resurrection of the family goes hand in hand
with the increase of the educative role of the ruble. A tax indubitably
makes registration difficult for those for whom it is difficult to pay.
For the upper circles, the payment, we may hope, will not offer any
difficulty. Moreover, people possessing nice apartments, automobiles and
other good things arrange their personal affairs without unnecessary
publicity and consequently without registration. It is only on the
bottom of society that prostitution has a heavy and humiliating
character. On the heights of the Soviet society, where power is combined
with comfort, prostitution takes the elegant form of small mutual
services, and even assumes the aspect of the "socialist family." We have
already heard from Sosnovsky about the importance of the
"automobile-harem factor" in the degeneration of the ruling stratum.

The lyric, academical and other "friends of the Soviet Union" have eyes
in order to see nothing. The marriage and family laws established by the
October revolution, once the object of its legitimate pride, are being
made over and mutilated by vast borrowings from the law treasuries of
the bourgeois countries. And as though on purpose to stamp treachery
with ridicule, the same arguments which were earlier advanced in favor
of unconditional freedom of divorce and abortion -- "the liberation of
women," "defense of the rights of personality," "protection of
motherhood" -- are repeated now in favor of their limitation and
complete prohibition.

The retreat not only assumes forms of disgusting hypocrisy, but also is
going infinitely farther than the iron economic necessity demands. To
the objective causes producing this return to such bourgeois forms as
the payment of alimony, there is added the social interest of the ruling
stratum in the deepening of bourgeois law. The most compelling motive of
the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the
bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the
disciplining of youth by means of 40,000,000 points of support for
authority and power.

While the hope still lived of concentrating the education of the new
generations in the hands of the state, the government was not only
unconcerned about supporting the authority of the "elders", and, in
particular of the mother and father, but on the contrary tried its best
to separate the children from the family, in order thus to protect them
from the traditions of a stagnant mode of life. Only a little while ago,
in the course of the first five-year plan, the schools and the Communist
Youth were using children for the exposure, shaming and in general
"re-educating" of their drunken fathers or religious mothers with what
success is another question. At any rate, this method meant a shaking of
parental authority to its very foundations. In this not unimportant
sphere too, a sharp turn has now been made. Along with the seventh, the
fifth commandment is also fully restored to its rights as yet, to be
sure, without any references to God. But the French schools also get
along without this supplement, and that does not prevent them from
successfully inculcating conservatism and routine.

Concern for the authority of the older generation, by the way, has
already led to a change of policy in the matter of religion. The denial
of God, his assistance and his miracles, was the sharpest wedge of all
those which the revolutionary power drove between children and parents.
Outstripping the development of culture, serious propaganda and
scientific education, the struggle with the churches, under the
leadership of people of the type of Yaroslavsky, often degenerated into
buffoonery and mischief. The storming of heaven, like the storming of
the family, is now brought to a stop. The bureaucracy, concerned about
their reputation for respectability, have ordered the young "godless" to
surrender their fighting armor and sit down to their books. In relation
to religion, there is gradually being established a regime of ironical
neutrality. But that is only the first stage. It would not be difficult
to predict the second and third, if the course of events depended only
upon those in authority.

The hypocrisy of prevailing opinion develops everywhere and always as
the square, or cube, of the social contradictions. Such approximately is
the historic law of ideology translated into the language of
mathematics. Socialism, if it is worthy of the name, means human
relations without greed, friendship without envy and intrigue, love
without base calculation. The official doctrine declares these ideal
norms already realized -- and with more insistence the louder the
reality protests against such declarations. "On a basis of real equality
between men and women," says, for example, the new program of the
Communist Youth, adopted in April 1986, "a new family is coming into
being, the flourishing of which will be a concern of the Soviet state."
An official commentary supplements the program: "Our youth in the choice
of a life-friend -- wife or husband -- know only one motive, one
impulse: love. The bourgeois marriage of pecuniary convenience does not
exist for our growing generation." (Pravda, April 4, 19136.) So far as
concerns the rank-and-file workingman and woman, this is more or less
true. But "marriage for money" is comparatively little known also to the
workers of capitalist countries. Things are quite different in the
middle and upper strata. New social groupings automatically place their
stamp upon personal relations. The vices which power and money create in
sex relations are flourishing as luxuriously in the ranks of the Soviet
bureaucracy as though it had set itself the goal of outdoing in this
respect the Western bourgeoisie.

In complete contradiction to the just quoted assertion of Pravda,
"marriage for convenience," as the Soviet press itself in moments of
accidental or unavoidable frankness confesses, is now fully resurrected.
Qualifications, wages, employment, number of chevrons on the military
uniform, are acquiring more and more significance, for with them are
bound up questions of shoes, and fur coats, and apartments, and
bathrooms, and -- the ultimate dream -- automobiles. The mere struggle
for a room unites and divorces no small number of couples every year in
Moscow. The question of relatives has acquired exceptional
significance. It is useful to have as a father-in-law a military
commander or an influential communist, as a mother-in-law the sister of
a high dignitary. Can we wonder at this? Could it be otherwise?

One of the very dramatic chapters in the great book of the Soviets will
be the tale of the disintegration and breaking up of those Soviet
families where the husband as a party member, trade unionist, military
commander or administrator, grew and developed and acquired new tastes
in life, and the wife, crushed by the family, remained on the old level.
The road of the two generations of the Soviet bureaucracy is sown thick
with the tragedies of wives rejected and left behind. The same
phenomenon is now to be observed in the new generation. The greatest of
all crudities and cruelties are to be met perhaps in the very heights of
the bureaucracy, where a very large percentage are parvenus of little
culture, who consider that everything i8 permitted to them. Archives and
memoirs will some day expose downright crimes in relation to wives, and
to women in genera], on the part of those evangelists of family morals
and the compulsory "joys of motherhood," who are, owing to their
position, immune from prosecution.

No, the Soviet woman is not yet free. Complete equality before the law
has so far given infinitely more to the women of the upper strata,
representatives of bureaucratic, technical, pedagogical and, in general,
intellectual work, than to the working women and yet more the peasant
women. So long as society is incapable of taking upon itself the
material concern for the family, the mother can successfully fulfill a
social function only on condition that she has in her service a white
slave: nurse, servant, cook, etc. Out of the 40,000,000 families which
constitute the population of the Soviet Union, 5 per cent, or maybe 10,
build their "hearthstone" directly or indirectly upon the labor of
domestic slaves. An accurate census of Soviet servants would have as
much significance for the socialistic appraisal of the position of women
in the Soviet Union as the whole Soviet law code, no matter how
progressive it might be. But for this very reason the Soviet statistics
hide servants under the name of "working woman" or "and others"! The
situation of the mother of the family who is an esteemed communist, has
a cook, a telephone for giving orders to the stores, an automobile for
errands, etc., has little in common with the situation of the working
woman who is compelled to run to the shops, prepare dinner herself, and
carry her children on foot from the kindergarten -- if, indeed, a
kindergarten is available. No socialist labels can conceal this social
contrast, which is no less striking than the contrast between the
bourgeois lady and the proletarian woman in any country of the West.

The genuinely socialist family, from which society will remove the daily
vexation of unbearable and humiliating cares, will have no need of any
regimentation, and the very idea of laws about abortion and divorce will
sound no better within its walls than the recollection of houses of
prostitution or human sacrifices. The October legislation took a bold
step in the direction of such a family. Economic and cultural
backwardness has produced a cruel reaction. The Thermidorian legislation
is beating a retreat to the bourgeois models, covering its retreat with
false speeches about the sacredness of the "new" family. On this
question, too, socialist bankruptcy covers itself with hypocritical
respectability.

There are sincere observers who are, especially upon the question of
children, shaken by the contrast here between high principles and ugly
reality. The mere fact of the furious criminal measures that have been
adopted against homeless children is enough to suggest that the
socialist legislation in defense of women and children is nothing but
crass hypocrisy. There are observers of an opposite kind who are
deceived by the broadness and magnanimity of those ideas that have been
dressed up in the form of laws and administrative institutions. When
they see destitute mothers, prostitutes and homeless children, these
optimists tell themselves that a further growth of material wealth will
gradually fill the socialist laws with flesh and blood. It is not easy
to decide which of these two modes of approach is more mistaken and more
harmful. Only people stricken with historical blindness can fail to see
the broadness and boldness of the social plan, the significance of the
first stages of its development, and the immense possibilities opened by
it. But on the other hand, it is impossible not to be indignant at the
passive and essentially indifferent optimism of those who shut their
eyes to the growth of social contradictions, and comfort themselves with
gazing into a future, the key to which they respectfully propose to
leave in the hands of the bureaucracy. As though the equality of rights
of women and men were not already converted into an equality of
deprivation of rights by that same bureaucracy ! And as though in some
book of wisdom it were firmly promised that the Soviet bureaucracy will
not introduce a new oppression in place of liberty.

How man enslaved woman, how the exploiter subjected them both, how the
toilers have attempted at the price of blood to free themselves from
slavery and have only exchanged one chain for another -- history tells
us much about all this. In essence,
it tells us nothing else. But how in reality to free the child, the
woman and the human being? For that we have as yet no reliable models.
All past historical experience, wholly negative, demands of the toilers
at least and first of all an implacable distrust of all privileged and
uncontrolled guardians.



--

Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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