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The Life and Work

munism, since there will no longer be any economic reason for it. If monogamy continues to exist for the woman, for the first time in history it will be equally compulsory for the man.

Whilst the private household of the present day, with all its wastefulness and pettiness, will certainly disappear, and children, whether legal or illegal, will be the equal care of the State, yet for the first time in history individual sex-love, which is supposed to form the basis of all marriages and of the monogamic family, will attain to this position in actual fact as well as in theory. Mutual love will then be the only real consideration which will force a couple to live together, and to be true to one another.

As for how exactly the men and women of the future will regulate their lives, Engels says: "That will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity—a race of men who have never in their lives had occasion for buying with money or other economic means of power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or for refusing to surrender to their lover for fear of economic consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They will follow their own practice and fashion their own public opinion about the individual practice of every person—only this and nothing more."

Thus, whilst private ownership in wealth and the means of production, with its concomitant existence of classes and subjection of women, was a necessary result of the accumulation of wealth, it yet bears within itself the germs of its own destruction. Private property and class domination can no longer cope with the problems confronting it. By the rise of the great towns, by the massing together of large numbers of men in factory and workshop, by forcing them to unite in defence of their interests, by the recurrence of trade crises and unemployment, by the production of unheard-of luxuries side by side with the direst misery, by the collective methods of production the owners of private property have themselves been forced to introduce—in short, all the facts of our modern industrial life have been digging and are rapidly completing the grave of private property and the inevitable extinction of all class or sex domination. But if we say that this is inevitable, it does not mean that we are to fold our hands and do nothing. All things in society are brought about by human beings, but the psychology of these human beings is moulded by the economic conditions of the time, and this psychology again reflects and exerts an influence in changing these economic conditions. In pure self-defence, and partly unconsciously, the workers are compelled to carry on a constant class struggle. Some of them are led again by these economic conditions to see the real trend of this struggle, its necessary aim, the doing away with private property, and the establishment of the Socialist