Vol. 78/No. 12      March 31, 2014

BY LEON TROTSKY  
What is our old culture in the area of the family and everyday life? On top was the nobility, who put the stamp of vulgarity, on a basis of darkness and lack of culture, on all social life. And if our proletariat, which emerged from the peasantry, caught up in a single leap with the European proletariat in some thirty to fifty years and then overtook it in the fields of class struggle and revolutionary politics, there is still, in the proletariat too, more than a little of the foul old leftovers of serfdom in the field of personal morals, the family, and everyday life. And in the intellectual or petty-bourgeois family, you can still find as much as you like of genuine present-day serfdom. You should not set yourself the utopian task of overturning the old family by some kind of instant juridical leap — you’ll fall on your face and compromise yourself in front of the peasantry — but within the material possibilities, within the already assured conditions of social development, act, along the legal line too, so as to direct the family toward the future. …

We Marxists say that the value of a social structure is determined by the development of productive forces. This is indisputable. But it is also possible to approach the problem from the other end. The development of the productive forces is not needed for its own sake. In the last analysis the development of the productive forces is needed because it provides the basis for a new human personality, conscious, without a lord over him on earth, not fearing imaginary lords, born of fear, in the sky — a human personality which absorbs into itself all the best of what was created by the thought and creativity of past ages, which in solidarity with all others goes forward, creates new cultural values, constructs new personal and family attitudes, higher and nobler than those which were born on the basis of class slavery. The development of the productive forces is dear to us, as the material presupposition of a higher human personality, not shut up in itself, but cooperative, associative.

From this point of view it may be said that probably for many decades to come it will be possible to evaluate a human society by the attitude it has toward woman, toward the mother and toward the child — and this is true not only for evaluating society, but also the individual person. The human psyche does not develop evenly in all its parts. We are living in a political age, a revolutionary age, when working men and women are developing themselves in a struggle, forming themselves above all in a revolutionary political way. And those cells of consciousness where family views and traditions reside, and the attitude of one man to another, to woman, to child, and so on — these cells often remain in the old form. The revolution has not yet worked upon them. The cells in the brain in which political and social views reside are being worked upon in our time much more quickly and sharply, thanks to the whole structure of society and thanks to the epoch in which we are living. (Of course, this is only an analogy — in the brain the process works differently.) And therefore we shall go on for a long time observing that we are constructing a new industry, a new society, but in the field of personal relations much still remains from the Middle Ages. And therefore one of the criteria for the evaluation of our culture, and a standard for individual proletarian working men and women and progressive peasants, is the attitude toward woman and the attitude toward the child.

Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] taught us to value the working-class parties according to their attitude, in particular and in general, toward the oppressed nations, toward the colonies. Why? Because if you take, say, the English worker, it is much easier to arouse in him the feeling of solidarity with his whole class — he will take part in strikes and will even arrive at revolution — but to make him raise himself to solidarity with a yellow-skinned Chinese coolie, to treat him as a brother in exploitation, will prove much more difficult, since here it is necessary to break through a shell of national arrogance which has been built up over centuries.

And just so, comrades, has the shell of family prejudices, in the attitudes of the head of the family toward woman and child — and woman is the coolie of the family — this shell has been laid down over millenia, and not centuries. And thus you are — you must be — the moral battering ram which will break through this shell of conservatism, women and the family rooted in our old Asiatic nature, in slavery, in serfdom, in bourgeois prejudices, and in the prejudices of the workers themselves, which have arisen from the worst aspects of peasant traditions. Inasmuch as you will be destroying this shell, like a battering ram in the hands of the socialist society that is being built, every conscious revolutionary, every Communist, every progressive worker and peasant is obliged to support you with all his might. I wish you great success, comrades, and above all I wish you more attention from our public opinion. Your work, which is really purifying, really salutary, must be placed in the center of attention of our press, so that it can be supported on the shoulders of all progressive elements in the country, and you can be helped to reach successes in the reconstruction of our way of life and culture. [Loud applause.]  
 
 
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