- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Free Love

In Reply to: Ladies, Mr. Marx... posted by Frenchy on October 04, 1999 at 10:49:25:

: Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
: Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, ie, of prostitution both public and private.

: From The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx/Frederick Engels
: Foreign Language Press, Peking. Third Printing. p.56

I always took this passage to mean that, in a socialist society, women won't have to sell their bodies nor will they be oppressed through the institution of marriage. If I'm not mistaken, the "openly legalized community of women" simply refers to women having the same rights as men, both inside and outside of marriage.

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