Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/48

 46 therefore, is no politician. She is simply working to preserve her home and the happiness of the future generation. With her it is a question of progress and human rights.

The economic development points to the collective ownership of the means of prodoction [sic] in the future society. That is all there is to Socialism. The other questions will take care of themselves. Ethics and ideas, marriage relations and laws, will reflect themselves in the changed conditions. No one can prophecy exactly what they will be. We can only judge in a general way from general economic knowledge.

Woman lost her power over herself and her children and her civic rights in society, as her possessions lost their relative economic value. When man of the ruling class acquired economic power he begot all power. In a Socialistic society the economic power falls away from class or sex. It will rest with society at large. Woman is part of society. She will produce economic goods or serve the good of the community in some useful capacity as well as the man. There will be no room for parasites, no room for rulers, no room for slaves. It will be a return of the primitive tribal relationship where the good of all will be the ultimate aim and end, only it will be on a larger and broader and fuller basis, an inter national, an intersexual, in short an interhuman basis.

Slavery has been an inevitable scourge in the progress of the world. In order that a part of humanity might advance, and learn and bring out the higher things, another part had to become the drudges, in the days when food was hard to procure.

Aristotle once said that in order for slavery to disappear machines would have to be invented to do the work of men. He never dreamt of such machines existing and the largest portion of the human race being enslaved to them for the benefit of only a very few, who not even are truly bebefited as they are no longer the intellects of the world. But it is quite natural that the enslaved class should first have to