Table of Contents
Introductiona. The Soviet ‘Glass of Water’ Theory b. Sexual Liberation in the Chinese ‘Soviet Regions’
4. How Communism Destroys Families in the Westa. Promoting Sexual Liberation
ReferencesThe family is the building block of human society, allowing people not only to raise children in a stable and nurturing environment, but also to pass the knowledge of one generation to the next. Marriage is a sacred institution arranged by the divine for humanity to form families, preserving traditional heritage and morality.
Today, the traditional family is being slowly destroyed. The writings of Karl Marx and other communists describe the family as a form of private ownership to be abolished. In addition to persecuting religion and spiritual faith, communist regimes place love for the Communist Party above love for even one’s own parents, spouse, or children, encouraging people to struggle against their own kin.
Since the 1960s, a variety of anti-traditional movements, including modern feminism, “sexual liberation,” and gay rights, have risen to prominence in the West. The institution of the family has been hit the hardest. Under the banners of equality and emancipation — implicitly and explicitly backed by modern laws, school curricula, academic theory, and economic policies — these movements are twisting the traditional bonds between the sexes, corrupting children, and dragging human behavior to previously unimaginable lows. This trend, which surfaced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is deeply infused with communist ideological factors. Friedrich Engels ultimately hoped for widespread “unconstrained sexual intercourse,” with the aim of dissolving traditional marriage and ultimately eliminating the family institution. [1]
Communism excels at continuous mutation and deception, which has led to constant confusion about what exactly people are supporting when they endorse its policies and ideologies. Over time, they come to accept communism’s underlying ideas. The tragic situation today — the degradation of the traditional family and people’s confusion about the true nature of this trend — is the result of meticulous planning and the gradual implementation of communism over the past two hundred years.
Laws passed in the United States and other countries have opened the floodgates to divorce and broken families. In the 1950s, about 11 percent of American children born in a married family saw their parents divorce; by 1970, that number had soared to 50 percent. [2] In 1956, less than 5 percent of newborn infants in the United States were born out of wedlock, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). By 2016, the figure was close to 40 percent. [3][4]
1. Communism’s Aim to Abolish the Traditional Family
In the traditional cultures of the East and the West, marriage was established by the divine and was considered to be arranged by heaven. Once formed, the bond of marriage could not be broken. Both men and women were created by the divine, in its image and equal before it. At the same time, the divine also made men and women different and established different roles for them in the family and in society.In Eastern traditional culture, men are associated with the yang of the yin-yang relationship and thus are symbolically connected to the sun and the sky. It is a man’s natural duty to continuously strive to make progress and shoulder the responsibility of taking care of the family. Women belong to the yin principle, which is symbolically connected to the earth, meaning they bear and nurture everything with great virtue. They should be yielding and considerate of others, and they have the duty to support their husbands and educate their children. Only when men and women work well in their respective roles can the yin and the yang be harmonized and children grow and develop in a healthy manner.
In Western religious belief, women are the bone of men’s bones and flesh of their flesh. [5] A man must love his wife as though she were part of his own body, and if necessary, sacrifice himself to protect her. In turn, a woman should cooperate with and help her husband, making the couple an integral whole. Men are responsible for working hard and making a living to support the family, while women suffer in childbirth. All this stems from the different original sins people carry.
None of this is meant to imply that men are superior to women in ability or intelligence, as men’s and women’s talents manifest in different competencies. Attempts to eliminate differences between the sexes run counter to common sense and prevent both men and women from fulfilling their potential.
Families play the role of transmitting beliefs and morality, thus maintaining a stable and healthy society. Parents are the first teachers in children’s lives. If children can learn traditional virtues such as selflessness, humility, gratitude, endurance, and more from their parents’ words and deeds, they will benefit for the rest of their lives.
Traditional married life helps men and women grow together in their moral conduct, as it requires husbands and wives to temper their emotions and desires, and to treat each other with consideration and tolerance. Marriage is fundamentally different from casual romantic love. Human emotions are fickle; a relationship that can be formed and broken up at will is hardly distinguishable from a common acquaintanceship.
According to communism, however, the family unit is an obstacle to human liberation. Classical communism regards economic factors as key in determining the formation of familial relationships, and it requires the private family unit to be revolutionized into a form of public ownership.
The “liberation of mankind” is the fantastic delusion sitting at the heart of communist ideology. Communist thought holds that oppression is not merely economic or social, but ingrained in the very culture of a society. For communists, “liberation” thus means the destruction of cultural norms “imposed” by traditional social morality. In their view, the patriarchy of the traditional family structure oppresses women, and traditional sexual morality represses human nature.
2. Communism’s Promotion of Promiscuity
One of Marx’s ideological forerunners was the Welsh socialist Robert Owen, known for his 1825 attempt to implement his vision of a “utopian” society in New Harmony, Indiana. In 1826, Owen said:I now declare, to you and to the world, that Man, up to this hour, has been, in all parts of the earth, a slave to a Trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race. I refer to private, or individual property — absurd and irrational systems of religion — and marriage, founded on individual property combined with some one of these irrational systems of religion. [6]
Owen’s time in New Harmony was short-lived; he left in 1828, abandoning his socialist experiment. But his ideas had lasting influence.Another influential utopian socialist, French philosopher Charles Fourier, provided much inspiration for Marx and his followers. The influence of Fourier’s writings could be seen in the revolutions of 1848 and the 1871 Paris Commune, and his ideas later spread to the United States. Significantly, Fourier is the first philosopher known to have used the term “feminism” (“féminisme” in French).
In Fourier’s ideal communist society (known as phalanges, or phalanxes), the traditional family was rejected, and bacchanals and orgies were praised as fully liberating human inner passions. He also declared that a fair society should take care of those who are sexually rejected (such as the elderly or unprepossessing) to ensure that everyone has the “right” to sexual gratification. He believed that any form of sexual gratification, including sadomasochism and even incest and bestiality, should be allowed as long as it was consensual.
The influence of Owen and Fourier sparked dozens of communist utopian communes in the United States in the nineteenth century, most of which were short-lived and ended in failure. The longest-running was the Oneida Commune, which was established on the basis of Fourier’s theory and lasted thirty-three years. The commune eschewed traditional monogamous marriage and advocated polygamy, group sex, and selective breeding. In the end, the founder, John Humphrey Noyes, fled to Canada to avoid legal action. Though the commune was forced to abandon wife-sharing, Noyes later wrote several books, one of which, “Bible Communism,” started an ideology in its own right.
Communism’s theoretical underpinnings go hand in hand with promiscuity. From the very beginning, communism has encouraged people to abandon divine teachings and reject tradition, overthrowing moral restraints and indulging in base urges, for the sake of revolution and liberation. By communist logic, social problems originally caused by the degeneration of human morality can be attributed to private ownership. Communism leads people to believe that if private property becomes public, people will not fight over it. However, even if all property were shared, people might still have conflicts over each other’s spouses. Therefore, utopian socialists openly advocate promiscuity and “free love” as the answer to sexual desire.
These communist “paradises” either directly challenged the traditional family or advocated a system of common wives, which led local communities, churches, and governments to see them as a challenge to traditional morality and ethics and to take action to suppress them.
The failure of utopian communes taught Marx and Engels a lesson: It was not yet the time to openly advocate the so-called “community of women” (that is, sexual relationships unrestricted by marriage) mentioned in The Communist Manifesto. Although their goal of eliminating the family had not changed, they adopted a more covert approach: attacking marriage as an instrument of oppression.
After Marx’s death, Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan to complete Marx’s theory on the family and further expound the Marxian view of marriage. In it, he claimed: “[The emergence of monogamy] is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife.” [7]
Engels argued that monogamy was based around private property, and that once all property was shared, there would be a brand new model of marriage based purely on “sexual love.” He boasted that in a communist society, private property would become public, housework would become professionalized, and there would be no need to worry about looking after children since childcare and education would be the responsibility of the state. He wrote: “This removes all the anxiety about the ‘consequences,’ which today is the most essential social — moral as well as economic — factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame?” [8]
As with their economic theories, Marx and Engels’s social ideology may appear cogent, but fails upon practical implementation. Feelings are unreliable; a person can love someone today and another person tomorrow. Without traditional norms of courtship and marriage, the inevitable result is sexual promiscuity and the breakdown of social order. Adding to the utopian communes mentioned above, the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes’ initial attempts to apply Marxist doctrine in family policy ended in utter failure and were quickly reversed.
Relationships between husbands and wives aren’t always smooth sailing. The vow “till death do us part” during a traditional wedding is a vow to God. It also represents the idea that both parties are prepared to face and overcome hardships together. What maintains a marriage is not merely emotion or feelings, but also a sense of moral and social responsibility. The need to treat one’s other half well, as well as care for children and extended family, transforms husbands into mature men and wives into mature women.
What Marx and Engels promoted, despite buttressing it with phrases like “freedom,” “liberation,” and “love,” was in fact nothing more than the abandonment of personal moral responsibility and the giving of oneself to desire.
3. Early Attempts at Sexual Liberation Under Communism
Today, authoritarian socialist regimes are often associated with strict social conservatism, including gender roles and marital laws that seem out of touch with Western liberal progressivism. However, such policies are not borne of a desire to preserve traditional culture or morality, but exist solely based on the communist regime’s desire to turn love and familial relations into instruments of state power. In fact, at the beginning of communist rule in countries like Russia and China, Party leaders tried to implement the entire Marxist program at once, including disastrous experiments with sexual liberation.As expounded previously, sexual chaos is an innate feature of communist ideology. Marx is believed to have raped his maid; he had Engels raise the resulting child. Engels cohabitated with a pair of sisters. Lenin carried out extramarital affairs for years and contracted syphilis from prostitutes. Stalin is known to have taken advantage of married women.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they instituted the practice of wife-sharing. The Soviet Union at the time can be viewed as the pioneer of sexual liberation. In 1990, one year before the fall of the Soviet Union, state-run Russian magazine Rodina published an article outlining the phenomenon of wife-sharing during early Soviet rule. The piece described the private lives of Soviet leaders Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai, and others, saying that they were “as casual as dogs” in their sexual activities. As early as 1904, Lenin wrote disparagingly of the situation, “Lust can emancipate the energy of the spirit; not for pseudo-family values, but for the victory of socialism must this blood-clot be done away with.” [9]
At a meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Trotsky proposed that once the Bolsheviks seized power, new fundamental principles of sexual relations would be drafted. After the destruction of the family, communist theory demands there be a period of unconstrained satisfaction of sexual desires. Trotsky also said that the responsibility to educate children should reside solely with the state.
In a letter to Lenin in 1911, Trotsky wrote: “Undoubtedly, sexual oppression is the main means of enslaving a person. While such oppression exists, there can be no question of real freedom. The family, like a bourgeois institution, has completely outlived itself. It is necessary to speak more about this to the workers.”
a. The Soviet ‘Glass of Water’ Theory
After the Bolsheviks seized power, Lenin rolled out a series of regulations effectively abolishing marriage and decriminalizing homosexuality. At that time, there was also the slogan “Down with shame!” This was part of the Bolshevik attempt to create the “New Man” of socialist ideology. Sometimes followers even roamed the streets naked, screaming slogans like “Shame is in the bourgeois past of the Soviet people.” [11]In the early 1920s, former People’s Commissar for Social Welfare Alexandra Kollontai popularized the “glass of water” theory about sexuality. Kollontai was a revolutionary from a traditional family who fought her way into the Bolshevik faction in search of “women’s liberation.” “Glass of water” is an allusion to sexual indulgence; the theory held that in a communist society, quenching one’s sexual desire should be as normal and easy as drinking a glass of water. The concept became widespread among factory workers and especially teenage students.
“The current morality of our youth is summarized as follows,” the well-known communist Madame Smidovich wrote in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda in March 1925. “Every member, even a minor, of the Communist Youth League and every student of the Rabfak [Communist Party training school] has the right to satisfy his sexual desire. This concept has become an axiom, and abstinence is considered a bourgeois notion. If a man lusts after a young girl, whether she is a student, a worker, or even a school-age girl, then the girl must obey his lust; otherwise, she will be considered a bourgeois daughter, unworthy to be called a true communist.” [12]
Divorce also became normalized and widespread. “The divorce rate skyrocketed to levels unseen in human history. In short order, it seemed as though everyone in Moscow had a divorce,” professor Paul Kengor noted in his 2015 book Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage. [13] In 1926, the American magazine The Atlantic published an article about the astonishing situation in the USSR, with the headline “The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage.”
The phenomenon of “Swedish families” — which has nothing to do with Sweden, but instead refers to a large group of men and women living together and engaging in casual sex — also appeared during this period of sexual liberation. This opened the doors to promiscuity, rape, broken families, sexually transmitted diseases, and other symptoms of moral collapse. [14]
Following the expansion of socialist communes, these “Swedish families” spread across the Soviet Union. This was known as the “nationalization” or “socialization” of women. The socialist women in Yekaterinburg of 1918 are a sad example: After the Bolsheviks seized the city, they issued an ordinance that young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five must be “socialized.” An unknown number of women were thus delivered to Red Army soldiers and civil officials to be “socialized.” [15]
During a conversation with feminist activist Clara Zetkin in 1921, Lenin deplored the “glass of water” theory, calling it anti-Marxist and anti-social. [16] The reason for this was that sexual liberation brought about an undesirable byproduct: an influx of unwanted babies, many of whom were abandoned, as there were no means to care for them. The Bolsheviks tightened their policies on sex at the end of the 1920s.
b. Sexual Liberation in the Chinese ‘Soviet Regions’
The circumstances during the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) early years were similar to those in the Soviet Union; communist parties are all varieties of poisonous fruit from the same tree. Chen Duxiu, an early communist leader, was known for his debauched personal life. According to the memoirs of Trotskyist cadres Zheng Chaolin and Chen Bilan, communists such as Qu Qiubai, Cai Hesen, Zhang Tailei, Xiang Jingyu, and Peng Shuzhi all had somewhat confused sexual histories, and their attitudes toward sex were similar to the “glass-of-waterism” of the early Soviet revolutionaries.Sexual liberation was embraced not only by the Party’s intellectual leaders, but also by ordinary people living in the CCP’s early “Soviet regions,” which were revolutionary enclaves set up in the provinces of Hubei, Henan, and Anhui during the time of rebellion against the Nationalist Party prior to Japan’s invasion in World War II. Due to the promotion of equality of women and of absolute freedom to marry and divorce, revolutionary work was often disrupted in order to satisfy sexual desire.
Young people in the Soviet regions frequently indulged in promiscuous relations in the name of “connecting with the masses.” It wasn’t unusual for young women to have six or seven sexual partners. According to the Collection of Revolutionary Historical Documents in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Districts, among local party chiefs in places like Hong’an, Huangma, Huangqi, Guangshan, and elsewhere, “about three-quarters of them had sexual relations with dozens or hundreds of women.”
In the late spring of 1931, when CCP military commander and founding member Zhang Guotao took charge of a Soviet region, he noted that syphilis was so widespread that he had to make a request to Party Central for doctors who specialized in treating the disease. Many years later, in his memoirs, he vividly recalled stories of women in the enclaves being sexually harassed, including some of the senior generals’ mistresses. [17]
4. How Communism Destroys Families in the West
Communism’s ideological trends originated in the nineteenth century. After more than a century of transformation and evolution in the West, they came to the fore in the United States and other free countries in the 1960s.a. Promoting Sexual Liberation
Sexual liberation (also known as the sexual revolution) saw explosive growth in the United States during the 1960s. The free love movement, which violates traditional sexual morality, paved the way for the gradual erosion and disintegration of traditional family values. The concept of “free love” posits that sexual activity of all forms should be completely unrestrained. In this view, marriage, abortion, and adultery should not be restricted by the government or by law, nor subject to social regulation.Followers of Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes were the first to coin the term “free love.” In recent times, almost all the main promoters of free love ideas have been socialists or people deeply influenced by socialist thought. For example, socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter was among those pioneering the free love movement in Britain and was an early activist for gay rights. The main forerunner of the free love movement in France was Émile Armand, an anarcho-communist in his early days who later built on Fourier’s utopian communism, founded French individualist anarchism (which falls under the broader category of socialism), and advocated promiscuity, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The pioneer of the free love movement in Australia was John “Chummy” Fleming, a unionist and a proponent of anarchism (another offshoot of socialism).
The free love movement in America bore fruit with the 1953 launch of erotic magazine Playboy. The magazine made use of glossy paper to create the impression that it was artistic and not seedy. It also used expensive color printing, with the result being that pornographic content — typically regarded as low-class and vulgar — swiftly entered the mainstream, and Playboy became a “high-class” leisure magazine.
In the middle of the twentieth century, with hippie culture increasing in popularity and free love gaining widespread acceptance, the sexual revolution made its official debut. The term “sexual revolution” was coined by Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian founder of communist psychoanalysis. He combined Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis, believing that the former liberated people from “economic oppression,” while the latter liberated people from “sexual repression.”
Another founder of sexual liberation theory was Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School. During the Western counterculture movement of the 1960s, his slogan “Make love, not war” embedded the notion of sexual liberation deep within people’s hearts.
The notion of sexual liberation swept through the West with the best-selling Kinsey Reports — two books titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — as well as the widespread availability of oral contraception. It is worth mentioning that contemporary scholars have discovered distorted statistical data in Alfred Kinsey’s work, as well as exaggeration, oversimplification, and other fallacies driven by his political and ideological commitments. Kinsey set out to show that extramarital sex, homosexual sex, sexual desire in children as young as infants, and so on were common, and thus to direct society to accept the normalization of these phenomena, a task at which he was largely successful. He worked with pedophiles in his research and sexual experiments on infants and children. [18]
All at once, being “sexually liberated” became fashionable. Among young people, promiscuity was considered normal. Teens who admitted to being virgins were ridiculed by their peers. Data show that of those who turned fifteen between 1954 and 1963 (the ’60s generation), 82 percent had premarital sex by the age of thirty. [19] By the 2010s, only 5 percent of new American brides were virgins, while 18 percent already had had ten or more sexual partners. [20] The cultural mainstream has become saturated with sex, as seen in advertising, literature, film, and television.
References
1. Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Alick West, (1884), chap. 2, part 4, accessed via Marxists Internet Archive on April 17, 2020, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm.3. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, “Table 1–17. Number and Percent of Births to Unmarried Women, by Race and Hispanic Origin: United States, 1940–2000,” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/statab/t001x17.pdf.
5. Genesis 2:23, American Standard Version Bible.
8. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
14. Melnichenko, “The Great.”
