Let me start with a quote:



"Whatever goes on in a society will be selected
and institutionally reinforced according to the
degree to which it buttresses the principal mode
of social production. There is no mystery in
that. The only puzzle is why people are slow to
recognise this truth; or, to be exact, how they
fail to recognise it, insofar as the reason why
they fail to recognise it is that it is veiled
from them - mystified - for a quite definite
purpose. Mystification serves to buttress the
prevailing mode of social organization when that
mode includes domination, as capitalism most
certainly does." [Kovel, J. (1980) *The American
Mental Health Industry* in Ingleby, J. D. (1981)
*Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental
Health* Harmondsworth. Penguin Books Ltd. [p. 73.]]



I will argue that the relationship between men
and women, and marriage in particular, as it has
been officially supported in the twentieth
century - is such a mystification.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that the evolution
of marriage as an institution and its
integration into the social system is remarkably
coincidental with the rise of the industrial
manufacturing base and a radical change in the
'mode of social production'. Prior to the
industrial mode of production the majority of
people worked on the land and were unlikely to
be able to move. Few had the means to move any
substantial distance and so were dependent on
the local landlord to ensure their work and so
their food. It is notable that at that time
there was a general attitude maintained amongst
villagers that excluded people from other
villages. As E. P. Thompson points out in one of
his anti-bomb essays of the early eighties, two
hundred years ago, in the shires, if a lad from
one village attempted to court a girl from
another village, the lad was likely to be
subjected to a trail of abuse and even stoned.
Such a social practice induced in the culture
tended to ensure the closed community of the
village and reduce the mobility of the
individual even further.

However, once the factory based production
centre became favourable it was necessary to
improve, at least to a primary level the
mobility of people in the geographic sense. The
railways achieved this, in part. This being
done, the peasants pouring in from the country
resulted in a high degree of mobility in the
immediate environment. The 'employer' could not
depend upon a captive and dependent work force
any longer. If the worker wanted to tell the
boss to stick it and move on he could. As
factories sprang up all over the place there was
plenty of work and the worker could move from
factory to factory very easily. Some kind of
basic control to ensure the stability of the
work force, and some dependence on the employer
was needed. For the most part this primary
control was wrought by building houses alongside
the factories (since the influx of workers from
the countryside also needed somewhere to stay)
so that the employee would also be dependent
upon the employer for a roof over his head.

Initially women worked along side men in the
factories. However, in the 19th century steam
power started to be used in the factories. It
took some time before steam started to be widely
used. Very simply, in the nineteenth century,
technology did not accelerate at the rate it has
in the last quarter off the twentieth century.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century
steam was beginning to impact upon the factory.
However, the electric motor was fast gaining on
the steam engine as a source of power. Now, one
power source could effectively replace
significant numbers of workers. Many tasks that
required the hard elbow grease of the worker
could easily be powered by the electric motor.
Very much more power could be delivered to the
workpiece by an electric motor than the worker
ever could. Also, many more pieces could be
produced in the same time.

The manufacture of a chair leg gives an
excellent example. One piece of wood turning as
the worker operated a treddle with his feet and
cut the shape into the chair-leg with a chisel
would take much longer than a workpiece that
rotated much faster and so cut more efficiently.
Even more so; while the worker could not
possibly use a cutting edge that was the whole
length of the chair leg because he could not
deliver enough power to the rotating piece; with
the electric motor the cutting tool could be
shapped to the shape of the resulting chair leg
and the leg could be cut to shape in one
semi-automated movement. While producing one
chair leg might have taken 30 minutes it might
now take 60 seconds. This is no exaggeration.
The saving on labour in this simple example
could be a factor of 15.

What is to be done with all unwanted labour?
There is no social security system, but it is
being talked about in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. Certainly, the capitalists
don't want to pay for all those people who are
sitting on their backsides. There are already
unions though they are called guilds; and
communism is lurking in the minds of these
socialistic types that would take it all away
from the capitalist bastards.

Now what? Easy.

As we will see later - marry off the females to
the males, make the males legally responsible
for the females and their offspring. In 1860
some 80% of females worked, by 1930 it was down
to 10%. Examine the development of legislation:
from *The Married Woman's Property Act* to *The
Matrimonial Causes Act* (1973) it all makes men
responsible and forces men to pay, pay, pay.

As Thomas (1993) has made clear:



"The desire to free oneself from work was common
to all classes and both sexes. Dr Joanna Bourke
of Birkbeck College, London, has studied the
diaries of 5,000 women who lived between 1860
and 1930. During that period, the proportion of
women in paid employment dropped from 75 per
cent to 10 per cent. This was regarded as a huge
step forward for womankind, an opinion shared by
the women whose writings Dr Bourke researched.
Freed from mills and factories, they created a
new power base for themselves at home. This was,
claims Dr Bourke, 'a deliberate choice...  and a
choice that gave great pleasure.'" [Thomas, D.
(1993) *Not Guilty: In Defence of Modern Men*
London. Weidenfield & Nicolson. [p. 89.]]



For millennia marriage had been used by the
upper-classes as a political device - financial
unions, land unions and, of course, the infamous
political alliances. The middle and upper class
have never had any regard for the status of
marriage outside its political value. Of course,
such a statement never needed to be considered
or made. It was simply a fact of life for a
section of society that took it for granted;
that manipulated their lives in a selfish and
combative manner within their class; who would
use whatever device that was available, and
marriage was such a device. Now marriage could
become a useful device for the control of the
working class. But, like Freud in America,
certain components had to be jettisoned.
However, what had to be jettisoned was its
personal irrelevance. The working class had no
use for such political devices. Moreover, they
could readily be seen, in the form that served
the purposes of State and capital, as being of
no use to the working class. They must,
therefore, be made useful.

But as is always the case with the fascists of
capital interest it must not cost anything. The
working class motive must be internal in the
sense that it requires no external component
that can then be used in trade. Even though it
must be clear that marriage can still be traded
in fact. Some years ago I pondered the question
'what is love?' That may seem a silly question.
It has been asked often enough and nobody seems
to have an answer. No surprise. The conclusion
that I had to arrive at was that it did not
exist. I then thought that it might be a
psychological projection arising out of the
great pleasure of sexuality. The middle-class
used the idea of love for centuries to justify
their affairs [See Greer, G. (1991 & 1971) *The
Female Eunuch* London. Paladin. [p. 222-]]. Now
it could be turned to very profitable use.
However, it clearly serves the purposes of the
capitalist State very well.

By introducing social mores that inhibit the
natural function of the male sexual motivation;
forcing men into the marital situation;
criminalising children who arise outside that
situation; disallowing divorce; obliging men to
be 'responsible' for their wives and children,
the conditions creating the need to work and
keep on working, and so the effective technical
control of the male sexual impulse could be
brought to bear. One might recall at this point
the common assertion of the late fifties and
early sixties that men marry for sex. That is,
of course, precisely what was intended: prohibit
access to the female and depend upon male sexual
impulse to motivate men into marriage.

Along side this we have the criminalisation of
homosexuality, attacks on prostitution, and the
all round sexual hysteria for which Victorianna
is famed. All of this in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century.

It seems, that if Marvin Michelson's statement,
that 200 hundred years ago 90% of people did not
marry, is true, and I see no reason to doubt it,
then there is no reason to maintain that 'men'
have kept women underfoot, trapped in the
bedroom and kitchen scenario for three thousand
years. It seems absurd to suggest such in the
face of the fact that 200 years ago 90% of
people did not bother with marriage and women
contributed on equal terms, in the workplace, to
their own existence etc. The whole construction
of marriage as we know it is a very recent
invention that just happens, very conveniently,
to serve the purposes of social control of both
men and women in the interests of capital.

D.


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