The Masses vol. 1 no. 12: "The Cheapest Commodity on the Market"

Submitted by Matt Picht on Wed, 02/13/2013 - 21:11

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/jpegs/1354919378297631.jpg    

The journal I've chosen for this week's assignment is "The Masses", a radical socialist monthly which features socialist fiction and poetry alongside impassioned diatribes and calls to action. The 12th issue of volume one is themed around feminism and suffrage, and contains many interesting tidbits, including ads for "Karl Marx Cigars" and a product called "Sargol" which promises to "put pounds and pounds of healthy flesh on your frame". But the main point of interest for me when I read this magazine was how similar the two movements, suffrage and socialism, appear to be within the magazine. This juxtaposition is perfectly exemplified by the column "Women Suffrage: Why?" on page 12 of the magazine. Author Lida Parce equates feminism and socialism with a similarly progressive agenda, and argues that the movements should support one another: "for every extension  of justice and every application of  the principle of a square deal is a step in advance for  all those who are suffering from social wrongs and are struggling to right them." Given their eventual divergence and relative successfulness, it's interesting to consider how similar these two movements once were.

    The main article of  this special issue of "The Masses" continues the trend of linking socialism to feminism, by framing the oppression of women in capitalist rhetoric. Titled "The Cheapest Commodity on the Market", this article argues that the capitalistic fixation on money as a signifier of worth has degraded the value of human life, women in particular. "What is the matter with a world that searches land and sea for a new jewel," cries the author, "yet stands calmly by while women sell their lives to a machine and sell them for only enough to buy food and bed?" This argument has a particular poignancy in retrospect, before the outbreak of the Great War would devalue individual human lives to an unprecedented level. Clearly, pre-war society was already beginning to struggle with questions of individual worth and identity; the war exacerbated these problems to their breaking point, magnifying an ideological issue for the oppressed into grim reality for every member of society.

Comments

Rebekah Chung

Thu, 02/14/2013 - 01:01

This concern about human worth that links feminism and socialism is quite intriguing, particularly because, in this case, the article focuses more on the preciousness of women rather than men in a set of circumstances where it was the men who were becoming scarce.  It seems it may possibly be a protest to the undervaluing of women as a result of the proportionate lack of men--just because there were more women available than men does not mean that they were to be cheapened.

What I find a little disturbing about the article, however, is the fact that the article, while assigning a very high price value to women, still commodifies them.  In fact, it does this to men as well, adopting an extremely economical view of human value that is based entirely on practical use.  Perhaps this a response to the realization that people of all sorts die the same--a sort of despiritualization and demystification of humanity as a result of the war.