For the better part of half a century, the book this one is carved from was the most widely read work of socialism on earth. August Bebel's Woman and Socialism, first published in 1879, went through more than fifty German editions in his lifetime, was smuggled from hand to hand under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law, and did more to win ordinary workers — and, decisively, working women — to the movement than any theoretical treatise ever did. It was the German Social-Democratic Party's true catechism, more read than Capital, and its power lay in a simple, daring move: it refused to argue only about what socialism would abolish and insisted on describing what it would build. Society of the Future, the volume in your hands, is Progress Publishers' 1971 abridgement of that book's boldest section — Bebel's portrait of the socialist future itself.
Read it for its nerve. Where most Marxists of his day, and after, treated the future society as an embarrassment best left vague — Marx himself scorned the writing of "recipes for the cook-shops of the future" — Bebel walked straight in and set the table. Here is a future in which the state, having no more classes to hold down, "withers away" and gives place to a simple administration of things; in which religion fades not by decree but for want of the misery that fed it; in which education is universal and joyful, art and science belong to everyone, and the individual is free at last to develop every faculty. And here, in the chapter that is the living heart of the whole book, is woman in the future: not tolerated, not "protected," but wholly equal — economically independent, freed from the private household and the tyranny of the kitchen, mistress of her own body and her own life. Bebel wrote that "the woman of future society is socially and economically independent... she is no longer subject to even a trace of domination and exploitation, she is free and the equal of man, mistress of her own destiny." In 1879 this was incendiary; more than a century on, it is still ahead of most of the world.
That is the reason to keep the book, and it is a large reason. But it is also the reason the book needs an introduction and not merely a reprint, because there is a bitter joke folded into this Moscow edition of 1971, and the joke is at the publisher's expense. Consider what the Soviet state chose to reprint, and against what. It printed Bebel's vision of the withering state while presiding over one of the largest and most intrusive state machines in human history — a bureaucracy that did not wither but metastasised, and that by 1971 had shown no sign of dissolving into any "administration of things." It printed Bebel's chapter on the total emancipation of women — the abolition of the private household, the socialising of domestic labour, women's full entry into public life — a generation after it had wound up its own women's department, recriminalised abortion, rebuilt the individual family by decree, and handed out medals to mothers of large families. The state that published Bebel's demand for the end of the "domestic hearth" had spent the middle of the century lovingly restoring it. Every one of the future's promises in this book is a measure held up against the present of the country that issued it, and by every measure that present falls short.
There is a second irony, and it points the other way, at the movement Bebel himself led. He was the co-founder and beloved chairman of German Social-Democracy, the most powerful workers' party in the world, and he built it in the confidence that it was the vehicle of exactly the future he described here. He did not live to watch it fail the test. Bebel died in August 1913 — one year, almost to the month, before the party he had made voted the war credits that sent German workers to kill French and Russian ones, and six years before its leaders, in power at last, loosed the Freikorps to murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and drown the German revolution in blood. The Society of the Future was written by a man who believed the German party would deliver it; the party delivered the opposite. So the book sits, poignantly, between two betrayals it never names: the reformist collapse of the Social-Democracy that produced it, and the bureaucratic petrifaction of the Communist state that reprinted it. Neither built Bebel's future. Both found his description of it useful, at different times, for different lies.
None of which is Bebel's fault, and none of it dulls the book. The tradition from which this introduction is written has always honoured Woman and Socialism precisely because its picture of human emancipation is more radical, more concrete and more honest than anything either of its later claimants was willing to enact. Bebel's future is not a bureaucrat's plan and not a parliamentarian's promise; it is a standard, and it is exacting. The withering of the state is there to indict every state, red or otherwise, that mistakes its own permanence for socialism. The emancipation of women is there to indict every regime, capitalist or "communist," that leaves the household a private prison and calls the result equality. Read this way — as a ruler, not a relic — Bebel's little utopia is one of the sharpest critical instruments in the whole library, and it cuts, impartially, in every direction the twentieth century took.
So take Society of the Future for what it is: the surviving heart of the book that taught a generation of workers to want not merely bread but the whole of human freedom, including the freedom of women, reissued by a state that had abandoned most of what it describes. Bebel meant every word as a programme. Read it as one — and then look up from the page at the country that printed it, and at the party that failed to build it, and judge them both by the future they promised and did not keep.