"The Working Class and Neomalthusianism"
p ... The working class is not perishing, it is growing, becoming stronger, gaining courage, consolidating itself, educating itself and becoming steeled in battle. We are pessimists as far as serfdom, capitalism and petty production are concerned, but we are ardent optimists in what concerns the working-class movement and its aims. We are already laying the foundations of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction.
That is the reason-the only reason-why we are definitely the enemies of neomalthusianism, [44•* suited only to unfeeling and egoistic petty-bourgeois couples, who whisper in scared voices: "God grant we manage somehow ourselves. So much the better if we have no children—-"
Notes
[44•*] Neomalthusianism-a variety of the reactionary doctrine of Malthus, an English bourgeois economist. To distract the workers from revolutionary struggle, the Malthusianists advocated the false idea that social evils could be removed by artificially curtailing the growth of the population.