Alexandra Kollontai  

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"Where does prostitution end and the marriage of convenience begin?" --"Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It" (1921) by Alexandra Kollontai


"Kollontai's theory: The revolution must destroy marriage." [Vladimir Ilyich]
"Yes, bourgeois marriage is nothing but licensed prostitution." [Milena]
--dialogue from W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism


"A female socialist like Alexandra Kollontai was scathing about male hypocrisy and the ... The analogy between marriage and prostitution had much in common with anarchist Emma Goldman's argument that ..." --Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, Peter Drucker, 2015


Kollontai’s most important texts on sexual reform are the two essays that comprise Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle[1], Love and the New Morality, trans. Alix Holt (Bristol: The Falling Wall Press, 1972), and “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth” in Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Writings , trans. Alix Holt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). (Schuster, 2013)


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Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (1872  – 9 March 1952) was a Marxist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1915 on as a Bolshevik (later Communist). In 1922, Kollontai was appointed a diplomatic counsellor to the Soviet legation in Norway, being soon promoted to head of the legation, one of the first women to hold such a post.

Contributions to Marxist feminism

As an unwavering Marxist, Kollontai opposed the ideology of liberal feminism, which she saw as bourgeois. She was a champion of women's liberation, but she firmly believed that it "could take place only as the result of the victory of a new social order and a different economic system", She criticized bourgeois feminists for prioritizing political goals, such as women's suffrage, that would provide political equality for bourgeois women but would do little to address the immediate conditions of working class women, and was further distrustful that bourgeois champions of feminism would continue to support their working class counterparts after succeeding in their struggle for "general women's" rights, as exemplified by the following quote:

"Class instinct – whatever the feminists say – always shows itself to be more powerful than the noble enthusiasms of “above-class” politics. So long as the bourgeois women and their [proletarian] “younger sisters” are equal in their inequality, the former can, with complete sincerity, make great efforts to defend the general interests of women. But once the barrier is down and the bourgeois women have received access to political activity, the recent defenders of the “rights of all women” become enthusiastic defenders of the privileges of their class, content to leave the younger sisters with no rights at all. Thus, when the feminists talk to working women about the need for a common struggle to realise some “general women’s” principle, women of the working class are naturally distrustful. --Alexandra Kollontai (1909), The Social Basis of the Woman Question

Kollontai is known for her advocacy of free love. However, this does not mean that she advocated casual sexual encounters; indeed, she believed that due to the inequality between men and women that persisted under socialism, such encounters would lead to women being exploited, and being left to raise children alone. Instead she believed that true socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes to sexuality, so that it might be freed from the oppressive norms that she saw as a continuation of bourgeois ideas about property. A common myth describes her as a proponent of the "glass of water" theory of sexuality. The quote "...the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water" This is likely a distortion of the moment in her short story "Three Generations" when a young female Komsomol member argues that sex "is as meaningless as drinking a glass of vodka [or water, depending on the translation] to quench one's thirst." In number 18 of her Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations, Kollontai argued that "...sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst."

Kollontai's views on the role of marriage and the family under Communism were arguably more influential on today's society than her advocacy of "free love." Kollontai believed that, like the state, the family unit would wither away once the second stage of communism became a reality. She viewed marriage and traditional families as legacies of the oppressive, property-rights-based, egoist past. Under Communism, both men and women would work for, and be supported by, society, not their families. Similarly, their children would be wards of, and reared basically by society.

Kollontai admonished men and women to discard their nostalgia for traditional family life. "The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia's communist workers." However, she also praised maternal attachment: "Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them."





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