Kollontai Quotes

Women will only become free and equal in a world where labor has been socialised and where communism has been victorious.

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.

Kollontai calls for the convergence of comradeship and political Eros, which would reconstruct the logic of individualized sexual communication. If the collective were motivated by de-alienated production and social relations, then sex and love relationships would stem from political Eros rather than from an individual's demand to get pleasure from another individual.

ALEXANDRA To be natural and clean, like the water we drink, love must be free and mutual. But men demand obedience and deny pleasure. Without a new morality, without a radical shift in daily life, there will be no real emancipation. If the revolution is not to be a lie, it must abolish in law and in custom men’s right of property over women and the rigid social norms that are the enemies of diversity. Give or take a word, this is what Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s cabinet, demanded. Thanks to her, homosexuality and abortion were no longer crimes, marriage was no longer a life sentence, women had the right to vote and to equal pay, and there were free child care centers, communal dining halls, and collective laundries. Years

A amizade foi, por muito tempo, uma virtude moral, uma das maiores. Isso só mudou com o nascimento da sociedade capitalista e, com ela, do individualismo e da competição. “A sociedade capitalista considerava a amizade como manifestação de ‘sentimentalismo’; portanto, como uma fraqueza de espírito completamente inútil e até nociva para a realização das tarefas de classe burguesas”, diz Kollontai (1982) em seu texto. O capitalismo e o patriarcado atribuíram ao amor o mesmo princípio de propriedade que regula o modo de vida em nossa sociedade até hoje. Amar, então, tornou-se sinônimo de posse: é preciso possuir o coração do ser amado. O amor nessa configuração perde sua amplitude e passa a ficar restrito às relações conjugais e familiares.

لا زلت أنتمي إلى جيل من النساء نشأ عند منعطف التاريخ. وكان الحب, بكل ما يجره من خيبات أمل متكررة ومآس وسعي دائم وراء السعادة الكاملة, لا يزال يلعب دورا كبيرا في حياتي, دورا أكبر مما يجب أن يكونه ! ولقد هدرت فيه الوقت الثمين والكثير من الطاقة, ويمكن القول أنه كان عديم الجدوى, في التحليل الأخير. فنحن, نساء الجيل الماضي, لم نكتشف السبيل إلى التحرر الفعلي. فبذلنا طاقاتنا بدون حساب, وهدرنا طاقاتنا العملية في تجارب عاطفية عقيمة. وتأكيدا, فإني وغيري من المناضلات والكادحات, أدركنا أن الحب ليس الهدف الأساسي للحياة, وتمكنا من أن نجعل العمل محورا لحياتنا. ولولا أننا لم نهدر طاقاتنا في الصراع الدائم مع عواطفنا تجاه الآخرين, لكنا استطعنا بذل المزيد من الجهد الخلاق. والواقع أن هذا النزاع كان حربا دائمة ضد تدخل الرجل في شؤوننا وتعديه على ذاتيتنا, نزاع يدور حول مشكلة معقدة: العمل أو الحب والزواج؟ نحن نساء الجيل القديم, لم ندرك, كما يدرك الشباب والشابات اليوم, أنه يمكن التوفيق بين العمل والسعي وراء الحب, بحيث يبقى العمل محورا للوجود.

Only the working class is capable of maintaining morale in the modern world with its distorted social relations. With firm and measured step it advances steadily towards its aim. It draws the working women to its ranks. The proletarian woman bravely starts out on the thorny path of labour. Her legs sag; her body is torn. There are dangerous precipices along the way, and cruel beasts of prey are close at hand. But only by taking this path is the woman able to achieve that distant but alluring aim – her true liberation in a new world of labour. During this difficult march to the bright future the proletarian woman, until recently a humiliated, downtrodden slave with no rights, learns to discard the slave mentality that has clung to her, step by step she transforms herself into an independent worker, an independent personality, free in love. It is she, fighting in the ranks of the proletariat, who wins for women the right to work; it is she, the “younger sister”, who prepares the ground for the “free” and “equal” woman of the future.

Yet the longing to be understood by a man down to the deepest, most secret recesses of one's soul, to be recognized by him as a striving human being, repeatedly decided matters. And repeatedly disappointment ensued all too swiftly, since the friend saw in me only the feminine element which he tried to mold into a willing sounding board to his own ego. So repeatedly the moment inevitably arrived in which I had to shake off the chains of community with an aching heart but with a sovereign, uninfluenced will. Then I was again alone.

We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force. But over and over again things turned out differently, since the man always tried to impose his ego upon us and adapt us fully to his purposes.

How difficult it is for today's woman to cast aside this capacity, internalized in the course of centuries, of millenniums, with which she tried to assimilate herself to the man whom fate seemed to have singled out to be her lord and master. How difficult she will find it to convince herself that woman must reckon self-renunciation as a sin, even a renunciation for the sake of the beloved and for the sake of the power of love.

This issue of Stvar we dedicate to the anniversaries. Each effort that commences from historical years and epochal dates, however, is not only supposed to cope with the legacy and lessons of evoked events and figures, but also to question a certain (dominant) relation to the past and history. In other words, the task is not a commemorative one, that is, a fetishist relation to the epoch of decisive dates and big events, but rather the radical grasping of the materiality of history following its work where social contradictions require that fight for emancipation and progress is to be taken up. What is at stake here is not an academic requiem or a leftist memorial service to the era of revolutions and great revolutionaries; it is all about casting our gaze toward the past in order to better examine those moments where the past opens itself toward the future. The relation toward past, therefore, should contain perspectives of different future. Amputation of the future is nowadays one of the features of many current academic, scientific and ideological discourses. Once this perspective of different future has been eliminated, the resignification of Marx, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Lenin and others becomes possible, because their doctrines and results have been quite depoliticized. On the contrary, it is the memory that calls for struggle that is the main cognitive attitude toward the events remembered in the collected texts in this issue. Not nostalgic or collectionist remembrance but critical memory filled with hope. The main question, thus, is that of radical social transformations, i.e. theory and practice of revolution. In this sense, Marx, Kollontai, Lenin and other Bolsheviks, and Gramsci as well, constitute the coordinates in which every theoretical practice that wants to offer resistance to capitalist expansion and its ideological forms is moving. The year 1867, when the first Volume of Marx’s Capital is brought out in Hamburg, then October 1917 in Russia, when all power went to the hands of Soviets, and 1937, when Gramsci dies after 11 years of fascist prison: these are three events that we are rethinking, highlighting and interpreting so that perspective of the change of the current social relations can be further developed and carried on. Publishing of the book after which nothing was the same anymore, a revolutionary uprising and conquest of the power, and then a death in jail are the coordinates of historical outcomes as well: these events can be seen as symptomatic dialectical-historical sequence. Firstly, in Capital Marx laid down foundations for the critique of political economy, indispensable frame for every understanding of production and social relations in capitalism, and then in 1917, in the greatest attempt of the organization of working masses, Bolsheviks undermined seriously the system of capitalist production and created the first worker’s state of that kind; and at the end, Gramsci’s death in 1937 somehow symbolizes a tragical outcome and defeat of all aspirations toward revolutionizing of social relations in the Western Europe. Instead of that, Europe got fascism and the years of destruction and sufferings. Although the 1937 is the symbolic year of defeat, it is also a testimony of hope and survival of a living idea that inspires thinkers and revolutionaries since Marx. Gramsci also handed down the huge material of his prison notebooks, as one of the most original attempts to critically elaborate Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine in new conditions. Isn’t this task the same today?

Kollontai stumbles upon the essence of sexual liberation as a form of control; it is “voluntary incarceration.” Because the will is more important than reason to the revolutionary, because in effect will is the essence of reason for both the Marxist and the Nietzschean, the revolutionary is unable to see how he is enslaved by his own will because he is unable to see the role that passion plays in that self-subversion. All the revolutionary can see is his passion, and because his only thought is how to gratify those passions - morals having discredited as “bourgeois” - he is blind to how his passions control him.

We are talking here about a vicious circle. Life as a rootless, unmarried cosmopolite led inevitably to loneliness, which led to an affair, which led to an even greater sense of alienation after it was consummated, which led to a desire to be free from the chains of love, which led to more work, which led to more loneliness. Kollontai’s new woman is a slave to her own passions, a slavery which is all more effective because she can never identify its source.

Page 18 Indeed, all the main writers on this topic – Marx, Engels, Bebel, Lenin, Trotsky, Zetkin and Kollontai – more or less imply that when women are engaged in wage labor on equal terms with men, and when housework has been socialized, we shall have arrived at the nirvana of proletarian heterosexual serial monogamy. Page 47 We have chosen to start at a very general structural level by showing how the family serves to pass on privilege and disadvantage from one generation to the next. We have done this partly because it highlights very clearly how the family embodies the principle of selfishness, exclusion and pursuit of private interest and contravenes those of altruism, community and pursuit of the public good. Society is divided into families and the divisions are deep, not merely ones of slight antipathy and mild distrust.

Kollontai definió a la mujer nueva como la mujer que había conseguido situar el amor en un lugar subordinado de su vida, que estaba volcada en dar sentido a su vida de otra manera, aunque no renunciara ni al amor ni al sexo.

But when the wave of passion sweeps over her, she does not renounce the brilliant smile of life, she does not hypocritically wrap herself up in a faded cloak of female virtue. No, she holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of love’s joy, however deep it is, and to satisfy herself. When the cup is empty, she throws it away without regret and bitterness. And again to work.

In her own memoirs, Emma Goldman reports being deeply moved by the speech Alexandra Kollontai gave over the grave of John Reed, but Kollontai must have also had Armand in mind when she spoke these words: “We call ourselves Communists, but are we really that? Do we not rather draw the life essence from those who come to us, and when they are no longer of use, we let them fall by the wayside, neglected and forgotten? Our Communism and our comradeship are dead letters if we do not give out of ourselves to those who need us. Let us beware of such Communism. It slays the best in our ranks.”30

El ideal de exclusividad en el amor se ha forjado históricamente, ligado a la ideología basada en la noción de propiedad.

Vi däremot vet, att det inte är kulturen och kunskapen som befriar och frigör kvinnan, utan det ekonomiska systemet, i vilket kvinnan får ägna sig åt nyttigt och produktivt arbete för hela samhället. Kommunismen är just ett sådant ekonomiskt system.