User:Alardne1/Alexandra Kollontai

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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", and has thus been regarded as a key figure in Marxist feminism. 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)

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" is often mistakenly attributed to her. 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." She believed that like the state, the traditional family unit would wither away once the second stage of communism became a reality. She viewed traditional marriage and 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 reared by society.

Though Kollontai believed in the eventual obsolescence of the traditional family, she held that the institution of marriage could survive if it underwent a radial transformation. She advocated for a transformed marriage that would be compatible with many other social relations. Kollontai felt that by liberating men and women from their traditional roles, communism would free marriage from the "conjugal slavery of the past", allowing spouses to thrive marriages grounded in mutual love and trust. As Kollontai wrote in 1920: The workers’ state needs new relations between the sexes, just as the narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family, the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women is replaced by a free union of two equal members of the workers’ state who are united by love and mutual respect. In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades.

-- Alexandra Kollontai (1920), Communism and the Family Kollontai's saw domestic labor as an impediment to her ideal of the "universal family". Rather than viewing the tasks that were traditionally reserved for women as productive labor, Kollontai believed that housework stood in the way of industrialization and modernization and that under a fully realized communist society, industrial mechanization would ultimately replace so-called women's work: All that was formerly produced in the bosom of the family is now being manufactured on a mass scale in workshops and factories. The machine has superseded the wife. What house- keeper would now bother to make candles, spin wool or weave cloth? All these products can be bought in the shop next door. Formerly every girl would learn to knit stockings. Nowadays, what working woman would think of making her own? In the first place she doesn’t have the time. Time is money, and no one wants to waste time in an unproductive and useless manner. Few working women would start to pickle cucumbers or make other preserves when all these things can be bought in the shop.

-- Alexandra Kollontai (1920), Communism and the Family 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 parental attachment, arguing that, "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." Kollontai's attitude towards parental attachment was related to her belief that mothers were socially obligated to raise children in order to contribute to the formation of a new and better society.