Hi folks,

Today we’ll be discussing:

Make Way for Winged Eros - Alexandra Kollontai

Today’s discussion is:

  • 1/25 - Make Way for Winged Eros - Alexandra Kollontai

I’m reading the copy from Marxists.org:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1923/winged-eros.htm

Discussion Prompts

These are some ideas to address while considering this work. None of them are essential, and any of your own thoughts are very much welcome! I’ll be adding my own thoughts later today.

  • What seems to be the main point of this work? What question is Kollontai trying to answer?

  • What has she missed? Is she wrong about anything?

  • Did anything surprise you?

  • Is this work applicable outside of the conditions of the early USSR?

  • Is this really a “nonessential” or would it be good for any communist to read it?

Next Discussion

The next book will be:

  • 2/1 - The Red Deal - Red Media. - discussion 1.
  • 2/8 - The Red Deal - Red Media - discussion 2.

I haven’t gotten my copy yet, so those discussions may change once I see how long it is.

I’d appreciate a line on a free e-copy if you’ve got one. I’ll probably purchase it here: https://www.commonnotions.org/red-media

Next Title

If you would like to suggest the next title please put in a separate comment with the words “submission suggestion”. I think the highest voted title should win.

Books should be:

  • not suggested for beginners.
  • not overly technical or philosophical (I’m just not smart enough to lead those discussions).
  • relatively short (so as not to lose too much momentum).
  • regionally or subject specific (like Che’s Guerilla Warfare is topically specific, or Decolonization is Not a Metaphor is regionally specific?).
  • readily available.

Thanks for your time! :)

  • @redtea
    4•1 year ago

    The second section is titled ‘Historical notes’. Kolontai begins with classics.

    Kinship community

    Love is owed to blood relatives first. Antigone ‘risked her life to bury …’ her brother, a strange thing from a bourgeois perspective, which puts the husband above the brother.

    Tribal rule

    The state was embryonic. It was

    vitally important that [the tribe’s] members were linked by mental and emotional ties.

    Women were excluded from social life and could not have friendship. Friendship was for men, and valued above marital love. Indeed, friendship was valued over specific actions in stories, even if those actions were for the tribe. This is reminding me of the opening to Pat Baker’s The Silence of the Girls.

    It would be interesting to compare Kolontai’s writing with Engel’s Origin of the Family and to consider whether Kolontai had access to or read a copy. Are the two works compatible? What were Kolontai’s sources for making her claims?

    Engels worked with a summary from Marx, who extracted crucial insights from Ancient Society written by Lewis Morgan, ‘so rich in content an so badly written’.

    There were four editions of Engel’s work by 1891, the first published in Switzerland in 1884, but no English translation till 1902. The first to be published in England was printed in 1940, a translation of a 1934 edition from Moscow. I’m unsure when it would have been published in Russian, but Kolontai could have read a German version. From the preface to the first edition:

    It is Morgan’s great merit that he has discovered and reconstructed … [a] prehistoric basis of our written history, and that in the kinship groups of the North American Indians he had found the key to the most important and hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman and German history.

    The idea being that the discovery of indigenous Americans in various stages of development allowed Morgan to see how different societies dealt with ‘families’ and property (e.g. inheritance). By this time, Europe was mostly homogenous, and only allowed the direct observation of families in bourgeois or feudal organisations. This is just a brief sketch to see if it sparks any interesting questions to ask about ‘Winged Eros’.

    • @redtea
      4•1 year ago

      The feudal noble family

      Love in feudal times was not a priority for marriage. Marriage was a means of securing class privilege. He who (Kolontai explains it would not be ‘she’) decides to marry for love, outside their rank, would be a sinner. But love was materially useful. When victory in war relied on individual prowess:

      The knighthood demanded of each member fearlessness, bravery, endurance and great feats of individual valour on the battlefield. … The knight in love with the inaccessible “lady of his heart” found it easier to perform miracles of bravery, easier to win tournaments, easier to sacrifice his life.

      Her argument is becoming more explicit now: love was subordinate to class interests and has a class character.

      Capitalism

      The bourgeois conception of love combined ‘the spiritual and physical’. During this time, platonic love (as between a knight and unattainable lover), and friendship, began to be derided. They could not survive as virtues in a system built on competition and individualism. Love was only needed to keep the family unit together, as the basic social unit in capitalism. Love became a pillar of marriage (contrary to within feudalism, where marriage was simply a means of uniting and protecting family wealth).

      In capitalism, the family did not guard inherited wealth, but was a unit for accumulating wealth. It would be easy to misinterpret Kolontai, here, as suggesting a clean break between feudalism and capitalism. Immanuel Wallerstein, elsewhere (in Historical Capitalism), argues against such a break, showing how feudal families married into bourgeois families and transformed themselves into capitalists. Modern monarchs are an example of what the undiluted result looks like in all its garish detail. Kolontai seems to me to accept a similar logic, but it’s subtle.

      Feudalism and Capitalism

      Later:

      The peasant family differs from that of the urban industrial bourgeoisie chiefly in that it is an economic labour unit; its members are so firmly held together by economic circumstances that inner bonds are of secondary importance.

      I’m unsure what ‘it’ refers to. I think she is arguing that the family is chiefly an economic labour unit in peasant society. She explains the family was also a productive unit in the guild system, too. In contrast, the family is primarily a ‘consumer unit’ and ‘a vehicle for the preservation of accumulated capital’.

      Im reminded of Marta Russell’s Capitalism and Disability, which argues that ‘disability’ is a capitalist conception; although physically and mentally impaired people would have faced societal barriers in feudal times, the community/family units would have been much more accommodating than capitalists in providing what today we call ‘reasonable adjustments’.

      In feudalism, the ‘disabled’ workers would be related or at least part of the same community, so welcomed into the work to the extent possible. I wonder what Kolontai would say about this, about how the feudal conception of love would have fed into the involvement of everyone in the socially-necessary labour.

      The feudal conception of love also reminds me of an argument for communism, a response to anti-communists who claim greed is part of human nature. The family unit shows this not the be the case. Communism/socialism merely extends the family ties to the broader community (almost a return to a pre-feudal concept of love).

      Putting it in these words may show something about Kolontai’s method. As her argument unfolds, I’m starting to see a ‘negation of the negation’: love changes form throughout different political economies, but will/can return to a more developed form of the love that held together kinship communities or those under ‘tribal rule’.

      • @redtea
        3•1 year ago

        I’ll suggest here – and see if others (dis)agree – that the family, and its related notions of love, changed during Keynesianism, neoliberalism, and are changing again through ‘platform capitalism’. What I mean is, that it seems to me that love is becoming increasingly transactional. Couples (even if married) are increasingly likely to keep their finances separate. Such marriages do not fit Kolontai’s idea of married families being a unit of accumulating capital. The family as a ‘consumer unit’ has taken the upper hand. So the dialectic has shifted as capitalism has developed.

        Edit: on further reflection I’m wondering if Kolontai does appreciate this difference. She’s focuses on the bourgeois class. She also hints that working class love conflicted with bourgeois class love. If the family were a successful unit for accumulating capital, everyone would be bourgeois by now. Which implies that working class families might have hoped marriage to bring wealth accumulation as economic security, but this is only a dream for many. But marriage could produce a unit for consumption, early on in capitalism. In this sense bourgeois love-marriage promises economic security and denies any collective responsibility for that economic security. Hence the ideological aspects Kolontai discusses. But really, for the lower classes, bourgeois love-marriage was only ever about creating consumer units.

        • @redtea
          5•1 year ago

          Kolontai writes some rather beautiful ideas in the third part of the essay, on ‘Love-comradeship’:

          The proletarian ideology, therefore, attempts to educate and encourage every member of the working class to be capable of responding to the distress and needs of other members of the class, of a sensitive understanding of others and a penetrating consciousness of the individual’s relationship to the collective.

          I like this idea and feel like it could underpin a Marxist concept of a ‘politics of care’. We need to build:

          sensitivity, compassion, sympathy and responsiveness – derive from one source: they are aspects of love, not in the narrow, sexual sense but in the broad meaning of the word.

          This is a rejection of what Kolontai scathingly describes of love in capitalism:

          On the one hand the healthy sexual instinct has been turned by monstrous social and economic relations, particularly those of capitalism, into unhealthy carnality. The sexual act has become an aim in itself - just another way of obtaining pleasure, through lust sharpened with excesses and through distorted, harmful titillations of the flesh.

          Only the working class have the power to unite ‘physical attraction’ and ‘emotional warmth’. Her dialectic framing takes shape subtly.

          She is clear, because she reiterates it, that purely physical love, ‘wingless eros’ (if I’m reading her correctly), ‘contradicts the interests of the working class.’ It can be excessive, exhausting, ‘impoverishes the soul, hindering the development and strengthening of inner bonds and positive emotions.’

          And in the third place it usually rests on an inequality of rights in relationships between the sexes, on the dependence of the woman on the man and on male complacency and insensitivity, which undoubtedly hinder the development of comradely feelings.

          I find this curious because it seems to accept that women are less willing participants in wingless eros love than are men. I’m unsure what to think of this. It seems to fall back on patriarchal concepts and a problematic, heterosexual man/woman dichotomy. I don’t think she’s trying to do that. Maybe she’s trying to criticise these concepts and imply, instead, that in socialism/communism, love can be recognised as something else. But that’s not explicit.

          Obviously, she was writing decades before broader LGBT liberation (which is still unfortunately incomplete), which may point to the problem. She does, rather promisingly argue that ‘Inequality between the sexes and the dependence of women on men will disappear without trace’.

          She proposes three principles of love:

          1. Equality in relationships (an end to masculine egoism and the slavish suppression of the female personality).
          2. Mutual recognition of the rights of the other, of the fact that one does not own the heart and soul of the other (the sense of property, encouraged by bourgeois culture).
          3. Comradely sensitivity, the ability to listen and understand the inner workings of the loved person (bourgeois culture demanded this only from the woman).

          Given these statements, I think we can infer that (at least some) early Soviets foresaw a sexually liberated future as well as a gender-liberated future. The terminology is not quite there, but one could interpret Kolontai as setting up the logical premises for a society that respects LGBT rights and respects monogamy as well as polygamy. Does anyone see the same thing ‘in’ the text?

          Edit: fixed missing quotation marks from numbered list.

    • diegeticscream[all]🔻OP
      3•1 year ago

      Comrade, you consistently come through with great insights! I especially like your comparison with Engels. I wonder if Kollontai was exposed to it?

      • @redtea
        4•1 year ago

        Thank you.

        If she had not read this book from Engel’s, is she working with the problematic sources and interpretations that contain “insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman and German history”. If so, on the one hand, it’s remarkable that she still derived an historical materialist analysis that isn’t too far from some of Engel’s points.

        On the other hand, that might explain some of her more troublesome assumptions: working with flawed sources, she’s accepted some bourgeois ideas, e.g. that all societies were similarly patriarchal, etc. So she’s reinterpreting history and rejecting the bourgeois framework, but at the same time kind of accepting a lot of the bourgeois framework from pre-history up to the revolution.

        This is a problem for all revolutionaries writing still today. We can’t fully shed bourgeois notions until we’ve lived without them. These vestiges will whither away along with the state. Similar to the way that bourgeois theory took a couple of hundred years to develop, and even now we hear pro-feudal assumptions and rhetoric.

        I don’t think this results in any/many deep flaws in ‘Winged Eros’, mainly because I don’t think Kolontai is presenting this as a definitive account. She’s giving a rough sketch of love through the ages in the frame of a novel perspective, and making some proposals for young revolutionaries who, by the sounds of it, are wondering what it was all for if they’ve won the revolution but lost the power to make meaningful love connections.