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
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    5
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    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.