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
    link
    41 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.