Attempting to discuss the opposition to prostitution as a Marxist-Leninist with “sex-positive” socialists results, more often than not, in baseless and preconceived accusations of moral puritanism from these against us. This speech from Kollontai however proves that this is far from the case, and that there is a solid base and defense supporting a Marxist position against prostitution in a society where labor has triumphed over capital. To this day I have found no sex-positive socialist able to refute the arguments that Kollontai presents here, more often than not finding instead an absurd attempt to expand the concept of unproductive labor exposed in this speech to professional athletes, actors and actresses, painters and so on, finally rendering any discussion useless and in a stalemate, or in other occasions, simply sticking to their guns on the concept that in a socialist society everyone must be able to do as they please in their life as if we were anarchists and as if socialism was not about the good of the many above the will of the individual.
Despite this, and despite the fact that most of the pillars presented in this speech still stand strong, the text is old, and it shows. Most of the reasons given by Kollontai against prostitution in the worker’s republic – mainly its classification as unproductive labor and as a form of labor desertion equal to the one of the stay-at-home wife on one hand and the incompatibility with socialist values that deem men and women equal due to the inherent inequality that supposes that one can simply buy the other one’s body on the other – still stand to this day, but when we move to the aspect of public health you can already see that Kollontai lives in a time and place where medical science still has a long way to go until our days, and while it is true that prostitution to this day still supposes a severe source of venereal diseases, bringing up eugenics in a good light as a tool to promote public health is now rightfully seen as unacceptable. While not pertaining to this text, the backwardness of the medical science at the time and the support that Kollontai gives to it (and that we can easily condemn in the current age in retrospection) can be seen better in other texts by her such as “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations” or others that I hope we can analyze soon. Moreover and probably most importantly, the antiquity of the text can be seen by the way in which Kollontai explains the form that prostitution takes in the bourgeois societies of her era and the behaviours around it in comparison to our days in which prostitution, once condemned by the bourgeois morality as she explains, has now instead become a gigantic industry embraced by such and even promoted as a tool of women’s liberation, once capitalism has expanded to all fields where there is a profit to find.
In conclusion, and while most of the text still stands strong, I think we would greatly benefit from seeing it be revisited and updated by another author that can take the torch from her in order to both include a study of the effects of prostitution on public health through the lenses of modern science as well as a study of the new forms that prostitution has taken in the 103 years that have passed since Kollontai pronounced these words.
Attempting to discuss the opposition to prostitution as a Marxist-Leninist with “sex-positive” socialists results, more often than not, in baseless and preconceived accusations of moral puritanism from these against us. This speech from Kollontai however proves that this is far from the case, and that there is a solid base and defense supporting a Marxist position against prostitution in a society where labor has triumphed over capital. To this day I have found no sex-positive socialist able to refute the arguments that Kollontai presents here, more often than not finding instead an absurd attempt to expand the concept of unproductive labor exposed in this speech to professional athletes, actors and actresses, painters and so on, finally rendering any discussion useless and in a stalemate, or in other occasions, simply sticking to their guns on the concept that in a socialist society everyone must be able to do as they please in their life as if we were anarchists and as if socialism was not about the good of the many above the will of the individual.
Despite this, and despite the fact that most of the pillars presented in this speech still stand strong, the text is old, and it shows. Most of the reasons given by Kollontai against prostitution in the worker’s republic – mainly its classification as unproductive labor and as a form of labor desertion equal to the one of the stay-at-home wife on one hand and the incompatibility with socialist values that deem men and women equal due to the inherent inequality that supposes that one can simply buy the other one’s body on the other – still stand to this day, but when we move to the aspect of public health you can already see that Kollontai lives in a time and place where medical science still has a long way to go until our days, and while it is true that prostitution to this day still supposes a severe source of venereal diseases, bringing up eugenics in a good light as a tool to promote public health is now rightfully seen as unacceptable. While not pertaining to this text, the backwardness of the medical science at the time and the support that Kollontai gives to it (and that we can easily condemn in the current age in retrospection) can be seen better in other texts by her such as “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations” or others that I hope we can analyze soon. Moreover and probably most importantly, the antiquity of the text can be seen by the way in which Kollontai explains the form that prostitution takes in the bourgeois societies of her era and the behaviours around it in comparison to our days in which prostitution, once condemned by the bourgeois morality as she explains, has now instead become a gigantic industry embraced by such and even promoted as a tool of women’s liberation, once capitalism has expanded to all fields where there is a profit to find.
In conclusion, and while most of the text still stands strong, I think we would greatly benefit from seeing it be revisited and updated by another author that can take the torch from her in order to both include a study of the effects of prostitution on public health through the lenses of modern science as well as a study of the new forms that prostitution has taken in the 103 years that have passed since Kollontai pronounced these words.