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Alexandra Kollontai was born 100 years ago this March. She played an important part in the international revolutionary movement at the beginning of the century: large crowds in the USA, Germany, England, and the Scandinavian countries came to her meetings. She worked in close contact with Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, the Liebknechts and was considered by the Bolshevik Party their authority on the problem of Finland and by European socialists as one of the main writers on the "woman question".
During the first years of the Russian revolution she was, because of her association with the Workers Opposition" which championed the power of the trade unions, relegated to diplomatic work; and the exile that had begun in 1908 under the Tsar continued almost without interruption until her retirement in 1945.
Both within the Soviet Union and in Europe she was forgotten or mentioned in a couple of lines either as the woman revolutionary-beautiful, charming. and always impeccably dressed. or as the supposed advocate of "free love and the idea that sex should be as easy as drinking a glass of water.
In the present situation of revolutionary struggle when all categories of oppressed people are finding a voice. Kollontai's insistence on the right of every person to control his or her own life should be heard and heeded. Her analysis of women's position under capitalism and of the struggle by which women can achieve liberation is already recognised as relevant.
For many of the problems that concerned Kollontai and the women's movement of which she was part are those which we face today.
Like most women who become involved in the contemporary movement, Kollontai was a member of the privileged classes. Her father was a general and she was brought up in comfort and given the education befitting her status. It was through a realisation of her personal oppression, of the inferior status offered women in society, that she was drawn to politics. Dissatisfied with the life of an engineer's wife and wanting independence and education, she left her husband to study in Zurich.
It became clear to her that the Marxists, with whom she was associated from this time on, were paying too little attention both in their theory and in their activities to the problem of women. They were prepared to pay lip service to an analysis of society that showed women's inferior status to be the result of her exploitation, but were, in the main, content to reason that there could be little improvement under a capitalist system. All would be won when a socialist society was established. Kollontai repeated again and again that the question of women's place was fundamental in the fight for socialism and that its discussion could not be waved away as "diverting from the class struggle" Neither was it sufficient to point with vague hopefulness to the increased introduction of women into the labour force. This process could not be appreciated except in the context of a woman's life as a whole. This meant an understanding of the origins and workings of the family.
Kollontai argued that in early societies women, because of their biological make-up, had been more often left by the hearth to cook and carry out the less arduous and usually subordinate tasks in production With the rise of property relations and the definition of people by their accumulation of property, women, who were at a disadvantage in this game, came to be seen as inferior.
The smallest social unit of society, the family, was now also the primary economic unit. Women concerned themselves with the internal affairs of the family; their status outside was determined by their position within the family, and this gave them little opportunity to become involved in matters that reached beyond the home walls.
The family is thus the social unit within which a woman experiences her life, and which expresses and reinforces the repressive nature of society. Women must therefore come to understand that the family is not a sacred unchangeable institution but one that adapts to the prevailing economic conditions. Then she will see how family and society are changing about her and how she can best act to make the world a better place for all people to live in.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY Written in 1920 for working-class women in post-revolutionary Russia, this agitational pamphlet by Alexandra Kollontai, Minister of Social Welfare in the first Bolshevik government, gives a vivid account of the origin of International Women's Day and the militancy of the mass working women's movements on the eve of the First World War, leading on March 8th 1917 to the Petrograd women's demonstration which sparked off the Russian revolution. Confronted with this, the European bourgeois governments attempted to integrate women into bourgeois parliamentary politics -they offered them the vote. Now, as then, our answer should bes "Mr. Bourgeois, sir-it is too late!' First translation into English by Alix Holt; a Socialist Woman Special produced by the North London Socialist Wornan Group Price 5p (+ 3p postage) from 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1.
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HER LIFE