Thursday, October 31, 2013

Alexandra Kollontai: Class and women’s oppression

Working with other leading female Bolsheviks, like Inessa Amand, Kollontai founded the Zhenotdel (or "Women's Department") in 1919. They introduced contraception, abortion and divorce on demand, and equal rights for both partners in a marriage. They turned into communal duties all the chores that had bound women to the home. Suddenly Russia was decades ahead of every other nation in terms of social welfare. - 

See more at: http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/theory/129-marxist-history/5366-alexandra-kollontai-class-and-womens-oppression#sthash.MveouJQl.dpuf

for Kollantai and legalization of homosexuality, see here 

On the other hand. a greater fluidity in relationships between the sexes coincides with and is even the indirect result of one of the basic tasks of the working class. The rejection of the element of “submission” in marriage is going to destroy the last artificial ties of the bourgeois family. This act of “submission” on the part of one member of the working class to another, in the same way as the sense of possessiveness in relationships, has a harmful effect on the proletarian psyche. 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/sex-class-struggle.htm

Engels, often critical of the Utopian Socialists, did address what human relationships would be like when capitalism was overthrown – but not with a blueprint. He wrote in Origin of the Family:
“What we can conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any considerations other than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover for fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual – and that will be the end of it.”[12]
By the late 1890s, as the homosexual rights movement was growing in strength, both Marx and Engels were dead. But the parties which had formed, based on Marxism, were taking up the cause of homosexual rights.

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/gayleft/marxismandhomsexuality.htm

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