Alexandra Kollontai was a revolutionary socialist and a feminist. In this excerpt, she explains the theoretical links between these two strands of her life. One part of her argument is summed up in the following line:
Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. . . . In other words, women can become truly free and equal only in a world organized along new social and productive lines.
This is an early statement of what would become Marxist feminism. Kollontai (and scholars much later) saw the plight of the working class and the subjugation of women as inextricably connected. She argues in the pamphlet that the efforts of what she calls "bourgeois" suffragettes were incomplete. Participation in politics alone would not bring about equality. Much of the first half of the pamphlet is devoted to tracing the connections between the oppression of women and the working classes with the emergence of capitalism. While she says that gains made in the struggle for political rights are laudable, she points out that the interests of bourgeois women are antithetical to those of working-class women.
Kollontai goes on to argue that the legal structures that undergird the bourgeois family are a source of oppression for women and again argues, without fully explaining, that the roots of this oppression can be found in the "inanimate and mighty forces of production." Struggles to reform these institutions will not liberate working-class women. She does not argue that reforming women's legal, political, and personal lives is completely futile, she argues that these reforms will not fully emancipate working-class women. She hoped that women would gain full equality through the destruction of the capitalist order, which formed the superstructure upon which sexist institutions were built.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Summarize the following primary source to offer historical understanding of what Kollontai believed and hoped to gain. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm
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