Kerala | Former health minister K.K. Shailaja on why Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai’s The Soviet Woman is particularly relevant today

Kollontai’s views on women’s liberation, a socialist society and socialist family relations need to be studied more in light of the decadence of the present times, says the minister

Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai’s The Soviet Woman, which I read again this year, can help us in our attempts to grapple with the social and political puzzles of our times. The distinction between bourgeois feminism and socialist feminism, as she carefully explains, is more relevant today as we see almost everybody, in the garb of a feminist, fighting off progressive ideals that would bring about a change in society. Her thoughts can strengthen the fight against gender disparity and decadence, provided they are not interpreted in a bourgeois society as promoting free sex.

The only woman to have been elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution in 1917, Kollontai functioned as People’s Commissar for Welfare in the first Soviet government. However, she was not given the importance accorded to male Marxist thinkers and historians. Perhaps the feudal-capitalist system which we live in never really prepared us to accept the progressive thoughts pervading her social analyses, which were mostly misinterpreted. That explains the relevance of her book, published by LeftWord Books in 2017, with a noteworthy introduction by Parvathi Menon.

Kollontai’s views on women’s liberation, a socialist society and socialist family relations need to be studied more in light of the decadence of the present times. Students of politics cannot ignore her work in three areas — socialist concepts about women’s liberation and the pragmatic interventions to realise it; her views on rebuilding society in the wake of the World War; and her studies about family, marriage, love and sex in different social systems.

While bourgeois feminists argue for equal gender rights, including the right to exploit, in a capitalist society, the working class proposes a society sans exploitation where men and women enjoy equal rights. That apart, socialist feminism demands special consideration for childbirth, childcare, and so on.

Kollontai’s interpretation of family, love, marriage, sex and morality should be read in the backdrop of the sexist, exploitative patriarchal characteristics of familial relations in a feudal-capitalist society. We are troubled by news of social evils such as dowry deaths, cruelty by jilted lovers, honour killings and rapes, most of which stem from our society’s skewed view of man-woman relationship. Typically, in a feudal-capitalist society, marriage is based on convenience, not love, and a sexual crisis arises from the exploitative, loveless, unequal partnership between the sexes, leading to ‘possessiveness’ and ‘a sense of ownership’.

In a socialist society, man and woman would strive to express their love not just in kisses and embraces, but also in joint creativity and activity. The task of the proletarian ideology is to educate sexual bonding in the spirit of a comradely relationship.

(As told to S. Anandan)