John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Kollontai and Armand’s efforts to free Russian women from social and domestic servitude ultimately foundered on the rock of sexism. Kollontai, especially, laid herself open to attack by her forthright challenge to patriarchal sexual attitudes with which many Bolshevik men felt comfortable (Lenin, although he endorsed Zhendotel’s social reforms such as the provision of communal kitchens and laundries, was for his entire life looked after by his mother, sister and wife, with no domestic concern allowed to bother him). Kollontai was far ahead of most of the Bolshevik Party in rejecting conventional marriage and championing free sexual partnerships based on love and respect. She attracted fierce criticism not just for the policies she advocated and the legislation on divorce, abortion and marriage, but for her forays into imaginative fiction and her speculative rhapsodies on the perfect sexual union. In particular, her much misunderstood and misquoted concept of “winged eros” incensed the puritans of the left.

In “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth” (1923), Kollontai laid out two contrasting concepts of sexual relations: one based on instant gratification and one on what was called “sex-love”. The concept of “winged eros” was not a charter for mindless hedonism. On the contrary it advocated an ideal fusion of the sexual, emotional and intellectual. It was also a union of two people who were not simply self-obsessed but who understood the greater needs of the new communist society and worked to better it. It was the opposite of “wingless eros”, which was simple sexual self-indulgence. “The unadorned sexual drive is easily aroused but it is soon spent”, Kollontai wrote.

Thus ‘wingless eros’ consumes less inner strength than ‘winged eros’, whose love is woven of delicate strands of every kind of emotion. Wingless eros does not make one suffer from sleepless nights, does not sap one’s will, and does not entangle the rational workings of the mind. 14

Kollontai’s great sin was believing that winged eros–the emotional-erotic union she idealised–need not occur in a conventional marriage or a permanent relationship. There could be wingless eros inside marriage (e.g. the stereotype of the loveless bourgeois union with the husband taking prostitutes on the side) and winged eros outside of it. Worse, although she did not say so explicitly, the concept of “multifaceted love” implied that as long as sex-love was honest and experienced by good communists with a social conscience, it could fluctuate across genders and from partnership to partnership.

In response to the new divorce laws, especially after the introduction of “registered divorce” in 1926, working-class couples in the cities divorced and remarried in great numbers and frequency. The decriminalisation of the old Criminal Code had also produced, at least in Petrograd and Moscow, a space for gays and lesbians to come out. Some Bolsheviks, such as Kollontai and Zetkin, even occasionally discussed the subject. “Proletarian ideology”, wrote Kollontai, “cannot accept exclusiveness and ‘all-embracing love’. The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation at the many forms and facets of ‘winged eros’”. If only indirectly, it was a shocking challenge to patriarchal authority and hetero-normativity.

Kollontai put the sexual morality taught by the old church and its feudal offshoots, including the folderol of “courtly love”, under a harsh spotlight. She wrote witheringly,

The knight who would not be parted from the emblem of the lady of his heart, who composed poetry in her honour and risked his life to win her smile would rape a girl of the urban classes without a second thought, or order his steward to bring a beautiful peasant for his pleasure. 15

In the new capitalist order it was necessary that capital be concentrated in bourgeois marriages to make inheritance easier, and that the working class, although without capital, perpetuate itself as a labour force. The most efficient machine to do this was the family. Love in families existed, of course, but it was not required , and in any case that was where it was meant to stay. A socialist revolution would free it. Kollontai’s 1923 essay, and her earlier Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations (1921), fell victim not only to their own heterodox daring but to the decline of Kollontai’s star within the Bolshevik Party after 1921 following her support for the Workers’ Opposition. In all respects, she was out of time.

Despite historic legislative victories (the vote, equal pay, abortion) and the provision of contraceptives allowing women to control the reproductive cycle, the challenges facing modern feminism are surprisingly little altered from the 1920s. The same core problems remain, especially the massively unequal division of domestic labour and childcare and its effect on professional and career status. The glass ceiling is unbroken, with most large public and private organisations exhibiting a pyramid structure for female employees–wide at the base, narrowing to a tip of almost none at the top. The media and fashion industries, the acme of professional middle-class careers, are arguably more sexist and misogynist than working-class occupations like bus driver or street cleaner. Fashion and lifestyle magazines impose a ridiculous “ideal” of emaciation on the psychology of their readers and the bodies of their models. Women working full-time earn 15% less than men, increasing to 18% for older women. Two-thirds of low-paid workers are women. In the UK the gender pay gap, for the first time in decades, is now widening, not diminishing.

This rests on systemic social inequality and the disinclination of mainstream political parties to seriously address it. Women perform 66% of the world’s work, produce 50% of the food, earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property. And then there is the final and defining characteristic of all sexism past and present: male violence against women. 89% of domestic-violence victims in the UK are women, and two women a week are killed by a male partner or former partner. In the UK approximately 100,000 women are raped each year, yet just 6% of reported rapes end in a conviction. 16

The first wave of feminism in the early decades of the 20th century secured basic legal and property rights. The second wave, developed from the 1960s to the 1980s, focused on deeper structures of social, cultural and sexual oppression. In seminal works such as The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Gyn/Ecology (1979) and Pornography (1981), American feminists Shulamith Firestone, Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin challenged the sexist psychology, imagery, language and cultural norms that ensured women, regardless of their nominal legal rights, remained what Simone de Beauvoir labeled the “Other”, i.e secondary and external to the default option of social reality–the white, straight, middle-class male. They sought not simply new laws but a new consciousness, a liberation from objectification and male oppression in all its forms.

The achievements of second-wave feminism–recognition of widespread domestic violence, rape and child abuse; new legal protections, including the provision by local authorities of shelters for abused wives and children; sexual equality and harassment policies in the workplace; feminist history and womens’ studies programmes–were real, essential and historic. But they fell victim to their success, with some prominent feminists lost in fantasy projects for a new language for women (Daly) and a female-only independent homeland (Dworkin) that meant absolutely nothing to most working women. Thus distracted, the partial advances made by women in the 1970s and 1980s were vulnerable to a sexist “backlash”, which duly arrived on the back of Thatcher and Reagan’s neoliberal counter-revolution. Lad Culture followed like a wolf at its heels.