Rebel's Guide To Alexandra Kollontai , livre ebook

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Alexandra Kollontai was a revolutionary socialist who devoted her life to the fight for women's liberation and human freedom. She played a prominent role in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Kollontai located the struggle for the liberation of women at the centre of the fight for socialism. A committed internationalist, she was one of a number of socialist women who launched International Working Women's Day in1910 to celebrate and unite the struggle of women workers across the globe. Kollontai became a leading member of the revolutionary party. At a time when most countries denied women the right to vote, she became the Commissar (Minister) of Social Welfare in the first Bolshevik government. This short introduction to Kollontai's life argues that her revolutionary ideas and activism contain vital lessons for the struggle for socialism and women's liberation today.

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Activism

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Publié par	Bookmarks
Date de parution	29 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912926169
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Sally Campbell and Colm Bryce for their hard work, support and feedback. Also thanks to Cathy Porter for taking time to meet and discuss Kollontai, and for her supportive comments. Thanks to Simon Guy for help with the design of the book and to Sarah Bates, Amy Leather, Nadia Sayed and Helen Blair for their useful comments and to many more people who helped with discussion and insight. Special thanks to Tom Kay for his continuous encouragement, love and patience; and to my mom, Elise Midelfort, whose memory inspires me daily.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Davis is a primary school music teacher and union activist in east London. She is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

COVER IMAGE: Alexandra Kollontai, circa 1920.
INSIDE FRONT: Kollontai surrounded by Muslim women, thought to have been taken at the Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920. INSIDE BACK: The Russian women s naval unit in the summer of 1917, between the two revolutions that shook Russia that year. Photograph by Yakov Steinberg.
Published by Bookmarks Publications 2019
Copyright Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE
ISBN print edition: 978-1-912926-14-5
ISBN Kindle: 978-1-912926-15-2
ISBN ePub: 978-1-912926-16-9
ISBN PDF: 978-1-912926-17-6
Series design by Noel Douglas
Typeset by Bookmarks Publications
Printed by Halstan
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
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A Rebel s Guide to Eleanor Marx by Siobhan Brown
A Rebel s Guide to Rosa Luxemburg by Sally Campbell
A Rebel s Guide to Gramsci by Chris Bambery
A Rebel s Guide to Trotsky by Esme Choonara
A Rebel s Guide to Marx by Mike Gonzalez
A Rebel s Guide to Lenin by Ian Birchall
A Rebel s Guide to Malcolm X by Antony Hamilton
A Rebel s Guide to Martin Luther King by Yuri Prasad
Sexism and the System: A Rebel s Guide to Women s Liberation by Judith Orr
Available from Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE
www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk | 020 7637 1848
1: WHO WAS ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI?
A lexandra Kollontai was a revolutionary socialist who devoted her life to pursuing women s liberation and human freedom. She was one of the leading fighters during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Kollontai located the struggle for the liberation of women at the centre of the fight for socialism.
Kollontai lived through a period of history marked by the bloodshed and barbarism of the First World War, and was a fierce opponent of imperialist war. She called for the unity of the working class and oppressed of all nations against their warmongering rulers. A committed internationalist, she was one of a number of socialist women who launched International Working Women s Day in 1910 to celebrate and unite the struggles of women workers across the globe.
Kollontai was a leading member of the revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks, that helped to achieve the immense victory of the working class in the Russian Revolution of 1917. At a time when most countries still denied women the right to vote, she took on the role of Commissar (minister) of Social Welfare in the first Bolshevik government.
Kollontai wrote extensively about sexual and personal relationships and their connection to the struggle for human freedom.
The tragic fate of the 1917 Revolution and the horrifying legacy of Stalinism, which reversed all of the social progress of the revolution, dissuaded generations of activists from looking to socialism as the way to fight for women s liberation.
There is a battle for Kollontai s legacy. Some claim she was simply a feminist who saw men as responsible for women s oppression and thought women should organise separately from men. Others see her as an early advocate of more recent ideas such as intersectionality or privilege theory. While Kollontai s vision of liberation shared many of the same goals as proponents of these ideas, ultimately she was a Marxist and a revolutionary.
Kollontai understood sexism as a result of class society. Women s liberation was bound to the struggle of ordinary people against capitalism.
Today, economic crisis, racism, war and climate catastrophe underline the fact that capitalism isn t working. Far from capitalism delivering liberation for women, sexism is structured into every part of how the system works, from boardrooms to classrooms.
At the same time, we see the continued resistance of women and men to the sexism in the system. Inspiring strikes and movements by women workers around the globe have been at the forefront of this resistance. The need for revolutionary change is as urgent now as it was in 1917. It is for this reason that Kollontai s activism and writings speak to us today.
2: HOW KOLLONTAI BECAME A REVOLUTIONARY
K ollontai was born in St Petersburg in 1872, when Russia was still ruled by a Tsar (emperor) from the Romanov dynasty. Her family was aristocratic, yet relatively progressive. Her father was an army general and her mother was the child of a Finnish peasant who had become wealthy through trading in timber. Kollontai had a comfortable childhood compared to the poverty that the vast majority of Russians, 80 percent of whom were peasants, experienced.
She described herself as the youngest, the most spoiled, and the most coddled member of the family (Autobiography, 1926). Despite her comfortable upbringing, her parents encouraged her to be hard working.
She recalled that from a young age, I criticised the injustice of adults and I experienced as a blatant contradiction the fact that everything was offered to me whereas so much was denied to the other children (Autobiography).
Kollontai grew up in a time when Russia was only just beginning to develop industry. Industrialisation happened at an extraordinary rate. In feudal Russia peasants, also known as serfs, had no freedom and were tied to the particular piece of land they worked. The abolition of serfdom by Tsar Alexander II in 1861 broke those ties and opened the way for industrial capitalism. Millions of peasants, including large numbers of women, were forced from field to factory. This fundamentally changed the experience of working life.
Conditions in the factories were horrifying. Women workers had it the worst, often working 14 hour days, earning as little as one fifth of the wages of their male counterparts. They routinely faced sexual harassment and even rape by managers. Poverty wages meant that many women had to turn to prostitution, for which a state license was obtainable.
Peasant women continued to face terrible conditions. Peasant families were fined if their daughters weren t married by the age of 17. Young wives were often expected to have sex with their fathers-in-law. The rule of the Russian Orthodox Church made divorce almost impossible for the poor.
Kollontai s parents rejected much of the sexism of the time, encouraging education for their daughters, but they also expected their daughters to marry well . Kollontai was horrified when they pushed her older sister at the age of 19 into marrying a wealthier man who was nearly 70. I revolted against this marriage of convenience, this marriage for money and wanted to marry only for love, out of a great passion (Autobiography).
When she chose Vladimir Kollontai, an engineer, as her lover, her parents were not impressed and they organised a trip across Europe in the hope of distracting her. In a Parisian bookshop she came across a copy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels s The Communist Manifesto and Engels s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Marx had been an active participant in the 1848-50 German Revolution. Both he and Engels had been leaders of the first International Working Men s Association (IWMA), which united workers internationally against exploitation and for the liberation of the oppressed.
Engels located the origins of women s oppression in the development of class societies. Capitalism-the latest form of class society-reinforced and profited from women s oppression through women s role in the family, their exploitation in the workplace and their lack of property rights. Reading Marx and Engels opened Kollontai s eyes to a vision of a liberated, classless society.
Upon returning to Russia, she convinced her parents to approve her marriage to Vladimir Kollontai. However, married life, and motherhood soon after, did not bring the freedom that Kollontai had hoped for. She recalled, I still loved my husband, but the happy life of a housewife and spouse became for me a cage (Autobiography).
In 1894 something changed. Tsar Nicholas II led a wholesale assault on the working class, provoking an outburst of strikes and protests. Kollontai was inspired by the strikes, including the 2,000 women workers who struck at St Petersburg s Laferme Cigarette Factory. She began to work with experienced women revolutionaries like Nadezhda Krupskaya, whose partner was the leading Russian Marxist, Lenin. They taught evening classes for workers, raised money for strikes and smuggled illegal pamphlets.
Her revolutionary activity was creating tensions in her marriage. Vladimir took her to a factory to show her how he was working to improve the ventilation. But Kollontai was horrified by what she saw. The 12,000 workers endured 18-hour days, seven days a week, in stifling factory rooms polluted by textile fibres. Many would develop tuberculosis and die by the age of 30. Far from being reassured, she left the factory even more convinced of the need for a revolutionary struggle of workers against the system. I could not lead a happy, peaceful life when the working population was so terribly enslaved. I simply had to join this movement (Autobiography).
In 1896, Russia s first mass strike wave broke out across the textile mills of St Petersburg. Women, 40 percent of the workforce, were leaders in the strikes. Kollontai recalled, It was indeed wonderful that the politically na ve factory girl, hopeles