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thread: Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian Marxist Feminist philosopher who was also an organizer and theorist in revolutionary Russia. She was the only woman member of the Bolshevik central committee and the USSR’s first Minister of Social Welfare.
In 1923, she published "Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth." "Winged Eros" is a Marxist reading of the concept of love, and a critique of bourgeois ideologies of love that treat it as a "private matter" divorced from material conditions.
For Kollontai, love is both a natural and social force. There is no abstract idea of love divorced from its manifestation in time among bodies. In her essay, she gives a historical materialist interpretation of love across different historical epochs (ancient, feudal, capitalist)
Kollontai doesn't approach love and relationships as a matter of ethics between two free consenting beings on equal footing, but with attention to material conditions--the interplay of gender and class in particular.
Kollontai notes that the present concept of love is full of contradictions and variations, including loves without physical components as well as those consisting exclusively of physicality.
Living in revolutionary times, she notes that at the time "everyone walked in the shadow of death," so there "was neither time nor a surplus of inner strength for love's "joys and pains.'" People were having sex and nothing more--wingless eros, for the times didn't allow for more
Winged eros, on the other hand, is the ideal of love-comradeship to be realized as communist society love, and this will surpass "individualist self-sufficiency" that "people in bourgeois culture have attempted to escape through love and marriage."
She calls for three principles to meet the demands of the incoming new proletarian morality: 1) equality in relationships ("an end to masculine eogism"), 2) mutual recognition of the rights of the other, "of the fact that one does not own the heart and soul of the other,"
(for ownership of the other is for Kollontai ultimately "the sense of property, encouraged by bourgeois culture," and 3) comradely sensitivity, the ability to listen and understand ("bourgeois culture demanded this only from the woman," she notes).
Kollontai's is certainly not the only Marxist reading of the concept of love and relationships, but it is striking in its power as well as its freshness, despite being nearly 100 years old now. It comes to mind for me often in discussions of ethics.
Ethics often draws heavily from Kant and abstract universal subjects to take on questions that are germane to relationships: the question of lying, of respecting the other, and responsibility. Kollontai remains important as a Marxist and Feminist corrective to a liberal tradition
