Alexandra Kollontai – författare

Alexandra Kollontai—the only woman member of the Bolshevik central committee and the USSR’s first Minister of Social Welfare—is known today as a historic contributor to the international women’s movement, and as one of the first Bolshevik leaders to oppose the growth of the bureaucracy in the young socialist state. Her Selected Writings discuss the social democratic movement before the First World War, the history of the Russian women’s movement, and the debate between “feminist” and “socialist” women; the effects of the war on European socialism; the revolutions; the part played by women in the revolutionary events; the early manifestations of bureaucracy and Kollontai’s role as spokeswoman for the “workers’ opposition”; and morality, sexual politics, the family, and prostitution. It also includes writings from her later life as a Soviet official. Each section is introduced by a commentary in which Alix Holt explains the background and critically sets Kollontai’s unique lifework in its historical and biographical contexts, demonstrating both its necessary limitations and its extraordinary range.

The first full-length English translation of the 1909 book from the revolutionary Russian Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai on the state of the contemporary bourgeois women’s movement and the role of working-class women in the struggle for women’s equality.In this classic text from 1909, Alexandra Kollontai, a leading early figure in the Marxist feminist movement, discusses the history and socioeconomic roots of the struggle for women’s equality. Examining the movement for women’s equality in late 19th century Russia, she discusses how upper-class liberal feminists ignored or patronized working-class women. The interests of upper-class women and their focus on suffrage and philanthropy meant that their organizations and movements could not be reliable allies to women of the working class.Many of the issues that Kollontai touches on in this book remain alive today, as the struggle for gender equality is dominated by liberal bourgeois groups while revolutionary leftists attempt to address intersecting systems of oppression without being co-opted by neoliberal feminism. Kollontai’s argument that the feminist movement needs to be part of broader working class struggles for liberation is as important and powerful today as it was in the early twentieth century.