On Aleksandra Kollontai

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Minnesota Review, Number 20, Spring 1983 (New Series), pp. 93-102 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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 93 spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

On Aleksandra Kollontai

Aleksandra Kollontai's life has the quality of an exemplum for the

feminist theorist of practice.1 What is it to articulate the revolutionary
politics of class struggle with a feminist vision? How does one plan
ideological transformation in the interest of lasting social change? How
should the socialist feminist understand her own place in the sexual text?
These are the questions that are illuminated and obscured by any attempt
to account for her.
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of female suffrage in the US. I heard
the head of the Texas chapter of a national professional women's
association say on the radio: we no longer make a fuss about this day
because we are busy pursuing our career goals.
At the University of California, I have heard a liberal separatist
feminist of considerable charisma argue in front of a largely white mid-
dle class female student audience: the power structure is identical with
men, women must find a way of turning their backs upon them.
National committes on Women in Development concern themselves
with practical statistics about so-called Third World Women. In the
meantime, at a conference on high feminist theory, I have women
elaborately discoursing on feminist practice admit with unembarrassed
impatience that there was no day care center there because the legal re-
quirements would have made it exorbitant, unable to realize that "prac-
tice" should be able to cope with so small a point of law.
These instances give the merest hint of the extreme moments of
bourgeois feminism in the English speaking First World— our world:
sharing the rights to exploit within the capitalist system, ascribing a pure
homogeneity to men as well as to women, supervising the well-being of
female animals elsewhere, interminably undoing the theory-practice op-
position inside the hot-house of theoretical systems.
The field of Marxist feminism is fraught as well: the anger of a Sheila
Rowbotham shading off into theories of co-operative communality, the
reformism of an Eisenstein finding radical possibilities in liberal
feminism, the dialectic between resistance and loyalty which finds refuge
in calling "Marxist" any feminism that is interested in social (rather than
"merely" sexual) justice; among males the coyness of acknowledging the
erotic, or the dismissal of feminism as the worst obstruction to the Left
or as an unexamined fixation on "free love.*2
94 the minnesota review

The workers for reproductive freedom and freedom from rape hold
themselves apart from these debates. To an extent, they have earned the
right to do so. But this allows the exaltation of mothering (sometimes
called "Goddess-worship" by the trade) to flourish in the mainstream.
Kollontai's ghost inhabits all these scenes.
She was born a year after the Paris Commune and died in the middle
of the Cold War. It is a failure of the historical imagination to see the
spirit of the young men and women of that era in Germany and Russia as
over-optimistic or idealistic. Some of the men and nearly all of the
women had two clearly articulated goals: the establishment of interna-
tional socialism, and the liberation of the working woman in socialism.
The dangers were clearly seen: the sentimentalization of a merely na-
tional liberation and the separatism of a bourgeois feminism that saw the
women's cause as class-transcendent and fought for equal rights within a
society in principle unchanged. The hope for the attainment of the first
goal — international socialism — was dashed when the German Party
voted for war credits in 1914: the Party was not going to arouse the Ger-
man working class to declare Civil war on the German bourgeoisie and
military aristocracy by refusing to fight against the workers in England
and France. From that point on, the program of the Communist interna-
tional became much less immediate, much more determined by the split
national contexts. It was not an impractical optimism but a persistence in
the long view that made Kollontai attempt to restore the program of
socialist emancipation.
Kollontai's commitment to revolutionary socialism was such that she
was a Left critic both of bourgeois society and of the construction of
socialism in the USSR. In 1917, she was against Lenin's Brest-Litovsk
treaty with Imperialist Germany. In 1921, she was against the com-
promise with capitalism that was to be the New Economic Program. She
was the chief theorist and risktaking spokeswoman— challenging Lenin
in front of the Comintern— for the Workers' Opposition of 1922, which
questioned the introduction of the managerial class into factories, the in-
troduction of a bureaucracy into the state, and the repression of inner-
party democracy. We know today that these were indeed the factors that
put the Soviet state on a regressive track away from the Bolshevik
teleology by compromising its constitutive practice, sacrificing the means
to an end which was by the same gesture compromised.
The deflection of the second hope— the liberation of the working
woman in socialism— came about through a slow struggle against the in-
grained sexism of Russian society, hardly held back even among the
members of the Communist Party. As I indicate above, Kollontai had
dared to confront the leaders of the Party not merely on what they held
to be the specialized "woman question," but on the grounds of the rela-
tionship between the State and Revolution. Whereas as the head of the
 95 spivak

Zhenotdel (Women's Department with many local branches to bring

non-party women into the Party) she was only held in some suspicion
and generally discouraged as a possible defector into bourgeois feminist
separation, she was directly punished for her intervention in the Party's
general domain in 1922. She was removed from the Central Committee
and was demoted from the directorship of the Zhenotdel. Without her
imaginative and persevering leadership, the Zhenotdel was abolished in
1930.
What is most remarkable about lives such as hers is their understand-
ing of justice as the establishment of a society that will be an adequate
representation of a political narrative— in a version as broad as Kollon-
tai's the narrative is fully psycho-socio-sexual. In terms of her ideal
political narrative, she could read her own impulses of desire and power
only as moments of aberration or contradiction that the narrative must
sublate. There was no place in that austere narrative for the suspicion
that the sexual text inhabited by a powerful, beautiful single woman
graduating into elder stateswomanship is itself a text of victimization. (It
should be mentioned that it remains largely illegible at present as well.
Beatrice Farnsworth can only account for it by implicitly undermining
Kollontai's political convictions: "Kollontai was using social ideology . . .
to mask her individual motives."3 Reversing this opposition, many
Western bourgeois feminists reject Marxism as denying female
sexuality.)
I am suggesting that a reading, by herself, of the text of her life as the
battleground for her own bourgeois sexual heritage and the political vi-
sion of a future could only have split her in the end. In fact her place in
the heterosexual marketplace was part of the politics of exploitation and
domination. Dismissal from the Central committee and the Directorship
of the Zhenotdel were not the only political disgraces that she suffered.
The constant references to her sexuality and to her alliances with younger
men, and finally Pavel Dybenko's turning her in for a younger model
while still asking for her intellectual companionship after five years of an
unregistered marriage were all the more political because she was
ideologically prevented from seeing the as such. (He was then thirty-
four, she fifty-one, and his young mistress nineteen.)
One of the greatest contributions of the Marxist rewriting of the
Hegelian morphology is to respect the empty place of the so-called
World-Historical Subject, instead of securing it for Absolute
Knowledge. It has not been easy to articulate a practice that can live with
such a radical move. In Kollontai's day the efforts to do so resulted in
valorizing the collective rather than the individual. Today that attempt
survives uneasily with the unacknowledged vanguardist heroics of much
Marxism, especially in countries with no political left. The celebration of
spontaneism is another attempt at coping with the undermining of the
96 the minnesota review

Subject. Across the theoretical spectrum there have also been more re-
cent attempts at filling the place of the subject with variations on the
Freudian theme.

The fierce loyalty to the Party that marked the first generation of
Bolsheviks was an effect of this problematization of the Subject. The
Party was the representation of a general will that transcended the
outlines of the individual. The contemporary anti-Communist point of
view that sees the narrative of Communism as necessarily leading to the
Gulag archipelago misses the point here. Faith in the Party as carrier of
the narrative of social justice need not be identical with a disregard for
the individual. In the absence of a deconstructive approach to the situa-
tion of the subject one attitude is inevitably complicit with the other. It is
possible that Kollontai, the only woman among the "heroines of the
revolution" who was deeply ambivalent toward her own constitution as
sexed subject, was also the only one who could fall back most astoun-
dmgly upon loyalty in the Party. She fell back as well upon that other
mainstay for a problematized subject: the nuclear or corporate family
for the female. What a life at the end! Rewriting the account of the early
days of Bolshevism to make Stalin their hero; occupying herself with her
role as a matriarch— rewriting, in other words, the text of "the new
woman" to put her back in the home. Broken as a revolutionary in three
ways: off the committee, off the Zhenotdel, off the sexual circuit. She
never wrote the name of Stalin in her letters, Farnsworth acutely com-
ments; occupied in writing an account of her life since 1922, she was
engaged in securing her own: "Drops of my energy, my thinking, my
struggle, and the example of my life are in this achievement," she wrote
(400).
My point has been that such an end is not necessarily a "destruction"
of her "political self" (382), but one among many scenarios of a commit-
ted Bolshevism that could not problematize or "situate" the subject,
especially the sexed subject, but merely privileged it by denial.
My opening series of instances make clear that the problem of dealing
with class or sex-subject in feminism has not only not been
"solved"— such problems are of course never really solved— but not yet
well enough articulated. It is therefore with a mixture of admiration and
caution that I tabulate below some of Kollontai's efforts at the
ideological constitution of the revolutionary woman:
She approved of the labor conscription laws instituted in the nascent
state at the time of the Civil War with the White Russians. She felt that
they produced a sense of equal usefulness to society in men and women,
husbands and wives.

She was an ardent supporter of collectivized child rearing. Although

she felt that the Socialist state needed children and that abortion was thus
 97 spivak

bourgeois self-indulgence (not morally wrong), she also felt that the
ideologically mystified drudgery of female child-rearing had no connec-
tion with "the maternal instinct."
She opposed the 1 926 Marriage Law which acknowledged unregistered
marriages for purposes of alimony payments. She felt that the
categorization of women in to registered wife/unregistered wife /casual
lover was to define them in terms of their relationship with men, and to
make them supplicants to men by law. She suggested rather a General In-
surance Fund, that would also have the advantage of not alienating the
participants in an extended peasant household, which stood to lose if ac-
tion on a nuclear model were state-subsidized.
In her fiction and writings on sexuality, she made a distinction between
long friendships between men and women and short-term relationships,
just as legitimate, on the basis of physical passion.

It is obvious that these efforts are operated by a continuous view of

economic causality. What is unusual and remains unusual today, is her
insistence that, in women living lives where physical survial itself is at
stake, the mere fulfilment of subsistence needs do not have an absolute
priority. Ideological formation must be attended to right from the start,
and in women it concerns the removal of guilt around their role in
reproduction and the family (170).
Of course the insistence upon determinism and isomorphism is
dangerous. Yet the opposite view, expressed energetically by some
feminists, that the control of pornography is a misguided voluntarist in-
terference with the production of fantasy or true erotic intimacy, is as
contaminated by an unexamined view of psychosexual causality precisely
because it affects to be less so.4 If we examine the details of Kollontai's
tireless work with the Women's Section over the years, we are struck by
her infinite carefulness. To have renounced "social engineering" in an at-
mosphere of indifference in high places would have been an act of
recapitulation. But no spontaneism where the subject must be
ideologically transformed, and no vanguardism where bourgeois
feminism or sexuality lay on the other side. It is in the arena of the pro-
duction of the socialist as Woman that the shifting grounds that by-pass
the Lenin-Kautsky debate can be glimpsed. After the discovery that the
subject is the "effect" of a much larger text, that it can be situated within
this text by the disclosure of its constitutive metalepsis, after the chastened
realization that political narratives are interminable, micrological, and
discontinuous, how to prepare the subject for making judgments?
Kollontai's practical politics can be read within these contemporary ques-
tions.
Her resistence to the nuclear family is not necessarily a refusal to ex-
98 the minnesota review

amine fully the larger question of the parent-child relationship (153-154)

or to ignore the family as "a bulwark of privacy" (159; in itself a highly
class- and race-specific sentiment). It is after all not difficult to ascertain
that the eternal verities about familial virtues that some of the more
romantic among us are sometimes prone to extol have something like a
relationship with the rise of meritocratic individualism in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.5 In insisting upon communal or collective child-
raising, Kollontai ostensibly freed the woman's time for participation in
the social process at large. But it seems to us that she also systematized,
wittingly or unwittingly, the potential of the extended or corporate fami-
ly which is the scene of the constitution of the sexed subject everywhere
outside of the circuit of Oedipus, the Oedipal explanation itself being
perhaps a contingent scenario.
The obvious usefulness of communal childraising has not gone
unremarked. We are, on the one hand, happy to take advantage of
organized child care services when they are developed for the middle
class within the circuit of free enterprise, or to admire collective child
care in contexts of poverty and underprivilege, or when inspired by
disguised apartheid.6 Radical feminists continue to make personalized
experiments in the area. And writers like Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, and
Samuel Delaney project extended families not necessarily tied "by blood"
as places of human strength. (On the other hand, corporate capital has
picked up "janitorial and catering services"— what used to be "domestic
drudgery"— and built up a multi-million dollar business interest.) I am
suggesting that Kollontai's support of collective childrearing should be
read in a broader context. Much of the praise of the family is after all an
unacknowledged paean to legitimacy, as betrayed, for example, by the
words of one of our most gifted young Marxist aestheticians: "If we were
able to recollect our ancestors, then in a moment of shock we might trig-
ger the unpalatable memory trace at a ripe time, blast through the con-
tinuum of history and create the empty space in which the forces of tradi-
tion might congregate to shatter the present. That moment of shock is
socialist revolution."7 We know our ancestors through the tenacity of
fathers, a possible nucleus even in a corporate household. In collectiviz-
ing childrearing, Kollontai was taking a first step in undermining that
tenacity; she was, as Farnsworth astutely observes, attempting to remove
the guilt associated with denying the circuit of fathers.
The military-bureaucratic Stalinist state has been such a figure of ter-
ror in our time that the idea that Kollontai was proposing State-
supervised collective childrearing has given her a totalitarian aura. This is
sometimes excused by ascribing to her the impractical idealism that is im-
puted also to US Bolshevik sympathizers like John Reed and Louise
Bryant. But a more productive way to look at her ideas is to realize that
in the very early days, when Kollontai's work with the Bolsheviks began,
 99 spivak

the Soviet State was not something already in existence, but something to
be put together. And Kollontai herself worked with an idea of that state-
in-construction which pre-dates the Brest-Litovsk treaty and is to be
found in Lenin's State and Revolution, the completion of which Lenin
himself announced to Kollontai in a letter:
From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to
administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have
organised control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish
to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly cor-
rupted by capitalism — from this moment the need for government of any kind begins
to disappear altogether.
Farnsworth indicates carefully how it was the betrayal of the vision of
the new transitional and educational State that Kollontai opposed
vigorously at every step. When she began to realize that the Soviet State
was hopelessly compromised from its blueprint, she found justifications
for a certain relative autonomy for the Women's Section that she should
have earlier condemned as separatism (315 f.). In spite of this, however,
the summary of Stalinism that Farnsworth presents might not have been
identical with Kollontai's assessment of the situation: "Soviet-guided
revolutions in contiguous countries and the annexation of territory to
which Russia laid historical claim" (388).
Communism and capitalism are names of economic systems that entail
a politics— modes of production that entail relations of production. Both
the two systems have international aspirations: Communism so that the
working class can nowhere be exploited; Capitalism so that there can be
an international managerial capitalist bloc (First World) maintaining the
circuit of capital through the exploitation of a proletarian bloc (Third
World). The hopes of a participatory International Communism began
to die in 1914. (Whether it could have involved the Colonies even at the
outset is a different argument.) Little was left of the Internationalist pro-
ject but to support national liberation movements. Kollontai did not live
to see Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. It is conceivable that she
understood Stalin's foreign policy as the shadow of Communism's inter-
national dream. We can, after all, handily call "aid" the necessity for the
international march of socialized capital, obligated to develop the
worder as consumer in a limited way so that its surplus-value can be
realized.
It is equally absurd to assume that the change from pure Bolshevism to
Stalinism was an external accident, as to assume that the crises of capital
are accidents. We think we know today that part of the problem lies in
two different but essentialist views of the human subject presupposed by
the two economic systems in their pure form. In the former, a collective
or pluralized subject that shakily masquerades in the empty place of the
grand Hegelian Subject of Absolute Knowledge. In the latter, a
bicameral subject, motivated either by utility-maximization (consumer)
100 the minnesota review

or profit-maximization (producer), upon the rational expectations of

whose intentions the State formulates its fiscal and monetary policy and
the market makes its decisions. I am here interested not in developing a
critique of the capitalist theory of the subject, but in commenting on
Kollontai's role as a critic of Communism. Her persistence was finally
unproductive because she never wavered from her essentialist view of the
teleological Communist subject; her excellence was that she could see
that the Communist subject had different ideologilcal paths to travel
depending on sex— and that one sex could not bring about the Com-
munist world alone.9
The full implications of the definition of woman as subject-as-object
did finally elude her. To be able to have sex where one wants, and not to
identify good sex with long attachments; to have children who will be
brought up by others. Kollontai wanted a man's sexual prerogatives. But
a man is written into the social text as a legal subject-as-subject. To
polarize the opposition into extremes: when he ages, the lines on his face
express the interiority of a presumed subject; as a woman ages, the
transformations of her body are the impressions of the deteriorations of
an object. As writers like Louise Michel and Emma Goldman knew, the
status of female sexuality as a commodity in the heterosexual
marketplace is fundamentally precarious for this and allied reasons, even
in a revolutionary context. Kollontai lacked here what she possessed
elsewhere, the conviction of a historical differential between men and
women. The questioning of that differential in the realm of sexual ex-
change comes today through militant Lesbianism: within mainstream
heterosexuality, poverty becomes almost completely feminized, a large
proportion of the female poor being women in their late middle age who
have been replaced by younger women as wives.
At a time when political dissent has become committed to necessitarian
narratives, and a typical US debate can claim that "Communism is
fascism with a human face" (Susan Sontag), or, "In every communist
system that has ever existed, terror has been the antistrophe of ideology"
(Leon Wieseltier), we need to attend to voices like Kollontai's that tried
"to operate . . . from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic
resources of subversion from the old structure . . . and ... in a certain
way fall[ing a] prey to its own work."10 1 have suggested that she fell par-
ticularly a prey to essentialism and a determinist view of the collective
subject. If we want to engage with these problems and "rejouer le politi-
que," we might conclude that the "pagan" (the other "race" argument of
Jean-François Lyotard) or the "consumer" (the "class" argument from
Ralph Nader to Antonio Negri) as the resident foreign body that ex-
plodes corporate society has fewer possibilities than the "woman" (the
gender argument)." It is of great importance that Kollontai, deeply im-
plicated in Bolshevik politics, had the sense to see that certain classes of
 101 spivak

women, given their historical preparation, would make better Com-

munists than men (198). In spite of her essentialism, it is this perception
that can open her up for our use. If we read her extensive writings on the
questions of the working-woman and the peasant-woman in Russia
(much still untranslated) in this spirit, it is here that we will be enabled to
read her beyond herself.
l NOTES
The word "feminist" was unacceptable to socialist feminist women because of its iden-
tification with bourgeois feminism.
TTie debate is reflected in Women and Revolution: A Discussion ofthe Unhappy Marriage
ofMarxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981). See also
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing Women's History in History," New Left Review 133
(May-June 1982). A representatively virulent male gesture is to be found in Paul Piccone,
•Narcissism After the Fall," Telos 44 (Summer 1980), 119. One must also take into ac-
count the more recent phenomenon of young male theorists on the Left speaking of
feminism with some seriousness (Isaac Balbus, Marxism and Domination: A Neo-
Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Technological
Liberation [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982]; Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin
Or, Toward a Revolutionary Criticism [London: Verso 1981]; Michael Ryan, Marxism
and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
3 Beatrice
1982]). Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik
Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 334; hereafter cited paren-
thetically in the text. The book is a careful and well-researched biography to which I shall
refer often in what follows. There is unfortunately much duplication with Barbara Evans
Clements's Bolshevik Feminist: The Life ofAleksandra Kollontai (Bloormngton: Indiana
University Press, 1979). The occasional theoretical problems with Farnsworth's analysis
are implicitly stated in the present essay. A few summary complaints: While the pervasive
liberal anticommunism is perphaps unavoidable, Farnsworth might have included
English translations of as yet untranslated titles; she might have indicated translations
available in other Western European languages; perhaps the introductory chapter might
not have made quite so much out of the young Kollontai's romantic revolutionary pas-
sion; and the psychological explanations of Kollontai's conduct sometimes seem banal.
To offset the last, I recommend a reading of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle after one has
laid the biography aside.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Victim Syndrome: A Troubling Turn in Feminism," Pro-
gressive, (June 1982); for a more serious consideration of the problem, see B. Ruby Rich,
•Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World," Village Voice 27, 29 (July 20, 1982). It is precisely
the question of ideological formation that these women ignore.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage: In England ¡500-1800 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1977).
Tor the apartheid in the founding principle of kibbutzim, see Edward W. Said, The
Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1981), p. 21. Farnsworth
quotes Bruno Bettelheim, The Children ofthe Dream (New York: Avon, 1977), citing the
Kibbutzim as successful examples of the experiments suggested by Kollontai. The Cir-
cumstances seem to us to be so different as to make the comparison uncritical.
Eagleton, Benjamin, op. cit., p. 78.
'v.I.Lenin, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), vol. 25, p. 474
For the presentation of the argument theoretically and at length see Mary O'Brien, The
Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981).
"Communism and the Left," The Nation (February 27,1982), 231; "Ideas in Season,"
Partisan Review 49, 3 (1982); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 25.
102 the minnesota review

"Lyotard, Instructions Païennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977); Rudiments paiens (Paris: Union
général d'éditions, 1978) Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, tr. Harry Cleaver et al.,
[forthcoming]. I develop this argument in my current work.

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