kollontaie

1. Alexandra Kollontai
Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to
Working Youth

2. Understanding her thoughts regarding Women
• She tells women that they are capable of a new
freedom, beautiful and unexampled.
• To the women of Russia: “Cast off your chains! Do
not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children.
Break these old ties, the state is your home, the
world is your country”.
• women those who extolls are the women of the
factories and the fields; women who sweep the
streets, who scrub, who carry heavy burdens, who
plow and weave and drudge

3. Understanding her thoughts regarding Women
• “We must build a new society in which women are
not expected to drudge all day in kitchens. We must
have, in Russia, community restaurants, central
kitchens, central laundries — institutions which leave
the working woman free to devote her evenings to
instructive reading or recreation. …
• Only by breaking the domestic yoke will we give
women a chance to live a richer, happier and more
complete life.”
• Social suppression of women coincided with the
creation of private property

4. Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to
Working Youth
• What place the proletariat ideology provides
to love?
• Civil War in Russia where two ideologies
(proletariat and bourgeois) two cultures do
battle.
• A new attitude to life art, living can be
observed.
• An inner revolution to outlook, emotions and
inner world of the working people.

5. The context in which she wrote the letter
• New attitude to life and rules of living (morality)
can be observed.
• The arrangement of sexual relationship is one
aspect of these rule of living
• The question of relationship between the sexes is
as old as the humanity society itself.
• In Russia over the recent years of the civil war
there has been little interest of working class
towards love.

6. Russia under Civil War
• Shadow of death and uncertainty about the victory
of revolutionary and counter revolutionary forces
• All the preserved social and psychological energy
directed towards most urgent historical moment.
• Men and women came together and parted easily,
they came together without much commitment and
parted without tears or regret.
• Prostitutions disappeared and partnership existed
without no obligation
• This development frightened some but it was
inevitable.

7. The state of people and Love
• Wingless eros : consumes less inner strengths, doesn’t
make one suffer from sleepless nights, does not
entangle rational working of mind
• Winged Eros : Woven of delicate strands of every kind
of relationship, consists of love’s “joys and pains”
• The fighting class could not have fallen under power of
winged eros, when the clarion call for the revolution
sounds
• After the revolution gets over the tender winged eros
erupts and people no more look for momentous
satisfaction rather indulge in love affairs.
• Unlike bourgeois it is time to openly declare that love
is not natural factor a biological force, but also a social
factor

8. The state of people and History of Love
• Love posses a uniting element which is valuable to
the collective and its not merely a private affairs
• Kinship community,
• Under feudalism love and marriage were kept
separate by feudal ideology where as it was seen as
united by the bourgeois class.
• End of 15th
century propagation of love for flesh and
soul. The reformers challenged and criticised celibacy
of clergy and made fun of the ‘spiritual love’ .
• Reformation and recognition of bodily need
• In a peasant family, economy and family play a great
role in arrangement of marriage.

9. • The bourgeois family, looses its productivity role and
remains a consumer unit. Its works towards
preservation of the accumulated economy.
• Love as the basis of the marriage and love outside
marriage is considered as immoral
• Economic reasons is to prevent distribution of capital
between the illegitimate children
• The ideal was the married couple working together
to improve welfare and increase the wealth of the
family. (for the sake of their families cause
bankruptcy of the fellow share holders
The state of people and History of Love

10. History of Love and Comrade Love
• Love constantly escaped from the narrow
framework of legal marriage into free relationship
and adultery, condemned yet practised.
• Economic considerations and cooperation among
members-joint interest of accumulation of wealth
• The new communist society is built on the basis of
the comradeship and solidarity.
• For a social system to be build on cooperation, it is
essential that people should be capable of love
• Warm emotions can move from individual
relationship to collective as there is a need to
understand the distress and need of the other

11. Comrade Love
• Healthy sexual need has been turned by monstrous
social and economic relationship particularly of
capitalism
• Love is intricately woven from friendship, passion,
maternal tenderness, infatuation, mutual
compatibility, sympathy, admiration, familiarity and
many other shades of emotion.
• Difficult to distinguish where the physical attraction
and emotional warmth are fused.
• Only the ideology and life style of the new labouring
class can unravel this complex problem of emotions

12. Comrade Love
• One man going with so many women or vice versa
(fear of venereal disease) at least do not give rise to
emotional drama.
• These drama and conflict arise only where various
shades and manifestations of love are present.
• A woman feel close to a man whose ideas, hopes and
aspirations match her own
• Proletariat ideology can not accept the
exclusiveness and all-embracing love. It channelize
the emotions, which is advantageous to class during
the struggle for and construction of the communist
society.

13. Comrade Love
• Although it appears that the working class ideology is
trying to remove all kind of tender relations between
the sexes.
• The hypocritical morality of the bourgeois culture
• The ideology of working class does not place any
formal limits on love
• The proletariat ideology will persecute the wingless
eros in a much more severe way than bourgeois
morality
• It involves excess physical exhaustion which lowers
the resource energy

14. Comrade Love
• Bourgeois ideology demanded that only a person is
supposed to express such relationship only to her
partner
• The aim of the preliterate ideology is to develop
such relationship not only in relation to the chosen
but also in relation to all members of the collective.
• “These emotions facilitate the development and
strengthening of the comradeship”.
• The comrade relationship recognises all the rights
and integrity of the partners.
• “…a steadfast mutual support and sensitive
sympathy and responsiveness to other’s need.

15. • In a socialist society “the sympathetic tie” between
all the members will have grown and strengthened,
love potential would have increased,
• ‘Collectivism of the spirit then then can defeat the
individualist self sufficiency and “the cold of inner
loneliness”……through love and marriage will
disappear’.
• Many threads bringing men and women into close
emotional and intellectual contact will develop and
feelings will emerge from private to public.
• Inequality between sexes and dependence of women
on men will disappear.
• In the new society eros will occupy a respectable
place.

16. • Stronger the emotional and the intellectual bonds of
the humanity, less the room for love in present sense
of the term.
• The eros will be a transformed eros- focusing
collective need, benefit etc.
• New proletarian morality must confirm to three basic
principles: 1). Equality in relationship 2). Mutual
recognition of the rights of others of the fact that
one does not own the heart and the soul of the
other.
• Comrade sensitivity; the ability to listen the inner
working of the loved person (bourgeois culture
demanded only from the woman).
• It develops the class morality

17. Criticism: P. Vinogradskya
• Youths are supposed to have a clear cut aim towards
the revolution as there was lot more road to cover
• Even within the collective
• There are major concerns like low want, poverty, low
wage,
• Thousands of youth lack food, clothing, and not
enough text books.
• A large number of people suffer from TB and
malnutrition.
• Diversities based on personal choice, rather than
providing a sociologically correct and class based
answer.

18. Criticism: P. Vinogradskya
• Marx’s inclination was to follow monogamy and tried
to make the monogamous marriage a dogma and
norm by advancing medical and social arguments.
• Many faceted love if followed by youths would
result in increase of family, the addition of new
children, and do not know what to do with those.
• The state often raise kids in the nightmare condition.