“Women, Sex, and Freedom: World communism with Kollontai and Sankara” is the second instalment of “Materialities of Communist Freedom,” a series of considerations written by Jodi Dean for Communis. It can be read in Spanish in “Las mujeres, el sexo y la libertad. Comunismo mundial con Kollontai y Sankara.” Read also on Communis “Freedom for Marx, Freedom for Us,” the first instalment of the series.

“Historical materialist analysis suggests that the contemporary focus on the self may be symptomatic of the absence of organizing and mediating structures that make political action seem worthwhile and possible. Preoccupations with personal relationships point to the diminishing space of the political, its devolution into contributions to social media and actions as photo ops that deliver scooby snacks of purpose even as they entrap us in systems of exploitation and predation. All of the ‘change begins with me’ injunctions, all the minute introspections of feeling and motivation, are defeat put into practice, habituation to the disavowal of revolution.”

— Jodi Dean

 World communism with Kollontai and Sankara

 

Introduction

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels says that historical materialism views the production and reproduction of immediate life as the determining factor in history. How do people arrange the production of what they need to subsist and how do they arrange the production of human beings, “the propagation of the species?” What is their relation to food and land, air and water and how are these metabolized in social reproduction? Humans producing and reproducing themselves and their lives in common is the starting premise of historical materialism. Production and reproduction are constitutively intertwined, each implicated in the other. How they are arranged is neither fixed nor natural. They change and can be changed.

This premise is also the basis of world communism. The struggles of oppressed people involve their relationship to land and work, to the conditions of production and reproduction in which they find themselves. These are conditions we don’t choose but nevertheless collectively impact. Arrangements, desires, and limits that shape our individual lives are configured within a world system of combined and uneven production and reproduction. Our sense of what is possible for us arises out of and within this world. Notice the radicality of the premise: what we take to be the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives are species-level practices and arrangements. Acts and attachments, living with and realizing desires, are instances of the propagation of the species.

Persisting under capitalism in an imperialist epoch — in a grossly unequal, interconnected, and over-heating world — we confront how reproducing some ways of living diminishes, cheapens, and shortens human and nonhuman life. The capitalists’ state protects these ways of living, its military, police, and ideological apparatuses securing the conditions that enrich and empower the few, while immiserating and incarcerating the many. As Lenin argues, democracy is “curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority”[1]. Suppression of the majority “calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor”. The bourgeois democratic freedom of the few is inseparable from violence.

The initial phase of the transition from capitalism to communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, also requires a state in order to suppress the exploiters. This transitional state won’t be so violent and elaborate as the capitalist state since oppressing the few is a far simpler task than oppressing the many. Communism, though, will bring about real freedom, changing people’s habits so that there is no longer a need for the state. People won’t need to be protected from exploiters because exploitation will have been abolished. People won’t need to be protected from petty crimes because the immiseration that incites them will have vanished. Lenin explains: “people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.”[2]

Meant as an inspiring reminder of communism’s horizon in the withering away of the state, Lenin’s words should give us pause. Haven’t the elementary rules of social intercourse been anchored in raced and gendered hierarchy? In the patriarchal family with its slaves and servants? Aren’t the “ancient rules” injunctions to respect elders, authorities, natural superiors by sex and blood? Something is missing in Lenin’s appeal to centuries-old rules of social intercourse, something crucial for freedom (as he acknowledges elsewhere).

Alexandra Kollontai, writing in the early years of the Soviet Union, and Thomas Sankara, writing in the early 1980s in Burkina Faso, respond to these concerns as they address how the new society their revolutions are building will improve conditions for women, children, and families. In both countries, over 90% of women were illiterate, the vast majority were poor, and nearly all were completely subordinated to their husbands. In their attunement to the centrality of women, sex, and reproduction, Kollontai and Sankara exemplify the world communist perspective on liberation: no liberation without women’s liberation. They mark the ways that personal relationships, specifically intimate and family relationships, impact class struggle. Ending capitalism and imperialism can’t overlook women’s liberation. It requires it.

In this consideration, I read Kollontai and Sankara to draw out the historical materialist approach to the family, the world communist vision of emancipation, and the tactical implications of women’s liberation in the political struggle against capitalism and imperialism.

 

Sex politics

The assault on the freedom of women and LGBTQ people is a key front in the contemporary rise of the far Right. Rather than fighting on these fronts, critics across the Left either claim that communists ignore sex, gender, and the family or that we have become too woke and that’s all we talk about when we should be attending to the serious plight of white male workers and the lonely frustration of young men that pushes them to the right. The fact is that the woman question has long been an issue in world communism. Revolutionary change has always included changes at the level of consciousness, interpersonal relationships, and the family. Marx and Engels set out this line of struggle already in The Communist Manifesto as they criticized the bourgeois family and the sexual hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie saying, oh you charge us with wanting to abolish the family when you’ve already done it?

Across media, activist, and academic cultures, speaking from experience trumps speaking from analysis. Personal life appears more absorbing than anti-imperialist politics. Historical materialist method makes us consider why. Kollontai associates the longing for a “soul mate” with the separation and loneliness of class society. Men become overly invested in eros as compensation for the loss of connection and pressure of competition[3]. Historical materialist analysis suggests that the contemporary focus on the self may be symptomatic of the absence of organizing and mediating structures that make political action seem worthwhile and possible. Preoccupations with personal relationships point to the diminishing space of the political, its devolution into contributions to social media and actions as photo ops that deliver scooby snacks of purpose even as they entrap us in systems of exploitation and predation. All of the “change begins with me” injunctions, all the minute introspections of feeling and motivation, are defeat put into practice, habituation to the disavowal of revolution.

Liberation is a collective project, so how far does it go? Is it for all of life? World communism rejects liberalism and republicanism because they present dictatorship, oppression, and exploitation as if they were freedom. This comes out with particular force in critiques of imperialism. Neocolonies may be the result of a successful national liberation struggle, but they are still deprived of the freedom to make their own history. World communism’s approach to the woman question further demonstrates its expanded approach to freedom, how it extends into intimate relations and requires personal transformation. One can imagine — in fact, we don’t need to imagine, our world provides multiple examples — countries with highly developed production and repressive practices of social reproduction. World communism, in contrast, seeks to expands freedom everywhere. Recall from The German Ideology: “Free activity for the Communists is the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all abilities of the whole person.”[4] The historical materialist method emphasizes changes at the level of family and relationships and the economic conditions for these changes.

Since the defeat of the Soviet Union and the workers’ movement more broadly, popular struggles have organized less around class than around sex, race, sexuality, ability, and other aspects of ascribed identity. Even before that, already in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, bourgeois European women were articulating a feminist politics anchored in the condition of women. This presents a challenge to Marxism: why is the class struggle more important than the women’s struggle?

World communism agrees that relations in the household, in the family, in sex have to be transformed; liberation requires it. Class struggle is the way to achieve this liberation: change the social and economic arrangements of society, our mode of production and reproduction. It’s not only that women are dominated in the family (Sankara presents men’s power in the household as a feudal holdover). It’s that sex and the family are structured as barriers to women’s active participation in politics and production, in making history. The world communism tradition doesn’t deny women’s “special oppression”. It situates it historically, analyzes it, and combats it at its economic and social roots.

The family has a history

The radical premise of historical materialism is that the family has a history. Its structure is not fixed, given, and natural. It’s social and it changes. Sankara brings out the implications of this point: it’s a rejection of biological essentialism. Humans are not slaves to their nature, which means that women are not reducible to their sexuality. Women are not merely or strictly or primarily sexual beings, beings determined by a biological function. People have always interacted with their environments in ways that supersede nature. That’s what tools are. Physical differences are not determining. Rather, social differences stemming from property and production have led to women’s subordination.

Engels narrates a story of pre-historical matriarchy and the world-historical defeat of the female sex with the rise of property and exchange. Sankara elaborates on Engels by bringing out the element of mastery over land, slaves, and women effected by the establishment of men’s patriarchal power: “Women became his booty, his conquest in trade. He profited from their labor power and took his fill from the myriad of pleasures they afforded him. For their part, as soon as the masters gave them the chance, women took revenge in infidelity. Thus adultery became the natural counterpart to marriage. It was the woman’s only form of self-defense against the domestic slavery to which she was subjected. Her social oppression was a direct reflection of her economic oppression.”[5]

Kollontai presents the transformation in family structure ushered in by capitalism. “Strict individualism and the exclusiveness and isolation of the ‘nuclear family’ replace the emphasis on ‘collective work’” characteristic of feudalism[6]. Although she doesn’t put it this way, we might read her as telling the story of primitive accumulation in the family as women become separated from productive labor. Women are “freed” from some forms of necessary labor, but rendered unfree because of their dependency on access to a wage. The pre-capitalist family was a productive economic unit, the site where candles, soap, cloth, clothing, and more were made. This changes with the rise of commodity production. Factories make the same items more quickly and cheaply, so households come to purchase them. Kollontai writes: “The family no longer produces; it only consumes.”[7] What was a productive unit turns into a consumptive unit.

To be sure, housework hadn’t been eliminated. Being freed from necessary productive labor didn’t introduce a realm of freedom. It led to the devaluation of women’s labor because this labor was no longer productive. It didn’t produce anything of value. It just serviced, took care of, the household: “cleaning (cleaning the floors, dusting, heating water, care of the lamps, etc.), cooking (preparation of dinners and suppers), washing and the care of the linen and clothing of the family (darning and mending).” Women gained access to the wage through men (fathers and husbands). Male workers were the breadwinners for the family. Instead of relying on their community, individual women depended on individual men, which made marriage a financial arrangement.

For the working class, this changed around the middle of the nineteenth century as low wages and commodity dependence pushed more women into the paid labor force. Working-class women started working “outside the home as day labourers, saleswomen, clerks, washerwomen and servants.” At this point, the old family structure became an unnecessary hindrance. The woman earned her own wages and was thus liberated from her prior dependence on her husband. The household had already ceased to be a site of production. Why would it remain a unit of consumption?

Kollontai’s argument differs from familiar feminist arguments that the family is necessary for capitalism because of women’s unpaid labor in the home. By caring for the breadwinner and his children, women do essential work for capitalists for which the capitalists do not pay. In contrast, Kollontai shifts the focus to working-class women, wage-earning women who don’t have to remain tied to the family. For them the family is unnecessary, an extra burden, the site of what will be called the second shift where women continue to do the unproductive household labor Kollontai mentioned. Communism will eliminate this burden. Women’s work will be fully productive, and the individual household will wither away. People will eat in communal kitchens and restaurants. Teams of cleaners will clean people’s rooms. The remaining tasks will be socialized in centralized laundries and mending centers. Society will assume more and more responsibility for educating children. “Communism liberates woman from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier.”

That this is the tendency is clear. Many working-class households already rely on fast food and pre-packaged meals. Some women already experiment with relationships beyond the dictates of church and custom. But these experiments remain subjective, contingent on the individual rather than part of a collective practice. They are spontaneous rather than conscious. Because they are individual, they lack economic and social support. Kollontai criticizes bourgeoise feminists — “progressive equal righters” — who celebrate individual women who “dare to love.” She writes: “Let a woman simply ‘dare’, and the problem of marriage is solved.” But the problem of the family hasn’t been solved. An individual getting a job or a raise doesn’t solve problems of unemployment and exploitation. Neither does an individual forgoing traditional marriage and embracing polyamory resolve the issue of the family.

Kollontai makes the analogy between freedom of contract for labor and capital and “free love. In class society, both are forms of inequality and exploitation where the burden is on the weaker party. The marriage contract is the only guarantee that the burden of maternity is not born by the woman alone. It’s like the old guild relation that made masters responsible for their journeymen apprentices. When capital dissolved the guilds, the journeymen were thrown into the market to fend for themselves. Free love is a similar kind of freedom — a freedom from social supports.

Kollontai agrees with Marx and Engels. The communists aren’t going to destroy the family. Capitalism already has. Not only is the family economically unnecessary under capitalism, but capitalism places burdens and demands on the family, especially women in working-class families, that the family cannot bear. What is needed are new relations between the sexes, new ways of arranging intimate and sexual life. And these require economic and social support. Truly free love, truly free relationships, cannot occur in class society where people are dependent on capitalism and the family. Kollontai writes: “Women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines.”[8]

The communist economy moves to planned production and collective social consumption, eliminating the last vestiges of the family as an economic unit. During the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Kollontai explains, “the family economic unit should be recognized as being, from the point of view of the national economy, not only useless but harmful”[9]. The isolation of the couple is detrimental to solidarity, encouraging attachment to an individual rather than the collective, to one’s own children rather than all children. Economic factors that separate people into private households and relations of dependence keep women subordinated. Communism will eliminate them.

Emancipated life

Kollontai and Sankara link emancipation with productive work, that is, with value-producing labor outside the household[10]. Both associate this work with the success of their revolution: it’s the way people and the country become free. Work is not work for personal enrichment, as bourgeois feminists would have it. It’s for the people, the revolution. Kollontai and Sankara thus emphasize the thorough-going nature of revolution and the imperative of developing “a new mentality in social relations”, to use Sankara’s words. They understand this emancipatory project as requiring changes in domestic relations (inclusive of socialization and sharing of household tasks).

Kollontai emphasizes how new relations in Soviet Russia will be free unions between equal members of the workers’ state, comrades united by love and mutual respect. Such unity is incompatible with jealousy and financially motivated relationships, both of which are to be condemned. The new communist relations will ensure that each person will have “a real opportunity for the fullest and freest self-determination, and the widest scope for the development and application of all natural inclinations”[11]. Sexual and love relationships will not be exceptions. Ensuring that they will no longer be domains of ongoing submission and unfreedom requires the radical transformation of the human psyche. Comradeship makes this transformation possible. It’s both the means and the end, the form and content of free and equal social relations. For Kollontai, “comradeship” is the determining feature of proletarian morality. It engenders the capacity for freedom. Instead of submitting, instead of accepting inequality, instead of being bound by property, people can become free in their relationships with one another.

Comradeship entails the abolition of three aspects of sexual relationships under capitalism: egoism, possessiveness, and inequality. Egoism is the way people go into sexual or romantic relationships to find themselves while giving “little thought to what’s going on in the other person”[12]. Their own individual feelings and desires outweigh consideration for the other person, making the love demanded impossible. Possessiveness is the relational aspect of private property: one treats one’s partner as property, as someone who can and does belong to another person, as someone on whom one has exclusive claims. Bourgeois marriage inscribes this possessiveness into law. Inequality is the assumption that men and women are of unequal worth in every sphere (including physical and emotional experiences), that one sex is more worthy of freedom, respect, and fulfillment than the other. These three elements of bourgeois sexual morality produce the heightened emotional intensities driving what Kollontai (and others) saw as the “sexual crisis” in European society, a crisis that capitalism cannot solve because it is at its basis — despite the various experiments in ways of living celebrated by individualists.

Kollontai juxtaposes “passive adjustment” and “active opposition to the existing reality”[13]. Individuals will try to find ways to cope with pressures of life under capitalism: marrying later or, for many of us now, living with roommates or alone in our cars. These aren’t solutions. They are individual attempts to adjust to stunted, demeaning, diminished conditions of life. Active opposition to such conditions requires comradeship, engagement of the full person in the collective project of emancipation.

In her autobiography, Kollontai says that love played too great a role in her life. It was an incredible squandering of her mental energy, a diminution of her labor power in barren emotional experiences. Her writings on communist morality suggest ways of reimagining social ties so that neither women nor men are burdened by love affairs. She writes: “Love is only one aspect of life, and must not be allowed to overshadow the other facets of the relationships between individual and collective.”[14] Kollontai’s vision of a love beyond the confines of the couple provides an alternative that begins not from romance, marriage, and the family, but from the forms of relations that best strengthen the workers’ collective. Love and sex are not private matters; they are social.

Sankara’s conception of women’s emancipation focuses on just these forms of relation as he highlights the necessity of women’s participation in the revolution. He draws a parallel between women’s specific oppression as women and imperialism: the male “takes advantage of all the shrewdness that class exploitation has to offer in order to maintain his domination over women. This is the same method used by men to dominate other men in other lands”[15]. The method uses difference to justify social and economic inequality. Feudalism treats some men as superior to others by birth. Colonialism and apartheid treat skin color as justification for slavery and domination. When women are relegated to “third place”, behind their husband and children, Sankara argues, they are “just like the Third World, arbitrarily held back, the better to be dominated and exploited”[16]. Nonetheless, Sankara doesn’t call for the abolition of the family. While like Kollontai in emphasizing relations of equality and respect, in men and women fighting alongside one another, he retains an emphasis on motherhood as a vital, sustaining, and guiding social role.

Sankara observes that women are dominated by imperialism and by men. They can’t be free of one without being free of the other. With a sham women’s ministry and a female politician, the neocolonial regime keeps women in subjugation. Real liberation demands a “revolutionary political approach” that breaks with reactionary and backward social forces[17]. Crucial to this end is women’s participation in the construction of the new society in all aspects and at all levels. They need to be put to work in the large-scale development projects essential to escaping imperialist economic domination, but antiquated family structures hold them back. With “a revolutionary morality and an anti-imperialist life-style”, women can deepen the popular and democratic revolution, conquer freedom, and exact from men their proper respect and consideration. State ministries of culture and family affairs, the work of the Women’s Union of Burkina, and individual households all contribute to this effort[18].

Tactics of struggle

Historical materialist analysis has tactical implications. Its account of what changes are necessary leads to specific decisions on how to fight for these changes. The analysis determines the political line.

Kollontai offers her version of the two great hostile camps that others in world communist tradition emphasize. The way to fight for women’s liberation is not to position women against men but to transform the economic and social structure of society. Men are not the enemy. Capitalism is the enemy. Rather than unified by sex, women are divided by class. Bourgeois feminists encourage working class women to join their cause. Their fight is for equal rights within the framework of capitalist society. Working-class women want to bring down capitalist society. They know full well that their liberation is impossible so long as this society exists. Any improvements to the lives of working-class women have come from the class struggle, not feminism. So they don’t benefit from alliance with bourgeoise feminists.

Sankara presents women’s emancipation as necessary for the revolution in Burkina Faso. He explains: “We must pay the closest attention to women’s situation because it pushes the best of them into waging a sex war when it’s a question of waging, at bottom and in a complementary manner, a clan or class war. We have to say frankly that it is the attitude of men that makes such confusion possible.”[19] Machismo is a problem. Yes, it is understandable that men exploited by capital and oppressed by apartheid will go home to oppress their wives. But the result is that women are pushed toward feminism to address male stupidity and brutality. Women have had to fight on two fronts: against male oppression and in alliance with workers and peasants against imperialism. Men can only benefit by changing their attitudes toward women. The forces they need for victory will be strengthened, focused, redoubled.

Sankara emphasizes that the neocolonial regimes have “had no better than a bourgeois approach to women’s emancipation, which brought only the illusion of freedom and dignity”[20]. Instead of social, economic, and political sources of women’s oppression, they’ve been satisfied with “primitive feminist” and petite bourgeois fads, like the creation of a women’s ministry (headed by a woman) and women’s “right to be masculine”, that is, with symbolic equality rather than the structural changes necessary to realize that equality. His analysis resonates today, not just on the superficial level of progressive neoliberalism’s deployment of identity but more damagingly in movements unable to fight for structural change because they remain invested in disunity.

Sankara writes: “Comrades, the future demands that women be freed, and the future, everywhere, brings revolutions. If we lose the fight to liberate women we will have lost all right to hope for a positive transformation of our society into something superior. Our revolution will then have no meaning. It is to wage this noble struggle that all of us, men and women, are summoned.”[21] Sankara tells us that the future makes demands on us now. The liberation of women is too important to be left to bourgeois fads and half measures; it’s the very ground of our right to hope for positive — for communist — transformation. As with Kollontai’s vision of comradeship as the means and ends of revolutionary change, so does Sankara’s break with a temporality of emancipation reliant on sequential and segmented reforms. It’s not that class struggle comes first and after that we can talk about women’s liberation. It’s that in the future that summons us now the class struggle has been won, and women have been indispensable to that victory.

Notes

[1] V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Chapter V: “The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State”, in Collected Works, Vol. 25. Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s4.

[2] Lenin, The State and Revolution, cit.

[3] Alexandra Kollontai, “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle”, (1921), in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, London, 1977. Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/sex-class-struggle.htm.

[4] Karl Marx and [Friedrich] Engels, The German Ideology, Chapter 3: [Idealist mistakes & Materialist corrections]. Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03abs.htm#.

[5] Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, Pathfinder Press, 1990, p. 13. Available on https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/womens-liberation-and-african-freedom-struggle_by-thomas-sankara.

[6] Kollontai, “Sexual relations and the class struggle,  cit.

[7]Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family”, (1920) in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, cit. Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm.

[8] Alexandra Kollontai, “The Social Basis of the Woman Question”(1909), in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, cit. Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm.

[9] Alexandra Kollontai, “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Life” (1921), in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, cit. Available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/theses-morality.htm.

[10] “We must collectively remain alert to women’s access to productive work. It is this work that emancipates and liberates women by assuring them economic independence and a greater social role, as well as a more complete and accurate understanding of the world.” Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, cit., p. 31.

[11] Kolllontai, “The Social Basis of the Woman Question”, cit.

[12] Kollontai, “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle”, cit.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Kollontai, “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations”, cit.

[15] Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, cit., p. 15.

[16]  bid., p. 24.

[17] Ibid., p. 27.

[18] Ibid., p. 37.

[19] Ibid., p. 16.

[20] Ibid., p. 26.

[21] Ibid., p. 41.

Featured image: Alexandra Kollontai. Courtesy of Izquierda Diario.

Jodi Dean