Alexandra Kollontai FIGHTER FOR SOCIALISM

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of Kollontai's writing still remains to be translated from Russian but what we know of her work is relevant to revolutionaries today, centring as it does on women's vital role in communism.

Kollontai, as had Engels, analysed the economic and social oppression of women under capitalism and took this work forward by seeking to construct an alternative future for women under socialism.

The recruitment of women workers to the revolutionary party required, in her opinion, an orentation by the party to both the economic exploitation they shared with male workers and the social oppression particular to them alone.

Therefore both the form and content of work amongst women workers was examined by Kollontai and brought within the scope of the revolutionary movement.

NOTHING FIXED

In her pamphlet "Communism and the Family" (1920) Kollontai points out how nothing in life is fixed forever.

Morals and concepts of marriage change not only with history but also geographically. She sets out to determine what forms of social relationships are in keeping with communism.

Looking at individual households under capitalism it becomes clear that such forms are historically outmoded: the family now consumes but does not produce.

In the 'old' peasant family as Kollontai calis it, although dominated by the husband and "provider" the woman was a necessary producer of cloth, cheese, butter etc. commodities which could be sold or exchanged.

Work a housewife does under capitalism does not generally produce commodities.

HOUSEWORK

Kollontai argues that as housework is economically unproductive it must be collectivised. This would free the woman herself to become a worker while the housework would come under the domain of other professionals running state services such as laundries and community restaurants.

Kollontai was aware that although women would welcome such developments, other aspects of communism provoked great anxiety.

Would their children be taken away from them? If divorces were made easier to obtain, who would fend for them if their husbands took off!

The pamphlet takes up these concrete objections by looking closer at the family.

STATE

The state, under capitalism, goes part of the way to liberate women from their traditional role; by manufacturing food, clothes, household goods; by educating children to a minimum level and in fact by taking women out of the home to work for low wages in poor conditions when necded and thus loosening the family ties.

But capitalism needs the family bosses who control the right to work.

Therefore no provisions

made for the most demanding are part of a woman's work in the ho:

child care. ne The communist answer, Kollontai says, is free nurseries, and for the maintenance and care of children, freeing the mother to contribute to the prosperity of the workers' state.

REPLACED

In this way the family is not destroyed but dies out gradually, replaced by a society where personal responsibility for 'my' children gives way to collective responsibility for 'our' children.

Consequently personal relationships are freed from the economic factors of marriage and a union of affection and comradeship becomes possible between people.

The social turmoil accompanying the Russian Revolution resulted in a 'sexual crisis' affecting every layer of society.

Kollontai, who struggled throughout her life against subordinating tendencies affecting women in relationships, analyses this 'chaos' in "Sexual Relations in the Class Struggle" (1919).

She is seeking the "basic criteria for a morality that can reflect the specific interests of the working class ... and serve as an important weapon strengthening the working class's fighting position."

Bourgeois love' distorts the personality of both partners. It is based on extreme egoism, stitling 'possessiveness' deriving from private property relations, and centuries-old assumptions of physical and emotional inequality in sexual experience.

Much of the social chaos of the early revolution results, Kollontai says, from the active, creative efforts of the proletariat to forge new relationships and ideals, to throw off submissiveness and possessiveness, and strengthen the social position of the working class as a whole by bringing women forward as equals.

"The idea that some members are unequal and must submit to other members of one and the same class is in contradiction with the basic proletarian principle of comradeship.

This principle of comradeship is basic to the ideology of the working class. It colours and determines the whole developing proletarian morality, a morality which helps to re-educate the personality freedom instead of being bound by a sense of property, capable of comradeship rather than inequality and submission."

In Women Workers Struggle for their Rights" Kollontai takes up the question of how to fight amongst women workers to draw them into revolutionary struggle.

Using the example of work led by Clara Zetkin in the Social Democratic Party in Germany, Kollontai advocates a 'division of labour' within the Party.

Under capitalism it had been necessary in many countries to organise women separately in clubs and societies to get round the restrictive legislation preventing women from affiliating to political movements and in many cases to trade unions.

SOCIAL

However, apart from this tactic Kollontai argued that women workers although part of the working class had a specific social position within the class and particular problems flowing from that position making it necessary to take up questions which faced them both as workers and as women.

At the time such issues were protection at work, insurance for child-birth and for children, education, women's political education and political equality which had hitherto been left to the feminists.

Of course today the emphasis shifted somewhat but women Trotsky in Red Square continue to be oppressed doubly as both workers and as women.

Kollontai proposed the inauguration of à women's section of the party to take up these questions, with a women's commission to organise leaflets, pamphlets, classes, meetings and to produce a women's So it was that women workers' clubs had been set up in 1906 in Russia although the breaking up of the first Duma put an end to them.

VACILLATED

Throughout this early period Kollontai herself vacillated between Bolshevism and Menshevism. She argued. against the Bolsheviks, insisting on the need for special work among women.

In 1913 the Bolsheviks took this up, with the initiative for Women's Day to be celebrated by both men and women workers.

The paper 'Women Worker' was also launched though publication was stopped by the authorities after a few issues and resumed in 1917 In December 191 legises:= providing sickness insured:: ::workers was passed. I= !_=:

1918 a Department io: :** F::=:tion of Motherhoo: 2=: L:== was set up, and withr s :::

of the revolution become a purels civil after ione year women 1ã:

political equality.

Under the immensely dirticult conditions of early post-capitalist days the Bolsheviks were already making historic strides towards the liberation of women.

On November 18 1918 the First Congress of Peasant and Women was convened by the Bolshevik women's paper.

A special education committee was launched to inform women of their new rights and how to use them.

Finally a Department for Working and Peasant Women was set up-Genotdel-with branches throughout the country.

Its first task was to mobilise for civil war.

At the same time, despite the lack of resources, all sorts of experiments were taking place:

communal kitchens, laundries, and restaurants were launched.

It was not until 1929 with the rise of Stalinist bureaucracy that the tide began decisively to turn for women, with the closing down of Genotdel which was now proclaimed 'unnecessary'.

Kollontai's strong work in the struggle for the emancipation was combined however with a strong element of idealism which brought her into repeated conflict with the party leadership.

Lenin In 1920 she joined with Shlyapnikov and a number of lesser figures in the organisation of a "workers' opposition" faction, centring on demands for proletarian democracy and for immediate trade union control of industry.

It made capital out of the disproportionate weight of intellectuals within the party and called for a purge of non-workers.

Kollontai brought together the main positions of this faction in a booklet: "The Workers Opposition' of March 1921.

The demands of the Workers' Opposition, which could have been discussed on their merits in an ideal situation, struck a sour and divisive note at a critical juncture of the civil war in Russia.

Lenin appealed for party unity against the formation of factions at this point, and under great strain the 10th party congress outlawed 'fractionalism' OPPOSITION In 1922 eleven former former members of the Workers' Opposition including Kollontai joined others to make a similar appeal to the Communist International over the head of the Kussian Party. Two of the five ringleaders were expelled from the party at the elventh congress- Kollontai however was reprieved.

She later compromised with the emerging Stalinist bureaucracy, playing an active role in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs-as Soviet ambassador to Finland she was complicit in the preparations of the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish War. She died in 1952.

However, Kollontai's earlier work remains of use to us today as an indication of how we should intervene amongst women workers and link up their economic and ranial PRESS 'Socialist Press' has stressed time and again that all and any interference by the courts in the labour movement must be rejected.

We therefore take no pleasure in the fact that the House of Lords in an overtly political decision has ruled that the Attorney General, Sam Silkin, had the right not to stop the threatened South African boycott last year by the UPW.

UPW leader Tom Jackson's role then in calling off the blackinglike his role now at Grunwick was that of a destroyer of working class solidarity, itrespective of which way the courts may rule.

But the original decision by the Appeal Courts that "no man is above the law" and that therefore John Gouriet and the National Association for Freedom, should have been allowed to take out an injunction, was front page news in every capitalist paper.

The tones of ringing triumph in defence of the 'rule of law' were spread over acres of news print.

So what happens when that turns out to be overturned? The Daily Mail puts the story on Page 13, the Express gave it five inches single column on Page 2 and the Mirror hid it beneath a tiny headline inside.

Only the Telegraph out of the most extreme of the Tory Press splashed the story on the front.

Fleet Street's attitude to the rule of law-like its news value-took a sharp turn.

The Mail said: "Do we then have to bow down for ever meekly before a Constitutional convention that permits the Attorney General, for reasons which no judge may any longer dare to question, to scuttle cautiously away when any union raises its fist and turn a blind eye when the law is broken? No we do not."

The Express under a headline 'Change This Bad Law' said:

"There are any number of jargon phrases-any lawyer can think them up-to conceal a decision not to enforce the law for reasons of political convenience."

So much for the rule of law. Not that it did not do its alloted job in this case. Tom Jackson didn't have to be found guilty. He only had to be threatened.

Now bad news for those of you in the £3,000 to 145,000 a year bracket. You are extremely hard up.

That is what the Sunday Telegraph found on a journey to 'Kenilworth Park'-a two page weepy entitled 'The Middle Class at Bay'.

The poverty took all sorts of forms too terrible to mention here but was summed up by one man on this estate of genteel poverty:

"Look" : he said, "If you've had white wine?"

The top bosses are feeling the pinch as well. Exposed in the Daily Mail was the terrible piece of news that the bosses of our top companies are getting only five and a half times as much as the average wage after tax.

Just think for every pound say, a car worker takes home, the boss takes home a measly £5.50 If an average worker takes home £45 a week then his boss has only a paltry £247.50 a week after tax to play with.

As the Mail put it:

"The 'rich' have been soaked. They are now bone dry, cleaned out.

T+ ho +

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IN DESTRIAL NEwS

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