On Aleksandra Kollontai

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 middle 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 requirements would have made it exorbitant, unable to realize that "practice " 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 opposition 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 international socialism, and the liberation of the working woman in socialism. The dangers were clearly seen: the sentimentalization of a merely national 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 German 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 international 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...