Alexandra Kollontai, born on this day in 1872, was a Marxist feminist revolutionary who served as People's Commissar for Social Welfare in the Soviet Union and, later in life, as a diplomat for the USSR abroad.
Alexandra was born into a wealthy family of Ukrainian, Russian, and Finnish background, acquiring a fluency in both Russian and Finnish early on. This experience would later assist her in her career as a Soviet diplomat.
In 1895, Kollontai read August Bebel's "Woman and Socialism", which was a major influence on her thinking. In 1896, she helped fundraise in support of a mass textile strike in St. Petersburg, retaining connections with the women textile workers of St. Petersburg for the rest of her career.
In the years leading up to 1917, Kollontai was active as a Marxist theoretician, educator, and anti-war activist (opposing World War I, specifically). During this time, she established contact with Vladimir Lenin and gave a lengthy speaking tour in the U.S., sharing a stage with Eugene V. Debs and giving 123 speeches in 4 languages.
Following the 1917 February Revolution, Kollontai returned to Russia. Later that year, she voted in favor of the decision to launch an armed uprising against the government, also participating in the revolt. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government.
The Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography describes her efforts within the Soviet government: "The changes that Kollontai tried to bring about were enormous, involving the complete destruction of the old system and the creation of a new one...Kollontai authorized decrees that committed the Soviet State to full funding of maternity care from conception through the first year of a child's life - an unheard of measure for the beginning of the 20th century. She attempted to establish full legal, political, and sexual equality for women and to redress the entire marriage code."
In 1920, Kollontai joined the left "Workers' Opposition", an opposition tendency in the Bolshevik Party opposed to what they saw as the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet state. In March 1921, the Workers' Opposition was banned along with all other factions at the 10th party congress in March 1921, but its members continued to be active as leaders of both the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets.
In 1922, Kollontai was one of the signers of the "Letter of the 22" to the Communist International, protesting the banning of factions in Russia.
Following this incident, Kollontai began to serve as a Soviet diplomat, becoming one of the first women to work in international diplomacy. As ambassador to Norway and Sweden, as a trade delegate to Mexico, as a delegate to the League of Nations, and as negotiator of the Finno-Soviet peace treaty of 1940, she served the USSR with what was generally regarded as great finesse. From 1946 until her death in 1952, she was an advisor to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"Class instinct...always shows itself to be more powerful than the noble enthusiasms of 'above-class' politics. So long as the bourgeois women and their [proletarian] 'younger sisters' are equal in their inequality, the former can, with complete sincerity, make great efforts to defend the general interests of women.
But once the barrier is down and the bourgeois women have received access to political activity, the recent defenders of the 'rights of all women' become enthusiastic defenders of the privileges of their class, content to leave the younger sisters with no rights at all. Thus, when the feminists talk to working women about the need for a common struggle to realise some 'general women's' principle, women of the working class are naturally distrustful."
- Alexandra Kollontai
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People who know economics: Did the 2008 recession ever actually "end" meaningfully? When Covid hit I started hearing about a "new" recession but it never "felt" like the 2008 one let up. Now I hear talk of a "new recession" caused by Trump's tariffs, but when did the Covid recession let up?
Global capitalism has this issue, now, because:
The old Lenin and Luxembourg release valves of waves of imperialism have run into a world that is more or less fully enmeshed in capitalist relations. There is no Scramble for Africa or post war Asia for capitalism to have its imperialist periphery to extract imperialist super profits out of.
War, which can free up capital by eliminating dead or zombie capital and which allows for a nation-state scale level of coordination and central planning, would now mean mutual annihilation between biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
So this is another intractable position for capitalism to be, along side things like Climate Change, which - to me - suggest a Grossman-esque final conflict is likely to lay in this century.
According to Michael Roberts (Marxist economist), no it never ended! And the last few times it was this bad was the 1930s and 1873! You can read his many, many thoughts on https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/
Or read his book on more or less that topic The Long Depression
i can only speak for where i live in western europe but here and in the UK it's essentially just been constant stagnation since 08 of things that actually matter to workers. number go up or whatever but stuff like real wages has been more or less flat for years, while rent and goods prices skyrocket. we never really recovered in any meaningful way.
Nope, they kicked the can down the road by giving banks free money and doing zero interest rates and operation twist. (This deflated the USD btw, which is currency manipulation) They also changed mark to market accounting rules so banks wouldn't have to take losses on their toxic mortgage backed securities.