What makes reading Alexandra Kollontai so intriguing today?

Abstract

The Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai has gained renewed attention in contemporary feminist discourse. In particular, family-abolitionist perspectives draw on her critique of the family and bourgeois love, invoking her idea of free (‘red’) love as a form of solidarity. We share this revived enthusiasm, as Kollontai's work continues to offer valuable and inspiring insights today. As we argue in this article, it is especially her dual analysis of gender inequity, including a ‘moral’ or psychic and an economic or material dimension, that proves relevant for current debates. Her work holds the potential for bridging subject-centred and materialist approaches. However, we also recognise pitfalls in Kollontai's conception of the relationship between economic structures and subjectivity which are echoed in contemporary appropriations of her work. We maintain that re-reading Kollontai can raise awareness of the complicated nature of combining a materialist and ‘moral’ perspective on gender. While Kollontai does not fully achieve this mediation, she provides resources for this project that have thus far been overlooked and may still prove useful today.