A.k. 47 - Selections From The Works Of Alexandra Kollontai

In this episode, Kristen R. Ghodsee's reads the fourth part of her selections from Alexandra Kollontai's 1909 book, The Social Basis of the Woman Question. This manuscript was written while Alexandra Kolllontai was in exile from Tsarist Russia and affiliated with the German Social Democratic party. This is a key text in the history of socialist feminism, and is seen by many as a foundational document in distinguishing the "bourgeois feminists" from the socialists. In this essay, Kollontai is clearly a social democrat and an advocate for reformist social democratic politics, although by the end of the essay she begins to display a more strident allegiance to the total transformation of society demanded by the socialists.  This is Part IV of a multi episode series, and here Ghodsee discusses the problem of "free love" under capitalism. Basically, Kollontai argues that there can be no real "free love" unless there is a fundamental transformation in the social relations of