Lenin’s Response
Lenin objected to some of Kollontai’s points while
maintaining a critical and self-critical attitude. The socialist Clara Zetkin records the following from Lenin:
“… (A) large part of the youth is keen on ‘revising
bourgeois conceptions and morality' concerning sexual questions…The new values
are crystallizing slowly, in struggle. In the relations between man and man,
between man and woman, feelings and thoughts are becoming revolutionized. New
boundaries are being set up between the rights of the individual and the rights
of the whole, in the duties of individuals…It is a slow and often a very
painful process of decay and growth. And particularly in the sphere of sexual
relationships, of marriage and the family. The decay, the corruption, the filth
of bourgeois marriage, with its difficult divorce, its freedom for the man, its
enslavement for the woman, the repulsive hypocrisy of sexual morality and
relations fill the most active minded and best people with deep disgust.”
Kollontai and Lenin shared a critique of bourgeois
morality and hypocrisy and an analysis of the laws and customs which oppressed
and exploited women. Lenin noted “The desire and urge to enjoyment easily
attain unbridled force at a time when powerful empires are tottering, old forms
of rule breaking down, when a whole social world is beginning to disappear. Sex
and marriage forms, in their bourgeois sense, are unsatisfactory! A revolution
in sex and marriage is approaching, corresponding to the proletarian revolution…Nothing
could be more false than to preach monkish asceticism and the sanctity of dirty
bourgeois morality to the youth. It is particularly serious if sex becomes the
main mental concern during those years when it is physically most obvious. What
fatal effects that has!”
Lenin framed part of the problem in theoretical and
subjective terms. He said that “The changed attitude of the young people to
questions of sexual life is of course based on a `principle' and a theory. Many
of them call their attitude `revolutionary' and `Communistic.’ And they
honestly believe that it is so…Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the
so-called ‘new sexual life' of the youth–and sometimes of the old–often seems
to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has
nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we Communists understand it
You must be aware of the famous theory that in Communist society the
satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as
drinking a glass of water…Its adherents maintain that it is Marxist. But thanks
for such Marxism which directly and immediately attributes all phenomena and
changes in the ideological superstructure of society to its economic basis!
Matters aren't quite as simple as that.”
Lenin saw “this glass of water theory is completely
un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social.” Here Lenin went beyond a crass
mischaracterization of Marxism and said, “In sexual life there is not only
simple nature to be considered, but also cultural characteristics, whether they
are of a high or low order…The relations of the sexes to each other are not
simply an expression of the play of forces between the economics of society and
a physical need, isolated in thought, by study, from the physiological aspect.
It is rationalism, and not Marxism, to want to trace changes in these relations
directly, and dissociated from their connections with ideology as a whole, to
the economic foundations of society…As a communist I have not the least
sympathy for the glass of water theory, although it bears the fine title
`satisfaction of love.' In any case, this liberation of love is neither new,
nor Communist…In bourgeois practice it became the emancipation of the flesh.”
Lenin anticipated his critics and added that “I don't
mean to preach asceticism by my criticism. Not in the least. Communism will not
bring asceticism, but joy of life, power of life, and a satisfied love life
will help to do that. But in my opinion the present widespread hypertrophy in
sexual matters does not give joy and force to life, but takes it away. In the
age of revolution that is bad, very bad…The revolution demands concentration,
increase of forces…Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, is a phenomenon
of decay. The proletariat is a rising class. It doesn't need intoxication as a
narcotic or a stimulus…It must not and shall not forget, forget the shame, the
filth, the savagery of capitalism. It receives the strongest urge to fight from
a class situation, from the Communist ideal…Self-control, self-discipline is
not slavery, not even in love…”
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