Yuting Alina He and Ruairidh Brown consider the thought and contemporary relevance of a Russian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat who became an early advocate of International Women’s Day, and the resonating ideas in contemporary East Asian societies
Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) was a Russian revolutionary who advocated radical changes in traditional social customs and institutions. As a Soviet diplomat, she became the first woman to serve as an accredited minister to a foreign country. Much of Kollontai's thought focused on love; in particular a profound and meaningful love which required great emotional effort. She called this ‘winged eros’.
Such love, of course, was not possible in a capitalist system in which men regarded women merely as a means to pass on their property. Women were not people, but objects to be used and possessed. Women, in turn, did not marry a man for love, but for financial security.
Love in capitalism was thus neither deeply felt nor free, but contractual and utilitarian. Marriage was an extension of capital dehumanisation and dominion.
That was not to deny liberal capitalism brought some progress.
In the UK, for example, women gained the right to vote in 1918, and even elected their first female MP.
In Russia, the 1918 Family Code established one of the most progressive family laws in history. Most notably, it allowed for women to get a quick and easy divorce. Women no longer would be forced to remain with a man ‘who beats her and makes her life a misery with his drunkenness’.
Yet to be able to enjoy this progress, women first required financial means.
Only wealthy women could employ the domestic help which would free up time to properly engage in the public sphere. Only the rich could thus enter politics. It was no coincidence that Britain’s first female MP was an aristocrat.
If a woman were to divorce, she needed to be financially self-sufficient enough to survive without her husband.
Working women, meanwhile, suffered a double burden. Domestic responsibility still fell on them, but now they were also expected to work.
Kollontai saw International Women’s Day as a chance to awaken the political consciousness of working-class women and engage them in public life.
However, true to her Marxist beliefs, Kollontai argued that only through economic reform could women achieve lasting engagement. She advocated for extensive welfare reforms to provide domestic support, childcare, and public canteens, to free women from domestic servitude. Only if the State liberated them from ‘domestic slavery’ could working women truly be free to engage in politics.
Kollontai argued – controversially for her time – for extensive welfare reforms that would liberate women from domestic servitude
Such views were controversial. Orthodox Marxists maintained that sexual relations were subsidiary to the global class struggle. 'Women’s issues’ they judged a distraction from this.
Kollontai’s feminist-Marxism was subsequently declared a heresy. Marxists misassociated her ‘free love’ with ‘free sex’, and dismissed her as promiscuous.
Nevertheless, Kollontai’s observations about love, freedom, and capital remain incredibly important today. Her ideas have become especially heated issues in East Asia.
A key thinker in this debate is Japanese Marxist-feminist Chizuko Ueno. Provocatively echoing The Communist Manifesto, Ueno urged ‘Household Workers of the World, Unite!’. She argues that capitalism and patriarchy mutually reinforce each other through the postwar Japanese salaryman-housewife family model.
In her analysis, neoliberal Japanese society functioned based on the uneven division of labour. Women’s labour has long been devalued in workplaces and in unpaid domestic work. Mirroring Kollontai, Ueno concludes that, rather than liberation, neoliberal capitalism has created a ‘double burden’ of work and care responsibilities for working women.
Ueno similarly expresses scepticism over marriage. She believes women frequently marry out of cultural expectations and security concerns, rather than for love. Such expectations often pressure women into having children. Indeed, Ueno observed this in her own mother, which led her to reject marriage and motherhood.
Ueno is relatively invisible in the Anglophone world. Only two of her books exist in English translation. In East Asia, however, she has become a feminist icon.
Ueno has fast become one of China's most influential public intellectuals, her works in Chinese translation racking up over seven million sales.
Core to Ueno’s appeal has been that her thoughts resonated with Chinese women following their experiences after the People’s Republic’s ‘opening up’.
Since the late 1970s, China has experienced fundamental reform and the opening-up of its market economy. The neoliberalisation that followed coincided with China’s active integration into a globalised world.
During the Mao era, the state, through a top-down approach, directed gender policies and women’s liberation. But after 40 years of marketisation in China, women have opened up their own paths under the corporate logic of empowerment. This ideology resonates with women in postwar Japanese society.
As Chinese feminist scholar Jinhua Dai remarks:
When you embrace capitalism and its promises of success, competition, and financial security, you are also embracing patriarchy
Feminism has become an increasingly heated topic in China. Nowadays, young Chinese women are rejecting the belief that a woman’s purpose is to marry and have kids.
In Japan and China, conservatives have met Ueno's views with resistance. Some even blame her for falling birth rates in Japan.
A storm arose on social media when influential Chinese bloggers ‘rudely’ suggested Ueno was not married because she had been ‘hurt by men’. This deprived the Japanese thinker of agency, implying her unmarried status was an emotional response to rejection.
Mirroring Kollontai’s struggles, Chinese feminism also attracts continuous critique from its male Marxist counterparts. China is one of the very few states to teach Marxism from primary-school stage. Popular discourse generally dismisses, devalues or even attacks online discussions about gender. The society tends to claim that ‘gender struggles are essentially class struggles’.
In China, observers often characterise feminists as 'female boxers', implying feminist activism is deviant, aggressive and 'unladylike'
Observers often characterise feminists as ‘female boxers’. They dismiss feminists' political agency by implying feminist activism is deviant, aggressive and 'unladylike' behaviour.
Kollontai reminds us of the intersection between class and gender. Her legacy highlights how, under capitalism, love often yields to financial security.
This International Women's Day, let's work, as Alexandra Kollontai did, to dismantle capitalism's economic barriers to gender equality. The story of her marginalisation should remind us how those who draw attention to capitalism's inherent sexism are, to this day, often discredited. Sadly, Alexandra Kollontai's story is one that continues to repeat itself.
