Saturday, April 20, 2019

Using the primary source provided, summarize what Kollontai believes and hopes to gain. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm

Kollontai's desired gain is the thesis of the whole work and is found within the first paragraph. Namely, the author hopes that every person, man and woman, will have the fullest freedom to develop their abilities to the furthest capacity of their natural disposition.
Kollontai's beliefs about how this can be achieved are not so different from those of many other Marxists and Social Democrats of her time (and of our own). Broadly speaking, the author's opinion is that the full liberation of women won't be achieved until the repression of workers within the capitalist system is brought to an end. For the author, to be free on a sinking ship is no freedom at all; the very foundations of society need to be moved into the stages subsequent to capitalism (socialism and, ultimately, communism) in Marx's theory of dialectical materialism. While the author finds this to be so, she doesn't find fighting for reform within the existing societal framework to be of necessity a wasted effort.
A good answer to this question will further take into consideration the author's comments on the effects of marriage and family upon women and the possibilities for eventual social reconfigurations that would end any added subjugation heaped upon women by said institutions.
In the end, Kollontai underlines the importance of understanding the class divisions within the women's movement of the time. Suspicious that upper-class women would cease from fighting for the rights of working-class women once they had secured their own rights, Kollontai urges her reader to be wary of any women's rights movement that doesn't also place the class struggle front and center.

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