RED LOVE 1 RED LOVE. A READER ON ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI 2 RED LOVE. A READER ON ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI 3 4 CONTENTS LETTER TO KOLLONTAI 9 INTRODUCTION 15 ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI’S MANY LIVES MICHELE MASUCCI 29 LOVE IS REVOLUTIONARY CURATORLAB IN CONVERSATION WITH DORA GARCÍA 45 PORTRAIT OF KOLLONTAI AS A CHILD GIULIA ANDREANI 62 RED LOVE MICHAEL HARDT 63 DORA GARCIA’S RED LOVE MARIA LIND 93 AND ALL IS YET TO BE DONE IMAGES FROM A JOURNEY PETRA BAUER AND REBECKA THOR 103 FEMINISM IS OUR NATIONAL IDEA ALLA MITROFANOVA 117 INFRASTRUCTURES OF CARE CURATORLAB IN CONVERSATION WITH BINI ADAMCZAK 130 5 COMRADELY LOVE AS CONTEMPORARY STRATEGY FEMINISM‚ MEN & WOMEN‚ FRIENDSHIP AND POLITICAL ORGANISING NINA POWER 150 NEW GOSPEL SOON (IN 48 YEARS’ TIME) ALICJA ROGALSKA AND MARTYNA NOWICKA-WOJNOWSKA 168 THE STRUGGLE WITHIN THE STRUGGLE SALLY SCHONFELDT 172 ASK ALEXANDRA SOPHIA TABATADZE 179 DOCUMENTATION OF SWEET CONFISCATION BAÇOY KOOP 185 BODIES OF WATER A SCORE PONTUS PETTERSSON & HANNAH ZAFIROPOULOS 192 THE DIGITAL DOMESTIC SCRIPT FOR A PERFORMATIVE LECTURE ANTONIO ROBERTS 199 THE REVOLUTION WILL BE MOTHERNIZED! (KINDER‚ KÜCHE‚ KIRCHE‚ BITTE!) LISE HALLER BAGGESEN 217 THE SAME THING‚ AGAIN AND AGAIN JOANNA WARSZA AND MICHELE MASUCCI IN CONVERSATION WITH DORA GARCÍA 227 6 ANTI-ABORTION STRUGGLES IN POLAND TOMÁŠ RAFA 241 A WHORE MANIFESTO OXANA TIMOFEEVA 245 IN THE NAME OF LOVE SARAH AHMED 265 THE SEXUAL LIFE OF COMMUNISTS REFLECTIONS ON ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI AARON SCHUSTER 303 LETTER FROM A TRANSMAN TO THE OLD SEXUAL REGIME PAUL B. PRECIADO 332 HUMAN-MACHINE LIBIDINAL TRANSFERENCE MOHAMMAD SALEMY 338 DORA GARCÍA AND MARIA LIND IN CONVERSATION WITH AGNETA PLEIJEL 359 KOLLONTAI A PLAY BY AGNETA PLEIJEL 373 BIOGRAPHIES 505 7 8 LETTER TO KOLLONTAI LETTER TO KOLLONTAI Dear Alexandra, Stockholm is so cold without you! How have you been? We have missed you. We find our- selves thinking of you often in this place; we too have travelled to this country to work on making change, albeit in ways other than you. How do we begin to tell you what has happened since you left? So many years have passed, and so much has changed. The city you knew is gone and you’d hardly rec- ognise the world we are faced with today. Yet still your legacy remains. Lately we’ve been reading your writings again. It seems we’re finally able to understand what you were trying to tell us all along: that love is not a private matter con- cerning individuals, but an inherently political and so- cial force. The history you traced through the writings of Engels, Bebel, Meisel-Hess, and others from ancient times through feudalism, to the bourgeois era, has helped us to understand love as historically and materially de- termined, how the organisation of love, sex, and social relations are integral to the formation of any society, and must be considered in order to change that society. Today, your ideas are being rediscovered in calls for a form of love defined by multiplicity — a love of many, in many ways — that may become a powerful organising principle and model for collective action in the formation of the commons. 9 LETTER TO KOLLONTAI LETTER TO KOLLONTAI Yet how can we understand such a form of love, beyond the familiar structures within which it is currently con- tained? We wish you were here to help us. As in your analysis of your own, bourgeois society, we still find love expressed through forms of property relations and social control of the body as a result of unequal power rela- tions between men and women. And of course it is the ‘woman question’ for which you came to be known — your long and difficult struggles to improve the condi- tions of women’s lives laid the foundation for our battles, and the advances that followed, in time. In spite of your fight for women’s rights, you refused to be satisfied with the bourgeois feminist pursuit of equality on its terms, demanding instead the full emancipation of all women and workers from a repressive system. You understood, then, how these struggles intersected; how the fight for women had to coexist and develop alongside the rev- olutionary fight. Only now have we begun to see how we too must acknowledge the differences among us and strive to fight structural oppression in all its manifesta- tions to truly bring about change. In your time, this took the form of the shared fight of working men and women in the factories. Today, the things we share and those that set us apart are infinitely more complex. Yet we return to our question: what forms of love may help us in our fight? In your writings, you proposed a ‘comradely love’ that went beyond sexual or familial relations, even be- yond friendship, to form the basis for collective solidarity. Perhaps it is there that we should look for the answer to our question. 10 LETTER TO KOLLONTAI LETTER TO KOLLONTAI In spite of the growing equality between men and women during those years, many have since gendered the rev- olution as intrinsically male. One of your greatest con- tributions was to bring the relation between gender and economics into the political sphere, yet we struggle to understand what you wanted to achieve. Was masculinity an ideal that you believed the new woman must embody? As the only woman member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, it must have been hard for you. Yet your fun- damental calls for a revolution in which the members of society could form new bonds through a transformed love drew not on the hard rationality of the male sphere, but from the knowledge and resources of the female. In this, we have come far in our understanding of how masculini- ty and femininity are just two spheres in a wide spectrum of ways we can perform gender. We have learned many things about how gender is constructed socially, through performative and linguistic gestures, habits, and percep- tions, undermining supposed biological determinism to pave the way for non-binary, trans and ‘third gender’ pol- itics to come to the fore. Such nonconformity extends to sexual politics and morality in a manner you could never have foreseen in your calls for ‘free love’. Today, so many different forms of relation between individuals are pos- sible. We work to undermine heteronormativity and to understand how queer discourse may yet enable a more fluid state of love. Perhaps such new knowledges may yet inform our revolutionary struggles. Many of these advancements have developed alongside and as a consequence of new technologies. The world has 11 LETTER TO KOLLONTAI LETTER TO KOLLONTAI opened up; we can connect to each other across thou- sands of miles, and conduct relationships through screens. How would you perceive such a world? Our contemporary condition of hyper mediation, information dissemination, and connectivity should produce the conditions neces- sary for political organisation and solidarity on a scale you could never have imagined. Yet somehow, it has not led to fundamental transformation. We are more fragmented and further apart than ever. Human interaction has changed beyond recognition — we follow each other’s lives more closely than ever before, but spend less time together. Your political engagement was borne from your experience of organisation and agitation among female workers at the factories of St Petersburg. Your speeches brought people together, where they found strength in numbers. Today, the bonds that hold us together have grown weaker. We are dispersed and struggle to form alliances against the structures that oppress us — indi- vidualism ‘won’, at least temporarily. In the domestic sphere, technological advancements have entered the home, bringing the everyday into the dig- ital domain. In your time, you called for such progres- sive technologies to unshackle women from domestic concerns. Yet so many facets of domestic life remain un- changed. What would a world that had embraced your calls for the collectivisation of social reproduction, house- work, and childcare be like? Many of your ideas were too radical then. Indeed, they may be too radical now. The historically feminised practices of care are still dispro- portionality assigned to women, and mothers, whose 12 LETTER TO KOLLONTAI LETTER TO KOLLONTAI political and artistic potential is thereby repressed. To- day, still, women fight against the roles assigned to them within the structures of marriage and the family. Yet we are also beginning to understand how, historically, or- ganising around social reproduction has been important in the construction of collective forms of social power. Information sharing and political organisation has long been centred around practices of collective care such as knitting clubs, language cafés, self organised education, or communal cooking. Such seemingly marginal practices bring the politics of care from its supposed place in the private sphere into the public sphere. Perhaps soon, in forty-eight year’s time, we may create a world in which economic and social responsibilities are shared equally among the members of the collective, to the benefit of all. Though the logic of capital continues to penetrate every aspect of our lives, signs of hope are emerging. Inspired by your life choices, which were ripe with contradictions and conflicts, we seek directions. For example; we keep wondering how it was possible for you to be Stalin’s dip- lomat. In spite of the challenges we face, we are witness- ing a renewed spirit of self-organisation that brings back memories of you, standing amongst the workers and call- ing them to action. Waves of solidarity and collective ac- tion emerge, and a small hope for change blossoms again. New problems arise that ask us to find new tools, and they are certainly needed now.