Alexandra Kollontai, born on this day in 1872, was a Marxist feminist revolutionary who served as People’s Commissar for Social Welfare in the Soviet Union and, later in life, as a diplomat for the USSR abroad.
Alexandra was born into a wealthy family of Ukrainian, Russian, and Finnish background, acquiring a fluency in both Russian and Finnish early on. This experience would later assist her in her career as a Soviet diplomat.
In 1895, Kollontai read August Bebel’s “Woman and Socialism”, which was a major influence on her thinking. In 1896, she helped fundraise in support of a mass textile strike in St. Petersburg, retaining connections with the women textile workers of St. Petersburg for the rest of her career.
In the years leading up to 1917, Kollontai was active as a Marxist theoretician, educator, and anti-war activist (opposing World War I, specifically). During this time, she established contact with Vladimir Lenin and gave a lengthy speaking tour in the U.S., sharing a stage with Eugene V. Debs and giving 123 speeches in 4 languages.
Following the 1917 February Revolution, Kollontai returned to Russia. Later that year, she voted in favor of the decision to launch an armed uprising against the government, also participating in the revolt. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government.
The Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography describes her efforts within the Soviet government: “The changes that Kollontai tried to bring about were enormous, involving the complete destruction of the old system and the creation of a new one…Kollontai authorized decrees that committed the Soviet State to full funding of maternity care from conception through the first year of a child’s life - an unheard of measure for the beginning of the 20th century. She attempted to establish full legal, political, and sexual equality for women and to redress the entire marriage code.”
In 1920, Kollontai joined the left “Workers’ Opposition”, an opposition tendency in the Bolshevik Party opposed to what they saw as the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet state. In March 1921, the Workers’ Opposition was banned along with all other factions at the 10th party congress in March 1921, but its members continued to be active as leaders of both the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets.
In 1922, Kollontai was one of the signers of the “Letter of the 22” to the Communist International, protesting the banning of factions in Russia.
Following this incident, Kollontai began to serve as a Soviet diplomat, becoming one of the first women to work in international diplomacy. As ambassador to Norway and Sweden, as a trade delegate to Mexico, as a delegate to the League of Nations, and as negotiator of the Finno-Soviet peace treaty of 1940, she served the USSR with what was generally regarded as great finesse. From 1946 until her death in 1952, she was an advisor to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"Class instinct…always shows itself to be more powerful than the noble enthusiasms of ‘above-class’ politics. So long as the bourgeois women and their [proletarian] ‘younger sisters’ are equal in their inequality, the former can, with complete sincerity, make great efforts to defend the general interests of women.
But once the barrier is down and the bourgeois women have received access to political activity, the recent defenders of the ‘rights of all women’ become enthusiastic defenders of the privileges of their class, content to leave the younger sisters with no rights at all. Thus, when the feminists talk to working women about the need for a common struggle to realise some ‘general women’s’ principle, women of the working class are naturally distrustful."
- Alexandra Kollontai
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Russia made my wife left me
How good are Yemeni sandals? Their armed forces wear them. They must be incredible.
Will there be a new mega soon? Or will they extend this one? We await the answer with anticipation.
I have comically bad naming sense (see: my username). Every time I try to think of a username or domain name or whatever I come up with something that seems clever in the moment and then within days I’m like “WTF was I thinking this is so convoluted/embarrassing” but then it’s too late and I just have to live with it and cringe every time someone else has to use it
my cope is that it’s my brain fully rejecting SEO and marketing because I hate them so much
oh, speaking of which, I was listening to an interview with Reggie Fils-Aimé (former COO and President of Nintendo of America) where he was complimenting Shigeru Miyamoto when talking about his dynamism which he says has “served [Miyamoto] well in not only creating all of this wonderful IP but pitching all of these fantastic game ideas” and he also talks about playing “NES content” and I had a visceral reaction of disgust to both. It is genuinely repulsive how these creative endeavors–which their creators pour so much of themselves into and that people receive so much meaning and enjoyment from–are taken by capitalism and melted down into amorphous blobs of “content” which are valuable only for the ability to exploit their copyright and extrude them into other kinds of merchantable widgets.
* at Yosemite national park, tearing up * if it weren’t for all the regulatory burden this could all be condos
I just put gin in my hibiscus tea. It’s fire ngl.
Limerence kinda fascinates me. Like what the hell is it first off and where’d it come from (a book I think). I have heard it discussed in the context of an incomprehensible yearning for someone (felt that before), but sometimes it’s just really really annoying and feels like a fly buzzing around in your head
Imagine if someone’s activation phrase was Neutral Milk Hotel. That would be funny
People who know economics: Did the 2008 recession ever actually “end” meaningfully? When Covid hit I started hearing about a “new” recession but it never “felt” like the 2008 one let up. Now I hear talk of a “new recession” caused by Trump’s tariffs, but when did the Covid recession let up?
It sucks that like half the cast are pieces of shit because Silicon Valley is very funny.
unironically using the word tankie is such an incredible self-own. like thanks you should lead with that next time so i dont have to read the rest of your screed
Who’s that pokemon?
I AIN’T GONNA LET IT GET TO ME, I’M JUST GON’ CREEP
DOWN IN PUMPKIN HILL, I GOTS’ TO FIND MY LOST PIECE
I KNOW THAT IT’S HERE, I CAN SENSE IT IN MY FEET
THE GREAT EMERALD’S POWER ALLOWS ME TO FEELHow do DragonBalls work? If someone like Frieda or vegeta wished for immortality ans then someone else gathered em and wished they weren’t immortal would that work?
Sorry for still talkin’ about Nintendo prices, but 99% of the internet are dumbass liberals. It’s really distressing that class consciousness only really goes as far as consumer self-interest. At least there’s a little discussion of wages not keeping up with inflation but that’s as far as it goes. Asked a guy to explain what inflation is and what causes it and they just did the tautological ‘price inflation is when prices inflate’ thing. No curiosity what causes it. They’re satisfied that a little line in a textbook has it defined as such and no one wants to wonder why money is presented as having a baked-in half-life. No interest in looking at like profit margins, wage costs, cost of living cost indexes (and whether they’re actually useful or not), economies of scale, etc. etc.
Nope. You just get “Bart said NES games cost up to $70 in a Simpsons episode” over and over. IT’S MULTI-DIMENSIONAL, YOU FUCKS, THERE’S MORE THAN ONE FUCKING ASPECT THAT GOES INTO COMMODITY PRODUCTION. I’m more mad about people just rejecting thinking or changing their minds or expanding their comprehension of money and politics in general, but the Nintendo thing has the lowly gamer-type shitting up the discourse even more than usual.
They hear Nintendo has the Switch for like 33% off in Japan with that region-locked version and zero curiosity what the profit margin is on that or anything. Maybe Nintendo could afford to do that everywhere or at least more than just one market.
Especially annoying when these liberals will sink to saying there’s no price tendencies at all so they can rhetorically defeat marxism and the labor theory of value, but then when I say “I think the price is too high, I won’t pay these prices. Maybe if they lower them to what they had before” they revert to pretending they believe there actually are solid laws governing prices and Nintendo is only obeying them and I’m objectively wrong for disagreeing.
