In her most recent book, controversial British feminist Laurie Penny treats her unsuspecting young readers to Soviet propaganda, quoting a Bolshevik commissar’s denunciation of romantic love — without bothering to identify Alexandra Kollontai as the top female official in Vladimir Lenin’s Communist revolutionary regime.
A contributing editor for The New Statesman, Penny attacks “the neoliberal notion of romantic love” in her book Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, insisting young women must “refuse to define ourselves by romantic love . . . or lack of it.”
In support of her anti-love position, Penny writes on page 236 of her book that “today’s growing girls of every age might do well to recall the words of Alexandra Kollontai.” Penny then quotes Kollontai’s condemnation of love as “an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power.”
The source of this quote is identified in the endnotes of Penny’s book (page 254) as Kollontai’s 1926 The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman. That note lists the URL at Marxists.org where Penny evidently found it online.
Beyond this endnote, however, Kollontai is not further identified in Unspeakable Things, perhaps because Penny assumes her feminist readers are already familiar with the Soviet official who died in 1952.
So-called “Second Wave” feminists — leaders of the Women’s Liberation movement that arose from the New Left in the United States in the late 1960s — embraced Kollontai as a pioneering hero. Between 1979 and 1981, three separate English-language biographies of Kollontai were published, two by American professors (Barbara Evans Clements and Beatrice Farnsworth) and issued by university presses, and a third by British scholar Cathy Porter. In addition to those three biographies, a 1977 anthology of Kollontai’s writings, translated from Russian by British editor Alix Holt, was republished in the United States in 1980 by W.W. Norton & Company.
“With the current high interest in both feminism and Marxism in the West, the rediscovery of Kollontai was predictable,” Professor Simon Karlinsky wrote in a 1981 New York Times article reviewing the Kollontai biographies by Clements, Farnsworth and Porter. Karlinsky saw these biographers as seeking “to appropriate her ideas and experience to the newly revived feminist trends in Western democracies.” Karlinsky noted how Kollontai and the Bolsheviks opposed the liberal reform efforts of “bourgeois” feminists:
The roots of all oppression, the Marxists reasoned, are economic. Proletarians, whether men or women, are exploited by the bourgeoisie, and a proletarian revolution will put an end to that. . . . Alexandra Kollontai’s contributions to the anti-feminist campaign of the Marxists were her coaching of a group of women workers to disrupt the 1908 national congress of Russian feminists by shouting slogans and the publication in 1909 of her book The Social Bases of the Woman Question, a 400-page diatribe against the leaders of the feminist movement.
In that “diatribe,” Kollontai declared that the Marxist party “always and everywhere adheres to the principle of women’s equality”:
The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. Only the complete disappearance of these factors, only the evolution of those forces which at some point in the past gave rise to the subjection of women, is able in a fundamental way to influence and change their social position. In other words, women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines.
Kollontai’s rejection of reforms within the capitalist system and her demand for a revolutionary destruction of that system, are echoed in Laurie Penny’s own denunciation of “the logic of business and money” that she identifies as “neoliberalism.” Penny slams liberal feminism:
As financial capitalism faltered following the near-collapse of the global stock markets in 2008, the notion that one day all women would be able to make empowering choices within a market that respected their goals and autonomy was exposed as a twenty-year-old fairy tale.
The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms,’ when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.
Although she is herself of upper-middle-class background — her mother is a lawyer, as was her late father, and she attended elite schools in England — Penny’s hostility toward capitalism led her to support the so-called “Occupy” protest movements in 2011. In this, also, Penny mirrors the life of Kollontai. The Russian revolutionary Kollontai describes in her autobiography how she grew up in comfortable circumstances as the daughter of a general in the czar’s army:
I was the youngest, the most spoiled, and the most coddled member of the family. This, perhaps, was the root cause of the protest against everything around me that very early burgeoned within me. Too much was done for me in order to make me happy.
Alexandra Kollontai, Soviet Commissar
In contrast to the reformist measures advocated by 19th-century liberals, Marxist doctrine demanded the destruction of the traditional family, as Kollontai explained in her 1921 Bolshevik treatise, “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations”:
The communist economy does away with the family. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat there is a transition to the single production plan and collective social consumption, and the family loses its significance as an economic unit. The external economic functions of the family disappear . . . In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat the family economic unit should be recognised as being, from the point of view of the national economy, not only useless but harmful. The family economic unit involves (a) the uneconomic expenditure of products and fuel on the part of small domestic economies, and (b) unproductive labour, especially by women, in the home — and is therefore in conflict with the interest of the workers’ republic in a single economic plan and the expedient use of the labour force (including women).
Under the dictatorship of the proletariat then, the material and economic considerations in which the family was grounded cease to exist. The economic dependence of women on men and the role of the family in the care of ‘the younger generation also disappear, as the communist elements in the workers’ republic grow stronger. With the introduction of the obligation of all citizens to work, woman has a value in the national economy which is independent of her family and marital status. The economic subjugation of women in marriage and the family is done away with, and responsibility for the care of the children and their physical and spiritual education is assumed by the social collective. . . .
Once the family has been stripped of its economic functions and its responsibilities towards the younger generation and is no longer central to the existence of the woman, it has ceased to be a family. The family unit shrinks to a union of two people based on mutual agreement.
Penny does not quote these other writings of Kollontai and, as previously noted, gives her readers no biographical information on the Russian Marxist who was the lone female member of the Bolshevik Central Committee at the time of the 1917 revolution. Kollontai spent six months as a commissar in Lenin’s dictatorship before resigning that post and was subsequently appointed to a series of diplomatic posts, spanning two decades as a Soviet ambassador first in Norway (1923-25), then Mexico (1926-27) and Sweden (1930-1945).
Left to right: Josef Stalin, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov.
Left to right: Leon Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lavrenti Beria.
“This is no time for speech-making. Our Revolution is in serious danger. . . . We have no need for justice now. Now we have need of a battle to the death! We must act not tomorrow, but today, at once!”
— Felix Dzerzhinsky, December 1917
It is doubtful that Laurie Penny’s young readers know any more about the murderous brutality of the Soviet Union than does Penny herself. Only 28 years old, Penny’s attacks on “neoliberalism” in Unspeakable Things never examine the prosperity and freedom enjoyed under this system — i.e., limited government, representative democracy and industrial capitalism — in historic contrast to the totalitarian nightmares that covered the 20th century in the blood of innocents. A deliberate policy of terrorism was a weapon that the Bolsheviks considered absolutely necessary, as Leon Trotsky proclaimed in 1920:
We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron. . . .
The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. . . .
The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror.
Dzerzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Lavrenti Beria — these depraved monsters led the Cheka and the NKVD, merciless and sadistic murder gangs that imposed the “dictatorship of the proletariat” on the enslaved millions who suffered under Soviet tyranny. By the time the Evil Empire crumbled into the ash-heap of history, it is estimated that as many as 100 million people had been killed by Marxist-Leninist regimes in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua and other outposts of communist imperialism.
Of this senseless slaughter — to say nothing of the millions impoverished, imprisoned or exiled by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” — Laurie Penny seems stubbornly ignorant. Instead she heaps every imaginable calumny on the West’s “neoliberal” capitalist system. It is this system, of course, which sent her to some of England’s finest schools and provides her with publishing opportunities, a system that is even now providing her with a prestigious Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University.
If she would care to research the history of the man whose name is on that fellowship — founded with a bequest from his widow — Laurie Penny would learn that the self-made millionaire Lucius Nieman earned his fortune by hard work and courage. In 1919, Nieman’s Milwaukee Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for its “strong and courageous campaign for Americanism,” resolutely supporting the U.S. war effort against Germany “in a constituency where foreign elements made such a policy hazardous from a business point of view.” Indeed, at the time of World War I, Milwaukee was home to one of the largest German emigré populations in the world, yet Nieman’s “Americanism” was unflinching.
How ironic, then, that Laura Penny, an outspoken enemy of “Americanism” and an enthusiastic devotee of the Marxist doctrines of Kollontai and other radicals, should be granted a fellowship named for the great patriot Lucius Nieman, her reward for such important “journalism” as these colorful passages from Unspeakable Things:
In 2011, the summer of rage and riots, I kiss a girl and she tastes of cigarettes and gin and I like it. She says she wants to be a mistress forever. We met because we were sleeping with the same boy, and he isn’t entirely comfortable with how close we’ve become. I buy her a cupcake from a posh sex shop. The cupcake has icing on it shaped like a cunt with a little clear sugar glaze tricking obscenely off the frosting folds. She laughs and eats it right there in front of me because she is hungry. . . .
Then he’s sick of us both, and so we go out like we have before, eyeliner and cigarettes and bus passes on our way to corrupt young minds. . . . We are a tag team, an unstoppable perversion: we drag strange little hipsters into strange beds, turn them on to roll-ups and feminism. . . .
I have spent more time than I care to contemplate in my nimble years in the company of polyamorists, queer non-monogamists and the sort of people who prefer labels like “love anarchists” . . .
I don’t mean to advocate casual sex, housing collectives and late nights drinking bad vodka with bisexual activists as alternatives that necessarily work for everyone, though they’ve always done so for me.
Anyone who cares to read Unspeakable Things (those passages are excerpted from pp. 231-234) will discover that Laurie Penny is as wholehearted an evangelist for sexual perversion as she is a wholehearted enemy of democratic capitalism. Indeed, she is an enemy of every value of Lucius Nieman’s “Americanism,” but in this she is probably no different than any of the other Nieman Fellows at Harvard. Do any of them disagree with anything in Laurie Penny’s book? Is there a single Nieman Fellow who would criticize Laurie Penny’s tribute to the deadly ideas of the Bolshevik commissar Alexandra Kollontai?
Of course not. The last person at Harvard University who dared disagree with feminists was Larry Summers, and we know what happened to him. Feminism’s totalitarian terror continues, and the revolutionaries in power have no need for justice now.
ADDENDUM: Why am I such an outspoken and uncompromising anti-feminist? Because it is always smarter in the long run to be an enemy of totalitarians than to be a friend of totalitarians. If you think you can negotiate or compromise with totalitarianism, you are doomed to learn a painful lesson. While researching this article I discovered an interesting historical statistic: Of the 16 original commissars in the Bolshevik regime, nine were executed during Stalin’s 1937-38 purge and another, Trotsky, was assassinated by one of Stalin’s agents in 1940.
Maybe she can work towards abolishing the orgasm.
/sarc
Jebus, people: 1984 was a WARNING, not a how-to manual!!!
So Felix Dzerzhinsky was Putin’s grandfather or great uncle?
No doubt Alexandra Kollontai survived because she resigned as commissar and spent the rest of her service overseas.
This is hilarious. I love the OTT John Birch-style parody. This is the funniest pearl-clutching I’ve seen since Colbair retired. Keep up the good work.
Ironically Penny is a lost talentless hack who can find no productive role in society. She thinks fewer children and more women operating forklifts in worker-owned supermarket distribution freezer warehouses in sub-zero temps will change the world into a feminist vision of equality.
The problem there is the only time women are willing to carry bundles of thorned firewood on their heads 5 kilometers is when they’re forced to by harsh reality. Short of that, there has never been a sign of such a movement among women. The Soviet union eventually used women in the army in WW II only when their man-power became depleted and their very lives were at stake. Short of that, I see no women like Penny fiercely occupying draft offices to do their fair share in the reality of the world that is sometimes war. Feminists don’t pine for forklifts or introducing diversity into Vet’s Hospitals. It’s a lot easier for telemarketing failures to extort money using shaming tactics on the internet until tech giants pay them to shut up and go away.
All of Penny’s rhetoric, all the feminist rhetoric consisting of millions of words can be boiled down into the four horsemen of the ongoing 6,000 year apocalypse: the West, men, heterosexuals and whites. Dampen down that and all will be well. I’ve yet to see feminists laying down in the offices of nearly 100% male distribution warehouses and insisting on more women the way they do online for cushy tech jobs at Intel. That is an invisible but crucial world feminists have no interest in. It’s easier to cry for more women in movies and comic books. “I wanna be a trucker” isn’t a sign you’ll see at “Smash the Patriarchy” rallies. The irony these women don’t understand is that so-called “patriarchy” is the LSD trip that lets them hallucinate they have ever done a single thing as a group at the civilizational level.
If it were indeed true that establishing gender equality were only possible through totalitarianism, then this essay would culminate in a conclusion somewhat related to the ad hominem attack on Penny. However, the vast majority of people interested in gender equality have little interest in, for instance, martial law, making this essay at first interesting, and then sad and hilarious. Thanks for the laugh!
Well it isn’t as if we didn’t already know modern feminism was simply Marxism with saggy breasts.
Yeah, diversity, and equality only applies to high paying white collar jobs, and namely in tech where these women are on a verifiable crusade to impose their agenda.
To get an idea where feminists are actually coming from on the work front check this article out. It’s absolutely baffling how clueless the author is as to why she’s having a hard time getting in job with a major Silicon Valley firm, and for her it all comes down to her being a woman even though she lacks even basic qualifications for the job.
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/you-say-you-want-diversity-but-we-cant-even-get-internships
Reds are reds, wether beefsteaks, watermelons, or pink.
On the day you, Shanley Kane and Anita Sarkeesian harass and occupy draft offices with the same zeal you go after the tech sector, then you’ll have the credibility you desire.
As for ad hominen, you gals for the life of you can’t understand the difference between criticizing an individual and 3.5 billion men. One doesn’t solve a problem in tech by defaming men but by addressing a specific person. Men are not an ideology and you can’t solve a problem by assuming they are any more than I can solve crime in urban areas by starting out “Dear Blacks…” I’ve heard enough “Dear Men…” Give it a rest already.
As Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy; a hundred million deaths is hilarious!”
And Penny herself is the Unspeakable Thing. (Sounds like a straight-to-DVD B-movie when I say it like that. “Laurie Penny is…The Unspeakable Thing“, and you hear screams in the background during the voiceover.)
I want to laugh at that, but I feel guilty.
I am well aware of the mad house that is known as Shanley Kane. Her entire employment is based on defaming white heterosexual men and then begging for money from sympathetic patrons. She produces nothing. I saw one of her tech talks and it literally didn’t make any sense. It was poorly organized, baffling, and amateurish.
In the days of the Soviet Union, there was no higher praise for a KGB officer than to be called a “real Chekist”. That being the case, Dzerzhinsky was the godfather of the entire system of terror.
She survived because she was no threat to Stalin. Period, end of discussion.
Yeah Dzerzhinsky was a role model until they tortured and shot him. But I’m referring to an actual familial resemblance.
Most of those purged were merely theoretical threats to Stalin.
Why did you change your name to guest?
That happens when people try to delete their comments. Unless you’re an admin, you can only delete your name’s association with it.
When they rebel against sex, it’s because they’re not getting any. When they rebel against romantic love, it’s because they’re not getting any. The world must be changed to accommodate their self proclaimed victim-hood.
By the way, let’s extrapolate out the lawless hysteria of the culture that shut down that frat at UVA. Imagine that ideology completely in power and yes, you do have martial law and you do have a totalitarian society. Just imagine Amanda Marcotte, Anita Sarkeesian or Andrea Dworkin as dictators and then shudder. The irony there is feminists claim the one single man feminists have reduced all white Western men to is in fact a dictatorship for them. Then look at their unprecedented rights, including the freedom to defame that dictatorship. Case closed.
Well if you don’t like your comment one can edit it to nothing but one character. So she didn’t want her name attached but wanted the comment to stand or she doesn’t know much about Discus. She had less than a hundred comments if memory serves.
Actually, he died of heart failure after a speech to the Central Committee. You’re thinking of one of his successors, no doubt.
True, but he saw them as threats, and that’s all that mattered.
A good friend of mine is very far left. If the word “communism” is mentioned, he goes into snickering derision and brings up the JBS – as if there’s no such thing as a communist; like they’re Sasquatches or Martians.
Then you get a beer or two in him and he’s talking about how great communism is and how we should be a communist country.
So thanks for bringing up the JBS. Well done. And I like the weirdly phonetic spelling of “Colbair.” It makes you look like a real fan!
Merely different points on the arc leading down into slavery and darkness.
obladi oblada.
Time to repost Eric Raymond’s classic and very important essay “Gramscian Damage”:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260
Penny is a Marxist memebot of the kind he describes. “Americans have never really understood ideological warfare” — except for Stacy McCain.
How would you try to delete a comment once it’s posted? If you edit down to zero characters the whole comment comes back. I’ve never seen a delete button anywhere on Discus.
[cough, cough]
She would 100% confirm her insane bonafides if she promoted Jeb Bush for the GOP nomination.
Indeed. :/
To be fair, if someone isn’t willing to offend, then they probably won’t be much use to the task at hand. The diversity of opinion is, I hope, a strength.
That’s just an “o”. Now try deleting it.
You should feel good, since wanting to laugh means that you think it’s silly. If you nodded in agreement, then you should worry.
Over on the right, where it shows a flag on other people’s posts — standard on mobile, hover-over on desktop — it should show a down-arrow on your own posts. And one of the drop-down options is Delete (which actually just changes your name to Guest).
I also have a really, really warped sense of humor, so I have to be constantly vigilant. 😀
I will delete this as an example, using the down-arrow to the right.
Oddly enough, I can’t get this to change anything from my perspective. It looks like it’s completely gone; then when I refresh, it’s back and mine.
ETA: Whew! Finally, at last, it went to Guest.
“the vast majority of people interested in gender equality have little interest in, for instance, martial law, making this essay at first interesting, and then sad and hilarious. Thanks for the laugh!”
The vast majority of people who supported the Nazis had no clue it would involve an exterminatory war against Soviet Russia. The vast majority of people who were sympathetic to the Soviets had no clue it would lead to an industrial scale gulag complex, the deliberate starving of millions of Ukrainians and innumerable ethnic purges. The vast majority of people who sided with the French Revolution had no clue it would lead to the Terror and a genocidal war against the thought criminals of the Vendee province.
The vast majority of people who support totalitarian movements have no clue. Laugh all you want, you hapless chump. The last laugh’s on you.
Penny is like all the new generation of modern feminists: their main “arguments” are nothing more than group defamation. Such people understand the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation but when it comes to whites, heterosexuals and men a cloud forms in their brains.
For all the talk of rebellion, feminism has the appearance of a cultish regulated opposition.
Scumbags such as a Clinton or a Kennedy are always defended no matter what because of their ideological alignment even though people like that represent everything feminists say they are against. Points like this have been well noted here at TOM.
Beware of hipsters, they sometimes become tyrants, some petty some not so petty. Case in point:
http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/6/2/3/128623.jpg?v=1
Young Joe Stalin
yeah, that’s what i thought when i read this.
Gender feminists don’t give 2 hoots for Kennedy, Clinton or politics. Whatever the opposite of a Straight While Male Anti-Defamation League would be, that’s modern feminism, and it’s just as brutally simple as that. These people use extremely complicated rhetoric but is is just hate focused on a particular group. The idea they’re for equality is laughable. Whenever a “political” solution involves the immorality of men as a default, that’s not politics.
Conservatives love a bit of ‘sexual perversion!’
This sort of response (“sad and hilarious”) shows the danger in quoting “respectable” leftist lunatics. The same sort of thing happens with RSM’s feminism series, or quoting from Liberal Fascism. This stuff all seems incredible when you start scratching the surface and apparently easy to discredit if you aren’t familiar with the back story.
Of course, David Thompson has been a PennyRed afficionado for a long time. She makes many appearances in his Agonies series:
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/agonies-of-the-left/
If anything, RSM is probably playing down the crazy that exists here.
Isn’t that Joey from “Friends”?
“… the ad hominem attack on Penny …”
Wait a minute: An author cites a Bolsehvik commissar — recommending Kollontai’s words as advice for “today’s growing girls of every age” — and then I spend many hours researching to demonstrate how this implicates the author as having endorsed, second-hand, arguably the greatest horror in human history, and you want to brush all this aside as “ad hominem”?
You are either dishonest or stupid or perhaps both.