2

Social Democrat

KOLLONTAI’S JOURNEY to Western Europe to study Marxism was a pilgrimage made by many Russian radicals, for abroad they could read and talk freely. Women especially had been going to Switzerland for thirty years because Swiss universities were open to them. In Western Europe Kollontai could also hope to meet the leading Marxists, including the Russians Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Akselrod, and Vera Zasulich, who were in exile in Switzerland. By attending lectures at the university and talking with the masters of revolutionary politics, she would complete her education in scientific socialism.

The late 1890s was an exciting, if fractious, time to begin the serious study of socialism, for European socialist intellectuals were then embroiled in controversy. During the year that Kollontai spent in Switzerland, she became absorbed in the argument raging around her between orthodox and revisionist Marxists. According to Marx’s orthodox followers, the working class was becoming steadily poorer and capital more concentrated in a few hands, in prologue to inevitable revolution. This was the position adopted by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Erfurt Program of 1891.

In 1899 the German socialist Eduard Bernstein attacked orthodoxy in a work that came to be known in English as Evolutionary Socialism. Bernstein argued that both Marx and Karl Kautsky, the architect of the Erfurt Program, were wrong in their predictions of proletarian impoverishment. In fact, the proletariat had improved its wages and living conditions and property was becoming more widely distributed; he concluded that the possibility existed for a peaceful transition, or evolution, to socialism by enlarging the gains already achieved. Bernstein’s analysis was a response to the situation prevailing in Germany in the 1890s, where, after a decade of repression by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the SPD was able to participate in parliamentary politics, and where, furthermore, capitalism was flourishing.¹

Bernstein stood as the central, catalytic figure in an SPD debate over “revisionism,” that is, the revision of Marx and Engels, which had been developing throughput the nineties around a variety of practical and theoretical issues. Because the SPD was the leading Social Democratic party in Europe, the issue of revisionism swept outward from Germany to influence socialists throughout the continent. In Russia revisionist questions coexisted with the argument over economism, a dispute of Russian origin which, like revisionism, questioned the extent to which revolutionary change was necessary. The economist controversy began in 1898 when Ekaterina Kuskova, a young Russian socialist studying abroad, wrote a “Credo” asserting that revolutionary parties should aid the workers’ efforts to improve their living conditions and achieve constitutional reform. Kuskova circulated her ideas among her friends rather than issue them in full defiance of the established party view, as Bernstein had, but both her notions and his arose from observing the amelioration of proletarian life in Western Europe. She and another young Russian, S. N. Prokopovich, went on to argue that parliamentary reform could educate Russian workers politically and that the poor would respond more quickly to demands for economic improvements than to calls for revolution. Revolutionary strategies for Russia’s immediate present were deemed impractical as well as dangerous.²

The leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) —Plekhanov, Akselrod, Zasulich, Vladimir Lenin, Aleksandr Potresov, and Iulii Martov—attacked economism with all the considerable polemical skill they possessed. Plekhanov warned that this was a resurgence of the old populist notion that the masses could carry out a revolution without political struggle; Lenin declared that Marxism must preserve its revolutionary dimension or it would fail in Russia.³ Over the next four years the majority of the party would come to agree with Plekhanov and Lenin, but when Kollontai arrived in Zurich in 1898, the debate over economism and the new ideas from Germany had just begun.

By her own account, Kollontai rejected revisionism from the first.⁴ She met revisionists in Switzerland, including Heinrich Herkner, the professor with whom she studied, and in 1899 she visited England, where she contacted the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb; but despite this broad exposure Kollontai was impressed by the antirevisionists —Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky, Akselrod, and Plekhanov. She did not find evolution a realistic course for Russia; in the articles she wrote shortly after her stay in Switzerland she clung tenaciously to the notion of inevitable revolution. She asserted that inevitability granted hope, and she expressed a distrust of gradualism that was deeply ingrained in both the Russian revolutionary tradition and her own impatient soul.⁵ She may also have found revisionism too reminiscent of the liberalism in which she had been reared.⁶

In 1899 Kollontai returned home, now well versed in the fundamentals of Marxism and acquainted with many of the leaders of Social Democracy. She journeyed back to St. Petersburg through Finland, where she met Finnish Social Democrats and promised to raise money for striking textile workers.⁷ Finland would occupy much of her attention for the next several years. She had begun studying the Finnish economy at Professor Herkner’s suggestion, both because of her own background and because of repressive tsarist policies that were then earning the Finns much sympathy.⁸ Finland had been part of the Russian Empire since 1809, but the tsars had allowed the country substantial autonomy. The government of Nikolai II had reversed that policy by requiring Finns to serve in the Russian army and then violently suppressing Finnish protests.

Kollontai worked on her study of the Finnish economy during the winter of 1899-1900. The extent of her revolutionary activity at this time is unclear, but the evidence suggests that Kollontai was primarily engaged in raising money among the wealthy and in arguing ideology with other Social Democrats.⁹ Her father supported her, both financially and morally; the old general even hid illegal literature for her.

Kollontai’s difficult relationship with her parents had eased now, and her father accepted his daughter’s choices with remarkable tolerance. The new harmony did not last long, however, since Aleksandra Aleksandrovna and Mikhail Alekseevich died within a year of one another. In early 1900 Aleksandra Aleksandrovna lost a long battle with heart disease. She left Kuusa to Adele, Zhenia, and Aleksandr, some said out of guilt for having divorced their father.¹⁰ Kollontai never disclosed whether she and her mother became truly reconciled. A year later, in the summer of 1901, Kollontai and her father traveled together to the Ukraine to visit relatives.¹¹ From there Kollontai went abroad to meet foreign Social Democrats; she saw Luxemburg, Kautsky, Paul Lafarge (Marx’s son-in-law), and again Plekhanov. She also published several articles on Finland in Neue Zeit, the leading German Social Democratic newspaper, and in Zaria and Iskra, Russian émigré periodicals. Shortly after her return to Russia, her father died in an accidental fall.

Kollontai mourned for that gentle, tolerant man. They had grown closer in his later years, as finally she earned both his attention and his approval.¹² She wrote, “With the death of my father, I knew the pain of despair from irrevocable loss.”

She sold all the furniture at Sredniaia podiacheskaia 5 and moved with Zoia into a small apartment. Annushka the maid had married, but Kollontai talked her into coming to work for her again. Mikhail Alekseevich left her a small inheritance, which she supplemented with the proceeds from her writing. She was growing ever more estranged from her sister Adele, and Zhenia traveled a great deal, so of her family Kollontai had only her son. Misha, now eight, lived with his mother. During the day he attended a school noted for its progressive pedagogy and at night she took him to political meetings.

Kollontai continued the research on Finland, which culminated in a substantial book, The Life of the Finnish Workers, published in 1903. It was a great triumph to have it accepted by a press, but when she went for the first time to see the editor, he suggested, “Don’t you think it would be better if your papa himself came to discuss the statistical tables and not do it through an intermediary?”¹⁴ Kollontai had to convince him that she had written it.

The Life and the series of articles on Finland, published separately, constitute an exhaustive study of the Finnish economy from the orthodox Marxist perspective that Kollontai had wholeheartedly adopted. She argued that Finland had entered the capitalist stage of development and thus possessed a working class, but that, since it had experienced industrialization only recently, the country lagged behind Western Europe. Among the workers, class consciousness continued to be retarded by the remnants of “primitive patriarchal relations,” i.e., by the traditionalism of the peasantry.¹⁵

Capitalist economic growth, Kollontai continued, was leading to the increasing impoverishment of the proletariat, and poverty would create revolutionary awareness. Here Kollontai accepted the Marxist premise that Bernstein had rejected. In her analysis of the Finnish economy, she dissected every aspect of working-class life. Statistics on wages, housing, and factory conditions were given in detail, to prove that worsening economic conditions and the socialization of production were generating the class consciousness that would lead the workers to revolution.¹⁶ Although the works published in Russia did not mention revolution—such an indiscretion would have brought their confiscation by the police—revolution was the underlying concern. Beneath the scholarly Marxism, the charts and tables, the careful analytical work, lay Kollontai’s passionate concern for social change. The salvation of the worker could come only from shaking off his chains, so she searched through the extensive data for the key to liberation.

Kollontai had to use some ingenuity in applying an orthodox Marxist analysis of decaying capitalism to Finland’s emerging capitalism. She also had to deal with the peasants, whom Marx had condemned as nonrevolutionary because of their attachment to private property. Kollontai asserted that the impoverishment she viewed as crucial to revolution was affecting the peasants as well as the proletariat. The growing poverty of the landless agricultural laborers of Finland resulted directly from capitalist development, she wrote, because that development was causing an intensification of agricultural as well as industrial production. As smaller landowners were displaced, the poor were driven to the cities, where they provided a labor supply for the factories. The competition for jobs among the members of this burgeoning proletariat increased the workers’ awareness of their plight, raised their class consciousness, and thus, by implication, hastened revolution.¹⁷

Marx and Engels had paid little attention to the peasantry, so Kol- lontai’s efforts to see them as sub-groups variously affected by capitalism were creative, reflecting a common concern among the Social Democrats, most notably Plekhanov and Lenin, for analyzing the revolutionary potential of the Russian Empire’s agrarian society. Kollontai advanced her ideas tentatively, however, and she clearly stated that the workers were the only revolutionary class. A landless peasant had to be absorbed into the industrial work force to have any chance of improving his lot or, by implication, of acquiring proletarian consciousness.¹⁸ Kollontai’s articles contained little of the theory advanced by Lenin and Trotsky that the poor peasants could be allies of the proletariat in the overthrow of the feudal monarchy. Orthodox and therefore unoriginal, the Finland studies did demonstrate Kollontai’s grasp of Marxism and established her intellectual credentials within the Russian Social Democratic movement.¹⁹

In the fall of 1903, she went abroad, again at a time when controversy was dividing the Russian Social Democrats. Kollontai had heard of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress in the summer of 1903, and she was probably acquainted with the ideological battle that had preceded it. In 1902 Lenin, in his famous pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, expounded the theory that, to succeed in Russia, the Social Democratic Party should be a tightly knit association of full-time revolutionaries. The police would destroy an open political movement. Lenin linked this tactical premise to an ideological one. The revolutionary party was a vanguard, he wrote, which fought the inroads of “trade union mentality” among the workers by awakening them to the reality of their oppression. Both Lenin and Bernstein saw that the reforms to which capitalism had acquiesced in the last years of the nineteenth century were wooing the proletariat of Western Europe away from the notion of revolutionary change, and both inferred that revolutionary change was not altogether inevitable. Lenin refused to say so openly, but his “vanguard theory of the party” sprang from the belief that current alterations in the economic structure of society might slow the development of revolutionary consciousness.

At the Second Congress of the RSDRP, debate over these issues, and over the position of national groups like the Jewish Bund, led to a split, from which Lenin emerged as head of a temporary majority, the Bolsheviks. He soon lost his advantage, but the labels continued to distinguish the adherents to Lenin’s position (Bolsheviks) from those who disagreed with him (Mensheviks). Plekhanov, the leading Menshevik, argued that Lenin’s vanguard would not be an elite of the working class but a group of bourgeois intellectuals—Jacobins who would impose their will on the masses. To encourage formation of such a group contradicted the fundamental orthodox position that class consciousness developed among the workers as a result of economic change. Martov, agreeing with Plekhanov, charged that Lenin was questioning the spontaneous nature of revolution. Furthermore Martov and Akselrod contended that a tightly knit, highly centralized party such as Lenin envisioned would not be a mass party; the Social Democrats, if they had no large membership after the bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchy in Russia, would fail as a political movement. The party itself would become undemocratic, dominated by its leadership, as tyrannical as the institutions it sought to destroy.

Kollontai became a Menshevik, in part because the leaders she admired—Plekhanov, Akselrod, and Martov—were Mensheviks, but also because she found the Menshevik position more convincing.²⁰ It is true that Lenin’s theory implied the possibility of accelerating history through personal intervention, thus introducing an element of voluntarism that should have appealed to Kollontai’s commitment to revolution. But she could not accept a theory which diminished the spontaneous, inevitable quality of social change and implied a managed revolution. She wanted revolution as fervently as Lenin did, but it was to be a great, democratic upheaval organized and led by the masses. Kollontai would countenance neither the revisionists’ questioning of the need for revolution nor Lenin’s attempt to force it. Thus she denied that trade unionism had weakened the appeal of radicalism in Western and Central Europe, and that Lenin’s conspiratorial party was better suited to the reality of Russian repression than was the Menshevik concept of a mass movement. Kollontai would have spontaneity, democracy, and revolution—the central images of nineteenth-century socialism and of Menshevism.

Throughout 1904 Kollontai worked as a speaker in St. Petersburg.²¹ She discussed revisionism and economism at socialist meetings, gave lectures on Nietzsche and neo-Kantianism to more mixed audiences of intellectuals, and taught socialism at workers’ study circles. Kollontai did not participate in the conspiratorial side of party life—the smuggling of illegal literature and the clandestine assignment of party workers, which was then being managed in St. Petersburg by Elena Stasova. Instead, Kollontai took to the roles of speaker and writer, higher in status among Social Democrats and also less open to women. Stasova said later that she chose to be a party secretary because she lacked ability as a theorist.²² Kollontai had theoretical ambitions from the outset; thus she gravitated toward the intellectual side of revolutionary politics.

Meanwhile, unrest in Russia was mounting. Economic stagnation in the early 1900s resulted in a new round of strikes, demonstrations, and repression. Intellectuals and professional people were calling for reform, and the inept monarchy compounded its problems in 1904 by blundering into a war with Japan. The Japanese victory only increased public discontent. In December 1904 a strike began against the management of the mammoth Putilov steelworks in St. Petersburg. The strikers were led by a priest and union organizer named Gapon, who in early January 1905 drafted a petition to Nikolai II. Gapon called for an eight-hour working day, civil liberties, and the right to organize and bargain collectively. On Sunday, January 9, a crowd of icon-carrying workers marched to the Winter Palace to deliver the petition to the Emperor. Kollontai was among them.

I noticed that mounted troops stood drawn up in front of the Winter Palace itself, but everyone thought that did not mean anything in particular. All the workers were peaceful and expectant. They wanted the tsar or one of his highest, gold-braided ministers to come before the people and take the humble petition.²³

Tsar Nikolai had left his palace, however, and the frightened soldiers fired on the unarmed crowd. Kollontai ran in panic with the rest.

The Bloody Sunday attack catalyzed anti-tsarist feeling, and 1905 became a year of turmoil in all sectors of the Russian population. Unions were set up, the peasants seized land from the nobles, liberal leaders called for a constituent assembly, army and navy units mutinied. It seemed as if the revolution had begun. Revolutionaries like Kollontai set to work with enthusiasm in an effort to lead the proletariat, who had started the protest without them. She helped raise money for the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDRP, served as liaison with the Finnish Social Democrats, and wrote for party publications.

In January 1905 Lenin instructed A. A. Bogdanov to recruit Kollontai as a contributor to a Bolshevik newspaper, and throughout the year she worked closely with the Bolsheviks.²⁵ She did not adopt their position on party organization and its relationship to the masses, however; the more she saw of the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks, the more critical she was of them. Particularly, Kollontai disliked their approach to the trade unions and factory committees that were springing up almost daily. The Mensheviks viewed these genuinely proletarian organizations as groups that could be educated in Social Democracy, then allowed to operate autonomously within the party hierarchy. Theoretically, they would form part of a broad coalition of various groups under Social Democratic leadership. The Bolsheviks, distrustful of weakening professional revolutionary cadres by enlarging the party organization, wanted to use the unions and factory committees chiefly as vehicles for agitation. The party would continue to be tightly organized.

The distinction between factions remained more important in theory than in practice, for in fact both groups sought to dictate union leadership and decision making.²⁶ Kollontai herself felt that when union “spontaneity” led workers to pursue nonrevolutionary goals such as parliamentary reform, the party should intervene; revolutionary spontaneity was fine, nonrevolutionary spontaneity not so fine.²⁷ Yet the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks did differ on the union question, and Kollontai found the Bolsheviks too inclined to advocate strong leadership with this specific issue and generally.²⁸ Although she worked with them in 1905, she did not become a Bolshevik.

Nor did she rise to prominence as a Menshevik agitator against the Bolsheviks. Still a minor figure in party politics, Kollontai avoided factional infighting. She wrote about the questions at issue between the two groups, but without bitter partisanship. She never attacked other Social Democrats by name, unlike the leading Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, whose work was cluttered with mutual harangues. As she would do for the rest of her life, Kollontai saved her venom for other parties, and deliberately remained on the periphery of the squabbles that racked the RSDRP.

In 1905 Kollontai published several articles in which she departed from her concentration on Finland and revealed in full for the first time the variant of Marxism which had become her ideology. In two agitational pamphlets, On the Question of Class Struggle and Who Are the Social Democrats and What Do They Want?, Kollontai presented Marxist fundamentals to the working-class reader. “The doctrine of historical materialism and the labor theory of value,” she wrote, “are the theoretical bases of the class struggle.” Quoting Luxemburg, she repeated the basic antirevisionist argument—that capitalist competition was becoming increasingly anarchic, that by contrast production was being socialized, “creating a positive base for the future socialist structure,” that the proletariat’s consciousness was growing toward the awareness necessary for revolution. She stressed the development of this consciousness, just as she had in her work on Finland. But Class Struggle, published in the revolutionary year 1905, did not have to be as circumspect as her earlier studies, and its revolutionary goals were stated more explicitly. The growing contradictions of capitalism would awaken the proletariat, who would then destroy the old order. Denying Lenin’s vanguard theory, Kollontai wrote that the untutored “class psychology” of the workers was “the greatest weapon in the historical process.”²⁹

As evidence that the awakening of the working class had begun, Kollontai cited the same reforms that revisionists used to justify an evolution into socialism. Yes, there had been improvements, but only because the workers demanded them. Regardless of the concessions the bourgeoisie might grant, their interests and those of the proletariat remained antithetical. As long as capitalism existed, it would exploit the workers, and as long as there was exploitation, there would be class struggle. Only destruction of the existing system through revolution could usher in the true harmony of absolute equality. In pursuit of that goal the proletariat recognized “class struggle as a fact of life, class politics as a tactical principle.”³⁰

Kollontai discussed her vision of society after the revolution in Who Are the Social Democrats? Again the basic argument about capitalist decay appears. Again the key to the future is seen to lie in rising proletarian consciousness. Here Kollontai’s position was still more clearly Menshevik; far from being an elite of professional revolutionaries, the Social Democratic Party was composed of all workers who understood Marx and who “consciously join the general proletarian liberation movement.” She stressed the inevitability of revolution because inevitability gave hope to people weighted down by the burden of a seemingly omnipotent capitalist system. In so doing, Kollontai called attention to another quality in Marxism that had attracted her. Marx had proved, she wrote, that “socialism is not a vision, not a dream as many think, but a living, real necessity.” The just society was not only possible, it was inevitable, and that knowledge allowed the socialist to deal with daily disillusionment. “The good will of people is not necessary to change all the existing conditions and relationships,” she wrote. “No, for that it is [only] necessary that the definite conditions be present, for life itself at its depths develops the rudiments of a new order.” With the requisite economic conditions, socialism would come regardless of human frailty. Kollontai wrote, “The merit of Marx consists precisely in the fact that he grasped in our present foul order the seed of a better future, that he showed how life itself, the economic needs of mankind, lead it inevitably to a socialist order.”³¹

Under socialism all people would own everything in common, and they would work together to produce goods in response to the society’s needs. The growth of technological mastery over the environment and the existence of truly equal opportunity would assure each individual the ability to develop to his full potential. Above all, “First place will be occupied not by competition, but by solidarity, the unity of people who can put the general good ahead of the personal, the particular.”³²

Nothing in Kollontai’s description of socialism seems particularly unusual either as theory or as agitation. The lack of precision, the hortatory quality, even the terminology, are familiar Marxism; the pamphlets were a rehash of the arguments against revisionism and, more obliquely, economism, that had been made repeatedly by Kautsky, Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Lenin, and many others since 1899. The articles are important, however, for an understanding of Kollontai’s outlook. Taken together with her assertions of the inevitability of socialism, the passages on the character of socialism reveal the enduring elements of her Marxism.³³ For Kollontai the achievement of a communal, just society was of paramount importance. She had embraced Marxism as an ideology because it promised revolution; she believed in the innate virtue of the workers and in their revolutionary consciousness; she hated the bourgeoisie and all dictatorial institutions because they stood in the way of the ultimate good.

What private need made Kollontai so sensitive to social ills? In her earliest writing she had linked dedication to social reform with personal independence: a life struggling for social justice would be possible only if one were free. Conversely, such a life was also, for her, a means of achieving independence, of escaping the control of family, husband, and tradition. Having a strong need for autonomy herself, Kollontai was sensitive to the chains that bound other people and eager to aid in their destruction.

Her drive for independence had been nurtured by her childhood. So too had the perception that her own fate was linked to the fate of her society. Kollontai was sensitive to the bondage around her because her family, like so many Russian intellectuals, had taught her to feel a connectedness between the individual and society, an intimate involvement in the whole. Furthermore she had experienced social wrongs personally as a child. Thus when she became a revolutionary, she built an ideology which stressed those elements most important to her individual psychological life. Kollontai did not imagine injustice: it was real, but she felt it as a greater threat than did many people of her class. She did not pursue independence only for herself, she stressed its importance for others because she knew its importance for her.

Independence and self-esteem were not the only goals Kollontai sought in socialism, however. Repeatedly in 1905, and for the rest of her life, she stressed “solidarity” as the chief virtue of a just social order. She wanted a world where everyone would work together “for the general good,” that is, for a society where private isolation would be broken down. This too was an abiding Russian vision with special meaning for Kollontai, who had felt alone through much of her childhood. Under communism she would resolve her vacillation between dependence and independence because there connectedness would not require sacrifice of self.

The attraction of collectivism for Kollontai is far more explicit in her later writings. As she grew older and established her autonomy, she came increasingly to value community. Nevertheless the attraction to communal togetherness, born out of childhood loneliness and her Russian heritage, can be seen in 1905. It appears in her descriptions of both communism and the working class, and her great faith in the innate virtue of the proletariat may have sprung in part from her seeing it as a comradely group. This was a perception, some would say an illusion, common among socialists.

The same elements—freedom and solidarity, independence and dependence—play a central role in two articles Kollontai wrote for the sophisticated socialist journal Obrazovanie. She was pursuing a different goal here—to defend Marxism from the frequently leveled charge of amorality. In the 1870s, German philosophers had sponsored a revival of the ideas of Immanuel Kant, seeking to generate an ethics and epistemology that would replace the simplistic materialist determinism common in the late nineteenth century. In 1899 Bernstein attempted to awaken socialists to their own philosophical shortcomings by declaring that they should avoid dogmatic use of the dialectic and consider moral norms to have independent validity. Bernstein does not seem to have understood Kant well enough to be called a disciple,³⁴ but the discussions he provoked became part of the revisionist controversy, finding their way to Russia along with the more general neo-Kantianism that was common in nonsocialist intellectual circles. Critics attacked orthodox Marxism for founding ethics on a constantly changing material base. Following their master, the neo-Kantians believed in the need for moral absolutes, for categorical imperatives. There could be no ethical action, they felt, without universal standards of right and wrong.

The two articles Kollontai wrote for Obrazovanie were intended to clarify the grounds for Marxist morality. The first, “The Problems of Morals from the Positivist Point of View,” appeared in two installments in the fall of 1905; the second piece, “Ethics and Social Democracy,” was published in 1906. In both essays, Kollontai referred to the Marxists as positivists, that is, people whose ethics had a “positive,” material foundation. Thus she linked them to the philosophical positivists, the disciples of Comte, Mill, and Spencer, who rejected traditional metaphysics in favor of scientific empiricism. Countering the neo-Kantians, Kollontai argued correctly that idealist ethics were based on unproven and unprovable “teleological” principles and a priori absolutes. Being metaphysical, idealism was unverifiable; being unverifiable, it was meaningless. By contrast the positivists drew their ethics from the scientific study of society. They understood “that morality arises because of the real mutual relations of people, that it develops under definite socioeconomic conditions, that for its existence it is dependent not on the individual but on society, since social cohabitation of people appears its source, cause, and even goal.”³⁵ Moral laws enabled human beings to live together peacefully; without them the individual would pursue his self-interest to the detriment of group harmony and therefore group survival. As social needs changed, morality would change, and different norms would be learned by society’s children.

At an early stage of social development, Kollontai wrote, people were unaware of this process. Individuals accepted the rules of society as absolutes, because they had no sense of their identity apart from the group. Group imperatives were internalized so perfectly that the individual will barely existed. The growing sophistication of human intellect, however, brought some thinkers to question the grounds of morality, asking why they should obey, and the conflict between personal interest and social good arose. Out of self-awareness came a drive to understand moral questions which reached a climax in bourgeois assertions of individualism. Kant and the other middle-class philosophers had proclaimed the primacy of the single will but had also tried to establish reasons for dedication to social welfare. They did not succeed, for they relied on metaphysics. The only sound basis for moral, socially beneficial behavior was a scientific understanding of that behavior, an acceptance of the empirical observation that moral rules furthered social harmony.

Obliquely in this article and openly in the later one, Kollontai wrote that the empirical search for morality would lead to the discovery of two conflicting codes in contemporary society—the bourgeois and the proletarian. In a world dominated by class struggle a morality “above classes” became a “logical absurdity.” The moral norms of the proletariat represented the highest development of society to date and were the hope of the future. “The Social Democrats maintain,” Kollontai wrote, “that under current socioeconomic relations, in this phase of the historical development of society, the interests of the proletariat and of no other class whatever, are nearer than anything else to answering the highest and most general interests of mankind, that their leading principles, and not the principles of another class, more closely coincide with fundamental moral criteria.” The mores of the proletariat promoted the good of humanity. Within the proletariat itself, values “serve one single task, pursue one single goal—to validate and support community, i.e., the social cohabitation of people.” The virtues of the working class were therefore “solidarity, unity, self-sacrifice, subordination of particular interests to the interests of the group.”³⁶

From unconscious obedience, history had brought humankind through bourgeois individualism to a conscious acceptance of duty to the whole. The ultimate goal lay ahead. “In this new world, still far from us, there will no longer be a place for compulsion; personal desire will coincide with social imperatives.”³⁷ Marx promised that when people understood their power to control the economy, they would be free. Kollontai prophesied that when individuals submitted to social imperatives out of a conscious commitment to the good of the whole, they would be moral. The achievement of such perfection required the abolition of private property. Branding Nietzsche the ultimate embodiment of bourgeois individualism, Kollontai wrote that “the true Superman is possible only as the creation of new, approaching, living forms, fastened together by widely understood principles of community, imbued with the mighty idea of socialism.”³⁸

For Kollontai, there existed no ethical god, no moral absolutes, no universal design based on ideas. There was only the rational working out of the unordained human purpose—a society in which the autonomous individual found community. The traditional virtues had value only insofar as they promoted that end. “As a goal, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, and self-denial in the name of society seem moral from the positivists’ point of view only when they flow out of living social interests by natural necessity.”³⁹ Kollontai did not explain how determined events could have a moral dimension. If proletarian behavior occurred because of “natural necessity” without the operation of individual choice, how could it be called moral? From the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers had recognized that a person must choose a right action of his own free will for his action to be ethical. Kollontai implied that as one recognized the utility of moral rules and chose to conform to them out of that realization, one became moral. Presumably one had a choice whether or not to dedicate himself to promoting social harmony.

In a burst of unconscious self-revelation Kollontai wrote, “We overthrow the former gods in order to set up in their place our deity—society.”⁴⁰ In the second article she added a corollary, “When society as a whole is threatened with danger from one social group, then the act of self-defense, in whatever form it takes, should be recognized as moral; then the principle of nonresistance to evil is the greatest moral crime.”⁴¹ Thus in fighting for the good, all weapons became acceptable, indeed virtuous, and all obstacles evil.

Kollontai’s naiveté, her breezy self-confidence, reflect a life which up to this time had been free of truly difficult ethical choices. Declaring that “we overthrow the former gods to set up in their place our deity—society,” she did not perceive that society could be a bloodthirsty god which would demand sacrifices. Instead she saw “society,” or at least a properly constituted society, as a purifier of human personality. “Only in the new social labor order,” Kollontai wrote, “in which the concern of society will be directed to the creation of conditions favorable to the flourishing of personality, will the social atmosphere be formed in which the realization of the higher moral person, now inaccessible to us, will be possible.” In the meantime, “society, being the source of morals, serves for [the positivist] as the next, immediate goal; outside of social cohabitation there are not and there cannot be ethics.”⁴² This position was easy to take in 1905, when the evils of tsarist oppression were clear; it would be harder to live by in 1922, when the imperatives of Kollontai’s cherished “society” came into conflict with her personal values. Yet even then she would remain faithful to her belief in the absolute priority of social imperatives. She would cling to her amorphous concept of “society,” that notion which blended Rousseau and the communal elements of Russia’s heritage, and which embodied the idea that there was a great human mass, trampled under foot now, but capable, given the right conditions, of building a perfect community where individual will and general will would coexist harmoniously. Kollontai never realized that these were mystical conceptions, touched with faith and sadly unamenable to proof. Like so many materialists, she thought that her philosophy rested on “objective” science. She had found the nonmetaphysical path to ultimate truth, for she did not recognize that all ultimate truths are ultimately metaphysical. She thought that faith could be based on logic and that evil was economically determined.

The popular pamphlets and the philosophical studies express Kollontai’s variant of Marxism; the premises would remain central to her ideology throughout her life. She accepted the orthodox Marxist scheme of history, stressing the virtue of the working class and the achievement of revolution. In her vision of the future, she attached great importance to a change in human relationships from competition to cooperation. The final goal was the creation of both mutual dependence and freedom; the process had already begun within the proletariat. It was a strongly deter- minist ideology forged by ardent belief.

Yet as her ideology stood in 1905, it lacked one central element: the set of ideas for which Kollontai was to become famous. There was nothing in the writings of 1905 about women. The absence does not mean that Kollontai came to the woman question after her ideology had formed, for rebellion against traditional female roles had helped make her a Marxist in the first place. But she did not embark on organizational work among women until the winter of 1905. Only several years later did she realize that she could make a contribution to the Social Democratic approach to the issue. By 1905 Kollontai had established herself as a revolutionary, a Social Democrat, a Menshevik. Thereafter she became a socialist feminist.