Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 20:13:44 -0400
Subject: Re: Lenin, Zetkin, Marx on sex?


Once again, I seem to be getting about half of the posts to this thread
(undoubtedly, another AOL snafu), so forgive if I provide redundant
information.

Lisa's quote comes from a text "Dialogue with Clara Zetkin" which was written
by her as an account of an extended conversation with him; the great mass of
the article is between quotation marks, and these passages are generally
treated as authoritative Lenin. I am sure it is available in more than one
collection, but if you are having trouble tracking it down, I found in on my
bookshleves in _The Lenin Anthology_, Robert C. Tucker, editor. New York: WW
Norton & Co., 1975. pp. 685-699. The discussion covers the 'woman question'
in general, and takes up Lenin's sexual puritanism (it is developed at length
and is unmistakeable) at some length. It even touches one a few criticisms
Lenin makes of Luxenburg's work with German prostitutes.

I was able to find some bibliographic references to the intersection of
German Social Democracy and feminism, and they would provide some interesting
contextual analysis of Zetkin's work.
Werner Thonnessen, _The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Declinbe of the
Women's Movement in German Social Democracy, 1863-1933_ London: Pluto Press,
1973.
Jean Quataert, _Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917._
Princeton University Press, 1978.
I do not know the works myself
.
If anyone is interested in these topics, another figure which should also be
examined is Alexandra Kollontai, a very interesting figure in the Bolshevik
Party who wrote a number of texts, including "Sexual Relations and the Class
Struggle", "Love and the New Morality", and "Women Workers Struggle for Their
Rights." Kollontai was a leader of the Workers' Opposition group in the
Bolsheviks, a group which criticized the Bolshevik leadership over the
Konstadt rebellion and had an affinity with other "left-wing Communist
groups" (Pannekoek in Holland, Bordiga in Italy, Bela Kun in Hungary).
Somehow, however, Kollontai managed to repair her relations with the
Bolsheviks to the extent that she survived the Stalinist purges -- a sign
both of her willingness to abandon all public statement of her previous views
and of her good luck to be doing ambassadorial work abroad for a great deal
of the 1930s.

Everything that Justin said about Marx and Engels was correct. I must add, if
only out of filial piety, that Engels' lover was an IRISH woman, a further
cause for Marx's cantakerous bourgeois moralism. (Marx also led a move to
expel the American section of the First International led a renowned
suffragist and 'free-lover', Vctoria Woodhull, on the grounds that it put
"the woman question before the labor question." 

Leo



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