Notes on socialism and sex..

Some random notes I've put together this evening after reading Lenin's writings on women. Thoughts appreciated - these are very rough, so I'd like to know what to develop and whether to write it up into something more coherent!

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Given the constituent parts of my daily existence, it's hardly surprising that sexual politics is a large theoretical preoccupation of mine. There is passion, excitement, comradeship and beauty in equal measure in both.

And in imagining a better future, a socialist future, I have always been incapable of detaching political and economic liberty from the freedom to love in a new way. To love, as Kollontai argues, without possession or boundary. To love without the fear of reaching an impossible peak, to love without dependency or shame.

This is why, as a socialist, Lenin's insistent sexual moralism is such a constant disappointment.

In his discussion with Clara Zetkin, painstakingly retold in her notes 'Lenin on the woman question', he makes no bones about tearing Alexandra Kollontai's theory - that 'sex should be as easy as drinking a glass of water' - to pieces. 'Would a normal man, with normal thirst,' he asks, 'lie down and drink from the gutter? Or even from a glass who's rim had been greased by many lips?'

He will not vouch, he adds, for 'male comrades who chase after every petticoat', nor for 'women whose love affairs are entwined with politics'.

This from a leader who had an excellent position on the organisation of women in the party, and on the importance of extending revolutionary ideas into the home as well as the workplace.

Lenin's letters to his suggested lover, Innessa Armand, lay out his proposals for communist love. In place of marriage, he proposes a proletarian civil union; indistinguishable from marriage in form, he envisages the partnership as monogamous and lifelong. This is an exact replica of bourgeois moralism.

Of course, the Bolsheviks legalised divorce, so they were eager in one sense to tear down the oppressive family institutions. But as socialists we must understand that it was not simply the label 'marriage' that was so destructive to familial and sexual relations. It wasn't even the fact that divorce was illegal, although this was undoubtedly a huge constraint on the rights of women and the possibility of  unrestrained love. What ruins love under capitalism is the insidious nature of every intimate personal relation. The fact that every single interaction is bound up not only in the economic base, but in the ideological superstructure.

The superstructure is the terrifying mass of ideas, practices, ways of living our daily lives that come not from 'nature' but from our relation to capitalism. The base might dictate the need for women to work in the factories during both World Wars - but the superstructure created Rosie the Riveter. Likewise, whilst private property generates the need for patrilineal societies, it is ideology which supplies us with the ideal of lifelong love, of finding 'the one'.

Of course, this superstructure cannot simply dissolve immediately as soon as workers seize power. Lenin himself recognises this to an extent - he discusses the problem of women, post-revolution, still being confined to the eternal drudgery of housework whilst their male partners throw themselves into party work. This serves, he says, not only to perpetuate the oppression of women the Bolsheviks were wholeheartedly attempting to destroy, but also drives a wedge between women and the party as they begin to resent it for taking up their husbands time and energy and leaving them in much the same position they were before. His solution was eminently sensible and inherently progressive - a true socialisation of housework and childcare, leaving people of all genders free to work, relax and continue building a better society.

The fact that Lenin is so progressive in this respect makes his conservative attitude to sex almost ridiculous. Clara Zetkin points out that sexuality and the moral maze surrounding it is where women feel their oppression perhaps the most. If this is the case, it is likely to be where they find their liberation first too. A sexual awakening can be inherently political. Many people only discover love or sexual arousal for the first time when they discover someone of the same sex; given the social castigation that follows, how can we say this is not political? Or the freedom women discovered at the onset of the sexual revolution: the contraceptive pill and Shere Hite's groundbreaking study of female sexuality meant women could sleep around and enjoy it too, changing the way we interacted with sex and men on one level forever.

It's true that socialists can't substitute progressive sexual ethics for committed political work; we can't, as much as some of us might like to, move into polyamorous communes and spend our days wrapped up in love and sex, removing ourselves from capitalism. We need to work for a society where everyone has the opportunity to love without fear. But reinscribing the same conservative sexual moralism - or ignoring the question altogether - can only harm our cause and alienate those we wish to reach the most.