Freeing Feelings in Russia
From translation of an article by M P T Acharya in l'en dehors, July 1932
Pursuing an argument in the pages of the French anarchist paper l'en dehors, Indian anarchist writer M P T Acharya (as featured on earlier post) explored questions that were to come to the fore in discussions among libertarians and others decades later, notably women's liberation and the politics of the personal. In attempting to demystify the supposed brave new world of the Soviet Union in this regard, he may have exaggerated the positive in the pre-revolutionary situation of Russian women, but made valid points, for example about the necessarily limited capacity of the state to prescribe for personal fulfilment.
Comrade Eliézer Fournier is mistaken in thinking that liberation of women and of marriage were due to the Soviet government. Before the war, Russian women had more freedom than the women of western Europe. Being married wasn't considered necessary in order to live together, even for people of 'good reputation'. It was not held to be indecent if a person went into another's room without being fully dressed. The universities, in and outside Russia, had a higher number of women students of Russian nationality than from the countries of western Europe. The immensely significant and risky part played by women in the liberation movement is well known. Even women of the upper class had gone over to the workers, and stayed, like (Alexandra) Kollontai and Vera Figner. People from the democratic countries who came to live under the Tsarist régime had found more democracy and less prudery among men and women in Russia than in parts of Europe with more advanced ideas.
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| Alexandra Kollontai, in the year the article was published. From the biography by Cathy Porter. |
After the Revolution, it was
noted that women from Muslim regions of Russia were more active in agitating
for female emancipation than those of Moscow, who only cared about attending to
their appearance and going dancing - just like the 'leaders' in fact.
The communists tried to arrange their own homes in the
bourgeois style current in other countries, and to keep their wives in a
bourgeois frame of mind. As one communist said: 'The first act of the
Revolution, for communists, was to get divorced from their proletarian wives
and marry aristocrats.' (Numerous instances could be cited in support of this
assertion). The sum total of women's activity is to join the public services
and become bureaucrats - which is happening now in western Europe. If to become
members of the police, soldiers, prison warders or torturers constitutes
'liberation', the Bolsheviks gave them the opportunity, no question. But the US
and other countries do the same. China has its women's battalions too.
Amanullah [Khan]'s father had female gendarmes as his bodyguards in the harem.
Russian women were always free in the best sense of the
word, and were consequently considered 'shameless' in western Europe. The
number of their substantial literary productions was greater than at present;
there were even more doctors pre-war than today.
But Tatar women always had the benefit of being free of the
veil and liberated from illiteracy; they were more advanced than
emancipated Turkish women.
What the Bolsheviks did in the name of liberation was to
assume no responsibility as far as women's economic situation was concerned,
even while invoking liberty and responsibility. It's true that their laws state
all women are free to marry and divorce as they like. But they were used to
doing that in the time of the Tsars. As for insurance provision for divorced
mothers, the same law exists in the capitalist countries. The State does not
provide for the needs of divorced mothers, but it makes the man or men
indicated by the mother pay maintenance. - I recently heard of a young man who
had to pay nine-tenths of his wages to feed nine children.
As for those women who are not economically indispensable
(like working women), they can do a lot of things they couldn't have done
before. They can accuse four or more men of being the father of their only
child and get payments for upkeep from them all. If that's freedom, it's also
engendering and encouraging corruption among women - without the Russian state
taking on the responsibility as it claims. Similar corruption is practised
professionally with the protection of the State in all countries, including
Russia.
The only good thing the Soviet government has done is to
free women from being forced to bring children into the world, but without
supplying them with means of contraception. But other countries are coming
round to the idea of the need for a right to abortion. In the prevailing
conditions, the cost of abortion is as prohibitive in the USSR as it would be
in other countries, if it was allowed. Preventive methods are cheaper and
better for health, it's true. But in either case, they have to be purchased.
Hence the necessity for abortion, costly and dangerous as it is, in Russia as
in other countries.
The Soviet government has not abolished prostitution, as in
its original banning of it on pain of prosecution, it even derives a source of
revenue from it. It has even set up 'houses of sexual satisfaction in the
interests of the people's health' - based squarely on those unfortunate women.
Even in capitalist countries, brothels are considered physically, morally and
intellectually dangerous... We only read the Soviets' propaganda
line about sexual regulation and regularising, we don't think about hunger.
In fact, the Soviet government is like any capitalist
system or the Catholic religion: it can only exist by doing business. It can
authorise and legalise certain freedoms in matters of sexuality, but its
business and its interest are at the same time to punish and to encourage the
'evil' as in capitalist regimes, it cannot liberate women from economic worries
and harassments.
As long as the government does not supply the means of
everyone's existence, no law and no regulation in favour of liberty, health and
ethics can secure those things. Poor people will have to profit from those
corrupting laws, simply in the interests of their continued existence. The best
laws are powerless against debauchery and poverty because decrees are the
result of the misery created by the law-makers. No government, however
well-intentioned, can obtain food and life for all, with or without work. It
can only prevent millions of people from eating and working and punish those
who infringe those limitations and restrictions (called law and order). To make
generous laws without granting the means to use them is to act in a
contradictory way, to neutralise and prevent the realisation of 'good
intentions'. Laws and 'good intentions' (or arrangements) are mutually
destructive. Laws are incompatible with freedom, but they are necessary faced
with the force majeure of statist economics.
Hence so many shameful contradictions and abolition of
laws 'to make freedom stronger' such as one even finds in a soviet state.
Suppress or abolish the State and no law is of any use, and liberty and the
economy generally will benefit from their disappearance.
However, there cannot be any authorised or imposed
communism in sexual relations. Sexual matters are part of individual freedom,
as between the partners. In this case, you cannot train people up to partake of
sexual pleasures without denying freedom and pleasure. Responsibility from the
sexual viewpoint cannot either be made instantaneous by 'improving' or
'regularising' sexual freedom, a system which seems to arouse the enthusiasm of
Comrade Eliézer Fournier. But blind admiration for Russian Soviet marriage laws
is rooted in the capitalist habit of thinking (or rather not thinking) that the
Bolsheviks are going too far. That can only please the bourgeois who are blind
in sexual matters, who make no difference between liberty and libertinism and
condemn both. -
M. ACHARYA
=====================(From RaHN Blogger).
Some readers may be reminded of certain preoccupations and publications of the London 'Solidarity' group in the 1970s:
"Between 1920 and about 1933 the situation gradually regressed to the point where the sexual ideology of the leading groups in the USSR could no longer be distinguished from that of the leading groups in any conservative country." - M. Brinton, The Irrational in Politics (1970).
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