Libidinal Bolshevism

The Libidinal Economy of Proletarian Dictatorship, with one Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai.

The Bolshevik Revolution was a project in libidinal communization. The new, collective libidinal economy was advocated and partially implemented by certain elements within the Bolsheviks, who were often misaligned and ignored, not least because many of them were women. The early years of the party saw an embrace of a more liberated mode of sexuality, with the decriminalization of homosexuality, abortion, and the encouragement of alternative modes of love to the bourgeois marriage.

Most prominent among these figures was Alexandra Kollontai, whose writings remain invaluable in dissecting the libidinal economy of the early Bolsheviks. Her letter Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth, wherein she (perhaps unintentionally) dissects the libidinal economics of the Communists, is far too often ignored or hidden by communists, yet it reflects a revolutionary dilemma, necessity, and solution. I quote from her at length¹:

“The ‘riddle of love’ that interests us here is one such problem. This question of the relationships between the sexes is a mystery as old as human society itself… In Russia over the recent years of intense civil war and general dislocation there has been little interest in the nature of the riddle. The men and women of the working classes were in the grip of other emotions, passions and experiences… In face of the revolutionary threat, tender-winged Eros fled from the surface of life. There was neither time nor a surplus of inner strength for love’s ‘joys and pains.’ Such is the law of the preservation of humanity’s social and psychological energy. As a whole, this energy is always directed to the most urgent aims of the historical moment. And in Russia, for a time, the biological instinct of reproduction, the natural voice of nature dominated the situation. The unadorned sexual drive is easily aroused but is soon spent; thus ‘wingless Eros’ consumes less inner strength than ‘winged Eros.’ whose love is woven of delicate strands of every kind of emotion. ‘Wingless Eros’ does not make one suffer from sleepless nights, does not sap one’s will, and does not entangle the rational workings of the mind. The fighting class could not have fallen under the power of ‘winged Eros’ at a time when the clarion call of revolution was sounding... Individual sex love, which lies at the heart of the pair marriage, demands a great expenditure of inner energy. The working class was interested not only in economising in terms of material wealth but also in preserving the intellectual and emotional energy of each person. For this reason, at a time of heightened revolutionary struggle, the undemanding instinct of reproduction spontaneously replaced the all embracing ‘winged Eros.’”

In this, Kollontai in no uncertain terms explains the libidinal economy of labor in the USSR, during and after the White Terror. Unlike many of her contemporaries at the time, she outlines that libidinal energy is not relegated to sex, but is instead harnessed by the proletariat for various activities, such as production, theorization, or reproduction. She names this energy “Eros,” distinguishing “wingless Eros” (productive libidinal energy) and “winged Eros” (pure libidinal pleasure).

Kollontai lacks certain modern vocabulary later provided by figures like Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, and Lyotard, but the sentiment remains clear– harnessing the spirit of “Eros” in all its various forms is the means by which proletarians (and populations in general) engage production and expend social energy. It is worth noting, however, that she sees libidinal energy as a fundamentally productive force which can be harnessed by social organizations. This perspective places her theories as a sort of proto-Deleuzo-Guatarrianism, elaborating a version of the “desiring-machine” decades before French philosophy would rediscover the idea.

She continues:

“‘Wingless Eros’ has ceased to satisfy psychological needs. Emotional energy has accumulated and men and women, even of the working class, have not yet learned to use it for the inner life of the collective. This extra energy seeks an outlet in the love-experience. The many-stringed lyre of the god of love drowns the monotonous voice of ‘wingless Eros.’”

In the next part, the author seems to transition from an analysis of revolutionary-era desire to a post-revolutionary libidinal economy. The libidinal energy of production cannot alone satisfy the proletarian population. It may fulfill itself initially through revolutionary fervor and a pride and love for the people, yet has neither been socially recognized nor accounted for within the population or party. This failure to account for the libidinal economy developing within the Soviet Union meant that the party was unable to prevent the necessity for a New Economic Policy, the beginnings of which serve as the context for this letter. Kollontai recognizes the fact which Deleuze & Guattari would articulate decades later, namely “that all sexuality is a matter of economy.”²

In addition, emotional energy accumulates. People seek to use this emotional investment in different fields, but it must be expended and will always invest itself in some experience or organization. This, again, reflects a cruder version of the theory expounded by Deleuze & Guattari decades later, and one cannot but wonder whether or not they encountered her work (or, if not, what they might have made of it).

“What does this mean? Is this a reactionary step?… Nothing of the sort!… It is time to recognize open that love is not only a powerful natural factor, a biological force, but also a social factor. Essentially love is a profoundly social emotion. At all stages of human development love has in different forms, it is true, been an integral part of culture. Even the bourgeoisie, who saw love as a ‘private matter,’ was able to channel the expression of love in its class interests. The ideology of the working class must pay even greater attention to the significance of love as a factor which can, like any other psychological or social phenomenon, be channeled to the advantage of the collective. Love is not in the least a ‘private’ matter concerning only the two loving persons: love possesses a uniting element which is valuable to the collective [italics added].”

In this final paragraph of the introduction, Kollontai dismisses the cries of those who see the developing libidinal economy and its study as a regression towards capitalism. Having established herself that desire is a productive element of the human constitution, she moves a step further and declares it a social phenomena, thoroughly breaking with many Bolshevik doctrines.

Lenin took a conservative view of desire, dismissing the attitude that “…in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water… this glass of water theory is completely un-Marxist, and, moreover, anti-social³.” In contrast, Kollontai understands (or seems to understand) that libidinal investment is nothing if not social, and that it must be harnessed by the communists lest capitalist desire-capturing resurface and eliminate the revolutionary progress made by the Bolsheviks.

As indeed it would. The revolution in Russia was not exported and failed to expand to developed countries precisely because revolutionaries have thus far failed to elaborate on a communal, revolutionary libidinal economy. Without such a model, without creating a collective mode of desiring, the hope and investment in the October Revolution was squandered for decades, until the final blow to the revolution came from Gorbachev. However, even had he not dissolved the USSR, it would have made little difference to the hopes for post-capitalist desire. The Bolsheviks had long since abandoned any hopes of harnessing communal libidinal energy. This would play a fatal role in their dissolution, as the capitalist West seduced the Eastern proletariat with its desire-capturing mechanics, its commodities so libidinally charged they burst out at the seams. As Mark Fisher put it⁴:

…there is only desire for capitalism. The Communist world, like IBM, and the then dominant corporate capitalist world, is boring and dreary, and that’s an objection to it! The new capitalist world won’t be like that. The new capitalist world will be about desire in a way that the Communist world won’t be… The fact that it’s not only that the Soviet bloc was repressive — politically repressive — it also inhibits desire and blocks desire… There’s a narrative behind it, which is a story about desire… Protesters have the products of advanced capitalism, therefore… it’s not only that they’re hypocrites, it’s that they don’t really want what they say they want. They don’t really want a wealth beyond capitalism. What they want is all of the fruits of capitalism — and ultimately that’s why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world.

This contradiction between what many of us consciously desire (the end of capitalism) and what we subconsciously libidinally invest in (iPhones, Starbucks, large houses, large bookshelves with complex material) is at the core of many critiques of the left, Fisher included. What many critics in this spirit, such as Lyotard and Fisher, fail to examine is an alternative to capitalist desire-capture (though Fisher was in the process of doing so before his suicide). What does anti-capitalist desire look like? What is an anti-capitalist libidinal economy?

Luckily, Kollontai offers a potential alternative in this letter as well, a collectivised libidinal economy.

…Communist society is being built on the principle of comradeship and solidarity. Solidarity is not only an awareness of common interests: it depends also on the intellectual and emotional ties linking the members of the collective. For a social system to be built on solidarity and co-operation it is essential that people should be capable of love and warm emotions. The proletarian ideology, therefore, attempts to educate and encourage every member of the working class to be capable of responding to the distress and needs of other members of the class, of a sensitive understanding of others and a penetrating consciousness of the individual’s relationship to the collective. All these “warm emotions” – sensitivity, compassion, sympathy and responsiveness – derive from one source: they are aspects of love, not in the narrow, sexual sense but in the broad meaning of the word. Love is an emotion that unites and is consequently of an organizing character.

What Kollontai begins to offer us in this first paragraph is a libidinal politics of love. Rather than investing our desire into capitalism, we ought invest that libidinal energy into love. She continues:

“The proletariat should also take into account the psychological and social role that love, both in the broad sense and in the sense of relationships between the sexes, can and must play, not in strengthening family-marriage ties, but in the development of collective solidarity. What is the proletariat’s ideal of love? We have already seen that each epoch has its ideal; each class strives to fill the conception of love with a moral content that suits its own interests. Each stage of cultural development, with its richer intellectual and emotional experiences, redefines the image of Eros… In modern society, sharp contradictions frequently arise and battles are waged between the various manifestations of emotion. A deep intellectual and emotional involvement in one’s work may not be compatible with love for a particular man or woman, love for the collective might conflict with love for husband, wife or children... The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation at the many forms and facets of ‘winged Eros’ in the way that the hypocritical bourgeoisie is; on the contrary, it tries to direct these emotions, which it sees as the result of complex social circumstances, into channels which are advantageous to the class during the struggle for and the construction of communist society. The complexity of love is not in conflict with the interests of the proletariat. On the contrary, it facilitates the triumph of the ideal of love-comradeship which is already developing.”

Kollontai again returns to Eros, this time singling out winged Eros and separating them from their non-winged sibling. Winged Eros is the element of desire which takes the form of pure libidinal pleasure. The bourgeoisie attempts to suppress, shame, and control this raw libidinal energy into Capital; the proletariat, on the contrary, must direct desire into the construction of communism (what some may call communization) through “the ideal of love-comradeship.”

However, her thought begins to take an unorthodox turn when she returns to non-winged Eros:

In this sense the proletarian ideology will persecute ‘wingless Eros’ in a much more strict and severe way than bourgeois morality. ‘Wingless Eros’ contradicts the interests of the working class. In the first place it inevitably involves excesses and therefore physical exhaustion, which lower the resources of labour energy available to society. In the second place it impoverishes the soul, hindering the development and strengthening of inner bonds and positive emotions. And in the third place it usually rests on an inequality of rights in relationships between the sexes… which undoubtedly hinder the development of comradely feelings. ‘Winged Eros’ is quite different. Obviously sexual attraction lies at the base of ‘winged Eros’ too, but the difference is that the person experiencing love acquires the inner qualities necessary to the builders of a new culture - sensitivity, responsiveness and the desire to help others… The aim of proletarian ideology is that men and women should develop these qualities not only in relation to the chosen one but in relation to all the members of the collective… The only stipulation is that these emotions facilitate the development and strengthening of comradeship. The ideal of love-comradeship… involves the recognition of the rights and integrity of the other’s personality, a steadfast mutual support and sensitive sympathy, and responsiveness to the other’s needs.

Here, we get to the meat of Kollontai’s alternative. Rather than simply disinvesting in wingless Eros, the productive libidinal energy, she argues for its persecution, to root out and destroy any desire for and within production. In this, Kollontai shares beliefs with the anti-work movement of a later era. She urges us to reject the workerisms held by the dominant figures of the time, and instead redirect libidinal energy away from production and instead into the relationship with one’s community. Kollontai recaptures the essence of communism– the working class, not production itself. The prioritization of production over community, Kollontai seems to say, is a losing battle for communism, demonstrated by the collapse of the USSR and the capitalist backsliding of the PRC. No economic system will ever harness libidinal energy for production as well as capitalism, and any attempt to do so is a losing battle. Kollontai was well ahead of her time in recognizing this, and theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and even Mark Fisher owe much to her developments, although few have given her the credit she is due.

“…with the realization of communist society love will acquire a transformed and unprecedented aspect. By that time the ‘sympathetic ties’ between all the members of the new society will have grown and strengthened. Love potential will have increased, and love-solidarity will become the lever that competition and self-love were in the bourgeois system… In the new and collective society, where interpersonal relations develop against a background of joyful unity and comradeship, Eros will occupy an honourable place as an emotional experience multiplying human happiness… Modern love always sins, because it absorbs the thoughts and feelings of ‘loving hearts’ and isolates the loving pair from the collective. In the future society, such a separation will not only become superfluous but also psychologically inconceivable. In the new world the accepted norm of sexual relations will probably be based on free, healthy and natural attraction… and on ‘transformed Eros.’

“But at the present moment we stand between two cultures. And at this turning-point… the proletariat’s interest is to do its best to ensure the quickest possible accumulation of ‘sympathetic feelings.’ In this period the moral ideal defining relationships is not the unadorned sexual instinct but the many-faceted love experience of love-comradeship… in proclaiming the rights of ‘winged Eros,’ the ideal of the working class at the same time subordinates this love to the more powerful emotion of love-duty to the collective. However great the love between two members of the collective, the ties binding the two persons to the collective will always take precedence, will be firmer, more complex and organic… The task of proletarian ideology is not to drive Eros from social life but to rearm him according to the new social formation, and to educate sexual relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of comradely solidarity.”

Kollontai finishes here by elaborating on her idea of a collectivised libidinal economy. Rather than investing our desire in an individual product, person, or place, we must divert and dilute our desires to encompass the community as a whole, a libidinal investment in the idea of the commune. She believes that the only way to build communism is through this collectivization of desire, the love and pleasure derived from the whole of the community, more so than from any of the individual parts. It is time we follow in her footsteps.

It is vital, however, that we not confuse “libidinal investment within the people as a whole” with investment in the party, in the proletarian dictatorship, or in any permanent, central structures. This was not Kollontai’s evaluation; the word “party” only appears once in her letter, when mentioning party workers. Communism, should it be built in tandem with a state apparatus and/or worker’s party, will always be built by the people themselves first, second, and third, not through indirectly-controlled organizations.

Lenin deserves praise for his progressive perspective on marriage, no doubt, but his views on sexuality and libidinal energy are nothing if not reactionary. When he states “Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?,” I cannot but wonder who is likened to the gutter water, or what is wrong with “a glass greasy from many lips" (by which he of course refers to promiscuous people). Kollontai offers a vision of libidinal liberation untainted with reactionary hostility to sexual desire, and unmatched both then and now, a prediction and answer to struggles and questions which would emerge in industrial countries decades later.

Many radical understandings of love do not go so far as to understand the libidinal economy underlying contemporary notions of the concept, and as such miss the point entirely and say far too little about collectivization. Without the communization of desire and love itself, we are simply hurling rainbow-colored molotovs. Through Kollontai, we can discover an alternative revolutionary politics.

For the 60’s and 70’s radicals, for the aftermath of May ‘68, for the philosophes who added to a baseline material examination of capitalism an understanding of its psychological underpinnings. Revisiting her work must be a task of the utmost importance for revolutionaries, regardless of one’s individual ideological (or anti-ideological) standing.

Lenin, for the most part, wrote for his own time. Many of his principles are still applicable and valuable, but this is more a matter of coincidence than direct intention. Alexandra Kollontai wrote for the future.

1. An excerpt from Alexandra Kollontai’s letter Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth, originally published in 1923 in Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) magazine. Available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1923/winged-eros.htm

2. From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written in 1972. Excerpt is from page 12, available online at https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf

3. From Clara Zetkin’s work Lenin on the Women’s Question, originally published in Her Memorandum Book. Available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm

4. From Mark Fisher’s Post-Capitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, posthumously published in 2021. Pages cited here are (on the digital version linked below) 43-45. Available online at https://kyl.neocities.org/books/[SOC%20FIS]%20postcapitalist%20desire%20-%20the%20final%20lectures.pdf