Communism and the Family

Does easier divorce make someone free if they have no income and must raise children alone? In her 1920 essay Communism and the Family, Alexandra Kollontai places the transformation of intimate life within the organization of work and subsistence. She rejects the idea that the existing family is an eternal natural form, but changing individual attitudes is not enough either. Her question is material: when wives and mothers remain responsible for sustaining everyday life, what makes formal equality a usable choice? The essay follows that question into cooking, laundry and childcare.

A factory job does not remove domestic work

Kollontai refuses a simple progression from employment to liberation. Capitalism recruits women into wage labor without relieving them of housekeeping and motherhood. The worker leaving the factory still has to cook, clean and care for children. Earnings and domestic responsibilities accumulate rather than replace one another. The household is therefore not a private refuge outside the economy: it absorbs work left unfinished when the paid working day ends, making another day of life and production possible.

She traces changes in household production. Cloth, candles and other goods once made at home increasingly come from industry, while cleaning, cooking, washing and mending recur without producing an enduring stock of goods. She describes such work as creating no new value. That language should not be confused with saying it has no social use: its necessity explains why wages alone cannot free women. It nevertheless creates a tension. Does measuring labor through accumulating products or value continue to devalue maintenance that must be repeated each day?

Making provision a collective responsibility

Public dining rooms, communal kitchens, laundries and repair centers are political institutions in this argument, not convenient domestic extras. They would change whose time must absorb everyday needs. Nurseries, kindergartens, schools and child welfare would make upbringing less dependent on a single household’s means. Kollontai imagines women gaining time for meetings, study and cultural life. Political participation requires time, and access to time depends on the distribution of work.

She also addresses the fear that collective care means forcibly separating children from parents. Rejecting that prospect, she distinguishes affection from the family’s exclusive obligation to secure survival. Mothers should extend concern beyond their own children to those of other workers. The issue is not whether parental love survives, but whether its boundaries should determine which children receive food, education and care.

These passages describe a revolutionary program, not a list of universally accomplished reforms. Moving work into public facilities still leaves someone doing the cooking, cleaning and caring. Who sets their conditions, pay and service arrangements? Can those receiving care participate in decisions? The essay does not fully develop these questions. Equating socialized housework with the disappearance of gender hierarchy would skip the organization of the transferred labor itself.

Free union consequently acquires material preconditions. Kollontai expects love and comradeship to replace dependence; she is not merely asking partners to become kinder. People should not have to remain married to secure their livelihood. Yet her political language centers workers and mothers. It also invites questions about people unable to enter wage labor, those refusing motherhood, and those needing sustained care: how would they enjoy equally substantial freedom?

Read alongside Emma Goldman’s Marriage and Love, the essay reveals different emphases on free love and collective provision within arguments against dependence. Servants of Globalization adds another problem: one household’s relief may depend on another woman migrating away from her own family to provide care. Escaping housework is then an insufficient measure of liberation. We must also ask who gains time, and whose time makes that gain possible.