ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Make Way For Winged Eros!

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

The ACFM gang gather for a springtime reading of a prototype acid-communist text by Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Download the text and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem get their teeth into Make Way for Winged Eros! A Letter to Working Youth, published in 1923.Check out the AK-47 podcast mentioned in this show: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast […]

Hi everyone, this is Jem, and you are about to hear our Microdose episode all about this very important essay by Alexandra Collentai, published in English under the title Make Way for Winged Eros. But before that, I want to tell you about an event that is going to be happening on Wednesday, 7th of May, 2025, and apologies to everyone listening in the future. But if you're not, then on Wednesday 7th of May, 2025, at the Avalon Cafe in South Bermondsey, in South London, we will be holding a live ACFM event. This is being hosted by Circle Dance, which is a regular party featuring DJs and sometimes live music, which is organised by producer Matt. On this occasion, I think we're just going to have DJs, mostly playing sort of move music. and the main substance of the event that evening will be a live evening-length ACFM trip, a sort of participatory evening for all of us. We'll be talking about the future, what we mean by it, how we imagine it, how we get there,

how we invent it. There's going to be a consciousness-raising, workshop-style discussion for everybody attending, who wants to take part, and that's going to be punctuated by things like conversations between the three of us who host the show, film clips, a slideshow, collective listening to some music, some theories, some history. It's going to be like an interactive episode of the show that we create together. It's £7 to get in. There'll be a bar and hot vegan food on offer at the Avalon Cafe,

which is a very nice little venue in, as I say, in South Burmantee, all the way down in South London. So quite a schlap for me from Walthamstow, but absolutely worth it for anyone. You can find tickets at the website. There's no WWW in the address. The address is just circle-dance. Dot eventcube.io.

That's circle-hyphen dance. Dot eventcube. Dot I.O. And that is where you can get tickets. And we really hope to see many of you there. Now, back to the episode. This is acid, man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left.

My name's Kea Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by my good friend Nadia Idle. Hello. And my other good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. And today we're doing one of our special reading group sessions and we're reading Maked Way for Winged E. Ross by Alexandra Collanty. We were doing this linked to our session, the main trip that we recorded called 50 Shades of Acid. One of the things we looked at there was the whole acid communist, acid corbinist project, our project, ACFM project. And linked to that, we wanted to read what we...

thought of as a classic AC Acid Communist text. We thought about something by Felix Guattari, but if you've ever read anything by Felix Guateri, you'll know the problems there. Quite dense and not quite suited. So we thought we'd go back to a real classic, a text from 1923, a text from the moment of the Russian Revolution, or just after the Russian Revolution, the moment of effervescence, perhaps. Do we want to set the context about who Alexandra Collentai is before we start the text. Yes, but before we even do that, let's just say that this is freely available on the internet. So if you look for listeners, make way for winged eros, you will find this text.

I've printed it out on recycled paper, of course, and it is around 19 pages, so 19 short pages with big margins. So if you would like to read along with us, you can go and pause this and go and get that reading. now. So, Alexandra Collentai. Alexander Collinthai was a Russian revolutionary. She came from a highly privileged background, but became a revolutionary at a young age. She's born in the 1870s. So she's been heavily involved in the Russian Revolution. She had a very interesting political career.

She was a Menshevik for a long time. One of the faction from the Russian Social Democrats did agree with Lenin's turn away from Mathis Democracy, awards the organisational technique of the vanguard party, but then she, once the revolution was underway, the Russian Civil War was underway, she joined the Bolsheviks, although she then joined the sort of a narco-sindicalist faction of the Bolsheviks, the workers' opposition, which is one of those figures that I often think, yeah, I think that's what I'd have done in that situation. That's the faction I'd have joined at that moment. I always think it's completely absurd when people try to define their political identity in the 2020s on the basis of which

faction in the Russian Revolution they'd have aligned themselves with, which loads of people still do. On the other hand, it's a sort of irresistible exercise. Then Conanty would, she would join the revolutionary government and she became, she has the record of being the first woman in history to be a member of, to be counted as a member of a government. There are women legislators, there are women elected MPs in various countries before that, but no women had been a member of a cabinet government. No woman had been a member of a cabinet government. Unless you are counting women who are like sovereigns, I don't think there isn't even an example, say if you go back to the Middle Ages of a female minister in a government. There are queens,

but this, so she, that I know of, and I know that other. people who've tried to assess this have also come to the conclusion. People who know more about this, come to the conclusion that Conanty is in fact the first woman ever to be a member of the government. Eventually, the sort of inter-and-sign fractional conflict within the Communist Party in Russia leads to her. She doesn't end up being either exiled or murdered by Stalin, as happens to almost all of her compatriots, all of her cohort, are Bolsheviks, but she does end up having to effectively be outside the USSR for most of her remaining life. She serves as an ambassador to Norway and to Sweden for a long time.

And she plays an important role in negotiating peace between the Soviet Union and Finland at one stage. And eventually, she lives until the early 50s. She's a really, really interesting figure. She's a key, and she is absolutely, she was understood by her contemporaries in her own time and has been understood by many people subsequently as an absolutely, crucial figure in the history of socialist feminism. You know, she was good friends with Rosa Luxembourg. They would sometimes hang out together.

I believe they attended the first ever international social arts women's conference together, for example. She's a very, very interesting figure, and she was obviously very concerned with the question of what is the place of women and what is the role of something like feminist thought in the building of a socialist society. And then the context for this particular article, this particular article was written for the Communist Youth magazine in the early 20s. And it is called Letter to a Young Comrade. And it is presented as a reply to a letter received, I think either by the magazine or by Colanty personally, from a Young Comrade, somewhere out in the Soviet Union, during this period of effervescent Revolutionary Construction. And the Young Comrade is complaining that in recent,

and months, their fellows have been overly distracted by a growing interest in romantic love, which wasn't something that was distracting people a couple of years previously. And this is her response to that claim. Is it romantic love necessarily? We'll get into that. Yeah. Yeah, that is that that is what the letter is responding. The claim that's being made is that they're spending their time, you know, on having relationships, having some romantic relationships. And then The implication being that they shouldn't be, that's a sort of deviation and a waste of time. Yeah, one's always reminded of one of my absolute favourite lines from the history of world cinema is that line from the film of Dr. Givago, where a commissar shouts at the titulary hero, the petty bourgeois of Dr. Zivago, the personal life is dead. And that is supposed to make, you know, the bourgeois liberal Western viewer like shiver with terror at the thought.

that a dictatorial socialist regime might declare the personal life to be dead. But I remember watching that even as a teenager thinking, well, that sounds quite good, actually. That sounds like I wouldn't mind my personal life being dead, just being able to devote myself fully to the project of collective emancipation. That sounds all right. The reason I was questioning that specific thing about that terminology around romance, obviously we are going to get to this later. but whether it's romantic or not, I think, is a question that is taken up by her analysis. I think probably it would be easier for us to say, like, personal relationships. That's what he's complaining about, like personal relationships and personal sexual relationships.

And she doesn't use the word, yeah, and she doesn't use the word romance at all in the text, which is interesting. Well, it's not used in this translation. I have to say this, the translation is by... It's translated by Alex Holt. Before we get on to the text, this is my first time reading this text. When I was sort of like a teenager, my father used to be in a libertarian socialist group, Solidarity.

I've mentioned it a few times. And they republished Alexander Collentai's pamphlet on the workers' opposition, basically, of making the case of the workers' opposition. So I'd read that, and there was some sort of context in that. I'd sort of known about this, but it's my first time reading. reading it. And it might be a little bit, it might be useful just to mention a little bit of like that. The analysis in that workers' opposition pamphlets and that, and it was a current as well, is that the party become bureaucratized, basically. And, you know, what they wanted was to

de-die bureaucratize the party and sort of like an anarcho syndiclus. They wanted more direct workers' control over individual factories, but also more direct workers' control over the direction of the economy. So sort of like more democratic planning rather than the sort of technocratism. planning. They were opposed to the new economic policy as well. Yeah, in particular, yeah. The policy of allowing some kind of restoration of petty bourgeois privileges in order to generate economic growth. You've got to say these days, looking at the world history for the past 120 years, given that's basically

that's what China decided, the Chinese Communist Party decided to do sometime in the 80s instead of doing perestroika and glastanast or workers control in a sort of Yugoslavian style on a global scale. given that it does seem to have worked out quite well for them, I do find myself wondering if maybe the new economic policy was correct. But my historical sympathies have always been with that left critique. That is the argument for what happens in the Soviet Union is that like, you know, they were immediately in a war with, you know, the Western powers as they all invaded, Britain invades, etc. And they're just coming out of that period when when

Colin Tai is writing this. Whether they knew or not, Hitler's tanks were going to be rolling up through Russia in order to murder and subjugate that population and you sort of need to industrialize to prepare for that. But anyway, that's a big counterfactual. But the other thing about we should add

a little bit more of a tragic tone to the story of Colin Tai. She basically says, I need to go abroad. And so they start sending her to various places in order for, you know, she wants to keep being participant in the revolution, but she can't do it in Russia. So she gets sent on various ambassadorial sort of missions.

I think she's the first ever ambassador as well, isn't she, a female ambassador because she's ambassador to Norway. Yes, I think she probably is, yeah. But basically she sort of realizes that that is in effect sort of like an exile, that they're sending her there so they don't have to kill her, basically. And she makes a decision to stop criticizing the Soviet Union.

Yeah, she doesn't get involved in any of the public criticism. She doesn't, around the purges. And there's various speculations about why, but the most probable reason is, you know, she had a, She had a son and, I think, a grandson eventually who were living in the Soviet Union, who probably would have been killed if she had done. Yeah, I mean, the other leaders of workers' opposition were all killed in the purges, basically. And most of the opponents of workers' opposition, too.

Well, yeah, that is true. But there's a tragic tone to it. A lot of the revolutionaries are really, because she was a really, really committed revolutionary, and a lot of those, you know, there's a tragic tone to quite a lot of that because of the purges, particularly in the 30s, etc. One more thing. Sorry, one more aspect of Alexandra Collentai that I just want to bring up before we start reading, which is that she has the look of an emancipated person, the way she looks at a camera. It is absolutely striking to me looking at her portraits online. And I think it's quite rare to find women's pictures like that. And it reminds me of the kind of coffee table books that were made of like the late 60s, early 70s like feminists when like, you know, feminism was. exploding in the West and like that gaze to have to have a series of pictures of women or in this case one woman who's just looking at the camera with such confidence I think has like I feel like

she's got like the like her revolutionary ideals kind of behind her it really it really is striking to me like the images of her are online so do check them out the look of confidence yeah that's true well she wrote I mean also in the 20s she publishes a memoir called the autobiography of a sexually emancipated woman. And she also published a novel called Red Love. She definitely saw herself for somebody who was sexually emancipated. And partly that's informing the whole of this piece of writing. You just don't tend to get women who are like staring down at the camera and they've got each arm on an, you know, on the arm of an armchair.

it's a very kind of, it's associated with men, a lot of the poses that you find. It really stands out to me, and these are pictures from like a hundred years ago of her sitting, you know, on a chair wearing these, you know, Victorian clothes, but the way she's looking at us is, you know, I think is really striking. That sort of relates to the sort of period when this is written, 1923, you know, the full artistic avant-garde sort of effervescence is going on. They're just about won the civil war. They've fought off the Western powers, etc.

And it's that that gives this a sort of tragic poignancy, basically, because that is not the sort of mood. You probably wouldn't be looking that way, you know, later on in life when she's had to cut her cloth quite considerably, she's basically lived in exile for 30 years or something. Even in the later picture, she is still staring down at the camera. Yeah, she is, yeah. That's nice to hear.

It's true. And she's staring down at the camera in almost all of her pictures, which I think it just genuinely is quite rare. And she's not smiling in any of them. Yeah, totally. I was trying to set that period as like the period of effervescence with a later tragic period, basically. So that goes back to our earlier discussion about like the new economic policy where we definitely need an ACFM line on that. But like, you know, we do. It's the question, the question, the wide. the question is, you know, was this effervescence always going to have some element of tragedy in it because it needed to defend itself when the Russian, when the German revolution fails, it then stands alone and it needs to defend itself against an incredibly hostile world, basically, a world which is going to become so hostile that, you know, it's going to include the Nazis and they're going to try to invade and subjugate the whole country, a whole population, you know, that's one of the questions, isn't it, is whether

that in that period at that time whether any socialist project was going to entail a deeply tragic element. But anyway, let's get back to the effervescent moment. You're saying effervescent a lot, Kea. That's usually my term. You're usually Mr. Stats. I don't know what is going on with this conversation already.

Everything's been subverted already. Let's start. So the first section is called Love as a socioc psychological factor. And in fact, you know, the historical sort of story we've been setting up there is quite relevant because the story she's sort of saying in this opening bit is that there's been this, and it's in reply to this supposed letter, that there's been this, you know, this intense civil war in which people

haven't had the room to think about questions such as love. Now we've got a little bit of calm and we can start to address that to some degree. And if she puts it sort of this way, There can be no doubt that Soviet Russia has entered a new phase of the Civil War. The main theatre of struggle is now the front where the two ideologies, the two cultures, the bourgeois and the proletarian, do battle. Alongside a victory of communist principles and ideas in the sphere of politics and economics, a revolution in the outlook, emotions, and the inner world of working people is inevitably taking place. A new attitude to life, society, work, art, and to the rules of living,

i.e. morality. Can I already be observed, the arrangement of sexual relations is one aspect of these rules of living. One of the things that comes up from there, something that's going to structure the text, which might be worth talking about, is that opening line about how these two ideologies, the bourgeois and the proletarian, are doing battle, because the text is like really admirable in trying to position concepts of love, like materially and historically. But you would say, reading it today, that like this faith that there are two clear ideologies, two clear cultures linked to the material circumstances of the bourgeois and a proletarian, seems harder to defend, I would say. I mean, I think it's really important that she starts this, and she introduces this idea really early in the text, this idea that the revolution in outlook, emotions and inner world is, you know, up in front, as one of the main contexts that are going to be.

discussed, right? So she tells us right at the beginning, this is something that we need to be paying attention to. You need a kind of inner revolution for this thing to work. And then she comes back to that at the end. So I thought that was important. I think that's all true. Yeah. I think Kears raised an interesting point. I mean, you're basically querying the determinism of this model according to which there's a clearly identifiable bourgeois ideology of love. And then there's a clearly identifiable alternative socialist ideology of, where she says, proletarian. I mean, I'd say yes, I'd say, I mean, clearly the actual lived experience of the past century has produced outcomes that are more complicated than a simple dichotomy would

lead you to necessarily expect. But if you understand these as being sort of, they're sort of, their tendencies or they're kind of, they are sort of ideal types, but they're going to be, in reality, you're going to experience the sort of combined and uneven development in terms of how people actually live these, and they're going to be modified by circumstances. And I think it's still a, I think it's a pretty reasonable position. I mean, I would say the regularity with which experiences of mass struggle, especially class struggle and all its complex forms, have led to sort of questionings of bourgeois morality, for example, and a move in the direction of something that was trying to be more egalitarian, less individualistic, the regularity with which that has

happened at different historical cultural moments, whether you're talking about Russia in the 20s, whether you're talking about the counterculture in the 60s and 70s, whether you're talking about revolutionary Cuba, whether you're talking about revolutions in Asia, the regularity of that seems to me to sort of bury it out to a certain extent as a model. It's like any model you're deriving from 19th century Marxism, you've got to assume it's going to only be applicable to the extent that you can complex to follow you. Basically, with the critique of like, or the linking of like a bourgeois conception of love

to the material circumstances of the bourgeoisie, given that those terms seem antiquated to us now. But like that seems really convincing as we go through this text. I suppose the proletarian, the proletarian is more difficult because in which material circumstances is this new conception of love rooted because they're going through a process of transition,

aren't they? They're going through a process of transformation. So that complicates it, and that complication seems to be overridden by a certain determinism in this text, I think. But I'm still on board of the project, Alexandra. Well, it's a polemical text, you know, I think it's borne out. I'm, you know, I'm standing up against your bourgeois revisionism. The Lenin cap of, has appeared on the head of Tanky Gilbert once again. miss him. So this, after the bit you just read Kea, again, I think it's really like interesting that one, you know, sentence of over the five years of the existence of our Labour Republic, the revolution on this military front has been accomplishing a great shift in the way that men and women think. So again, she's introducing like, we have to be taking into consideration what is happening in our internal worlds and how that relates to the social reality. You know, and I think that's really, again, she's

basically saying, I'm going to be talking to things, which are not just about, you know, the material, the external, the socio-political, the economic, but, you know, how we are as people and how that plays into, you know, how we actualise ourselves in everyday lives. I think that's why this is a really, really ACFM text, because she's trying to say, we have to be looking at both all the time. Yeah, I mean, it sort of relates a little bit to how we were trying to define the ACFM project as well in the last podcast. where we're trying to say that we need to widen the aspects of what is considered political to things such as love, etc., which of course is one of the projects of the feminist movement. So, yes, this is an ACFM text, that's what I'm saying. She's got this idea that we were having a war, and fair enough, you know, we just wanted to fuck and take our minds off things, but then we've got a bit of time and we can consider other forms of love. And there's something behind that.

There's a model of, like, libidinal energy or scarce libidinal energy, basically, something like that, I think. Not just a tension, not just, we're wound up on that. We basically have all our attention focused on the war, et cetera, as we don't have time to think about love. It is a more energetic thing going on. But I object to your use of the word fuck there, actually, because I think that what she's saying is it's unattached. So I would see it as casual sex. but she later goes on to say that having like, you know, I don't know, I don't know whether I would call it fucking or whatever, but like there's a certain kind of unattached sex which is not getting behind. So I don't think actually from a female perspective that that's what she's saying.

She's saying unattached sexual relations rather than the connotations with that some people might have with what fucking is. I think either we can agree she's talking about casual sex. She's talking about the idea that in a moment of so. crisis that's demanding huge expenditures of energy from everybody then there's a tendency towards casual sex, partly just as a way of sort of relieving tension

and there isn't really an opportunity for people to even think about forming relationships. Again, I mean, this is completely consistent with the sort of social histories people have done of sex during World War II, for example. Like it's not, it's interesting, she's writing this in 23 and it's basically like her

general impressions of what's going on. and there wouldn't have been there was no such thing as social history at that time so there wasn't like loads of documentation of comparable historical moments which could verify whether this is true or not and can tell you now

the social history of as I say of World War II for example suggests this is totally true this is totally what happens during periods of massive social upheaval which are generally understood to be more or less definitely temporary even though people don't know

exactly how long they're going to last and also doing periods when I mean, to some extent, you know, the violence means that people aren't really sure, like, who's going to survive either. So, and yeah, and like here, yeah, I think you're totally right. There is a sort of energetics here, and I would think, it's interesting to think about this set in the much broader context of people trying to think about the relationships between psychic life and social life and material life at this time. I mean, you know, you could, you could read this alongside Voloshenov's book about Freud. and Freudianism, Voluschenov, another radical Bolshevik thinker of the period, which comes out six years after this.

And Voluschenov, yeah, he doesn't, he isn't totally dismissive of Freud and psychoanalysis, as some more casual Marxist would be. But he says, you know, you've really got to try to think about psychic life in relation to social and economic life in a way that psychoanalysis tends to avoid doing. And there's a long history of people trying to think in those. terms and and of coming coming to the conclusion that in order to be able to do that you do have to sort of have to think in terms of sort of unenergetics a kind of imagine whether it's imagined or real sort of energetics and you know this is a this is a big big problem for me

with Michelle Foucault's actually Michelle Foucault in the history of sexuality volume one famously is very very dismissive of this you said it's silly to see to think about sexuality of this rebellious little energy that is only ever subject to, that is sometimes subject to repression and not subject to repression. And instead, we should just understand sexuality as always being sort of purely historically constructed in a given moment. And the experiences of sexuality from one historical moment to the next being completely different from each other. And I think from a materialist perspective, that that's not an entirely satisfactory viewpoint, really that is not entirely satisfactory and I think I'm partly thinking about this because

again it reminds me of conversations having years ago with it reminds me conversations having with Mark actually I'm always saying I'm going to stop referring I'm going to stop talking about a couple of chats I had with Mark Fisher but it's always coming up and because on the on the kind of blog scene that Mark and Annex were part of because they were precisely because there was this anti-hippie prejudice this deep anti-hippeism this hippie phobes. This hippie phobes as I called it, they were always trying to promote the idea of a philosophy which, like, whatever it could or couldn't be, it could not be in any way vitalist. Like, it couldn't be in any way informed by some silly idea of sort of a life energy as informing people's existence. But on the

other hand, they're always trying to sort of balance that with this intuition that something like what Jean-François Leotard called the libidinal economy, like it is a necessary component of is a thing you necessarily have to understand if you're going to understand human existence and that's definitely going on in Volusinov and I think it's going on here as well that you're trying to find a way of to talk about the idea that we are always caught up

in sort of economies of energy without either falling back into a sort of capitalist language which just thinks of your relationships as investments you are making for the future which you should calculate according to some utility and without collapsing into a sort of mysticism the sort of mysticism of somebody like an Henri Bergson, as they would have seen it, who was a big famous bourgeois philosopher of the 20s,

and I think really interesting, but they would have seen him as problematic because of his lack of class politics. And I think that's partly why I do think this essay, this by Conanty, although it's basically a little, it's a speculative essay in a popular magazine, is sort of the equivalent to a blog post today. I think it is making a really interesting contribution to this much, bigger question. So yeah, she is implicitly working with this model according to which, well, everybody has sort of a finite amount of, you know, psychophysical energy that they can

spend on tasks. And if you're having to devote too much of it to revolution at a given moment, then you're going to have to just, you're going to have to just meet your physical needs for a while. Yeah, I think that's really good. And I think what's also interesting about the text is it raises questions for us in the 21st century, as well. well about like energy and then it's made me think a lot about okay well she's in a very very different context to how we are today and I and I almost we brought this up as well in in my conversation with Amber Massey Blumfield in the last microdose this idea we're trying to unpack well what's the relationship between you know like art or like creativity and

war in contrast to creativity and capitalism and this is partly making me think this as I was reading the text, I was trying to think, well, how do these energetic principles relate to the world of today with the kind of what I call the slow sludge of capitalism, as opposed to, you know, the energy of war? Like, what does it do to, like, expending not just, you know, energy in the classic senses, but also, like, I think, and this comes up for her, although obviously she doesn't use this terminology, like bandwidth. Like, do we have the bandwidth to even think about these things, or do we have the bandwidth to act in this way or that way? So that's one area. where energy is important. But also, I have to say, I mean, we're still right at the beginning

of the text. I mean, for me, I'm on page two where, you know, there's this paragraph in the beginning where she starts to introduce this concept of the riddle of love. And what I take from that paragraph is actually, I can feel the spring in that. So what Keir is also pointing to, I think, in terms of like using this term effervescence is, you know, as far as she's concerned, like the revolution has won. Like, they are in like the building of the infrastructure, like after the war. And I can feel the spring in her confidence of how she speaks about like what the program is next. And I think that's also quite interesting. Should we just concretize it and just read a couple of lines just so that people who haven't

got the text in front of them? So it's in the face of the revolutionary threat, tender winged eros. So she sets this thing off of winged eros and wingless eros. And what we were talking about as casual sex or sex without great commitment and parted without tears. or regret is a wingless eros, and now is the time of winged eros, she says. In a face of 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, its 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 scene. Men and women came together, men and women parted much more easily and more simply than before. They came together without great commitment and parted without tears or regret. That's one of the ways she sort of talks about love is through this sort of energetics. But then just relating to the war point, we probably get into this a bit more depth, a bit later. She also uses warm and cold as like this way of like talking about emotion, basically. You know, the coldness that you need in war, perhaps, is fading. Now we can have slightly more warm emotion, something like that.

I feel like we should explain this term as well, actually, for people who don't know. So Eros was obviously the Greek god or demi-god, depending how you classify him, of erotic love. And then already, by the time she's writing this essay, actually, Sigmund Freud has proposed one of his various models of the psyche. the human psychic life according to which the fundamental drives which shape human consciousness and experience are on the one hand eros which is the drive partly towards sex but also just towards positive relationships with other people towards friendship towards reproduction all that stuff and thanatos the death drive which is this really is the is the tendency of the nervous system just to seek out the sort of the oblivion of inertia just to want to be done with

it all. And so this idea of eros as a sort of meaning generally sort of eroticism and love and affection and positive affect generally and connection with other people, it is around. I've never found any evidence that Colin Tai read Freud or has any kind of relationship to Freud. And I think it's a more sort of generic use of the term. But when she talks about eros, it is in the context of this use of the term eros to mean, to mean, to me, to mean, eroticism, but its eroticism understood as one very obvious manifestation of a more general tendency towards humans having affectionate relationships with each other. 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. It would not have been expedient at such a time to waste the inner strength of the members of the collective on the experiences that did not directly serve the revolution. 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 economizing 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. I have so much to say about this paragraph, but maybe if any of you want to comment on the first bit, I've got a lot on the second bit. I think we've already said it really. I think we've explained the first bit of that paragraph already. So, I mean, just to clarify again, for anyone who's listening, that wingless eros, as Keir said, is basically casual sex. It's sex without romantic involvement, as it would call it. And winged eros is being presented

here as this obviously more intense and arguably preferable. way of having sexual relationships which are characterised by, you know, passion and love, etc. But without there being a kind of moral judgment, they are different, but she's also saying it's not that one is necessarily always better than the other. It's that in particular context, one might be preferable to the other. Just a little bit of context. So when Colin Tai is like critiqued, and she's also critiqued by Lenin as well, partly for this article, she's sort of associated with the idea that she's promoting free love, basically, a sort of promoting wingless eros almost. And there's this idea that she's saying, you know, love is like having a cup of tea.

We should treat it the same as having a cup of tea. Not love, sorry, sex is like having a cup of tea. I thought that was a misquote. Yeah, it is. It is a misquote. Well, it's quite obvious she's not saying that, isn't it? She's not saying that we should just have love without, we should have sex about love, etc. Or we should just have lots of casual sex.

The line is, like, under very specific circumstances, people might have to treat sex as just like having a drink of water, meeting a physical need. Yeah, the whole point of the essay is to say is actually, we're no longer in that historical juncture when that's the way to treat it. She got slagged off by Lenin. I think she got slagged off by Clara Zetkin for that. It just seems to be a classic example of someone having skimred it and missed the point and just have this one line they remembered, and that becoming a meme. It's the Twitter version. It's the Twitter version. It's a Twitter. The Twitter prissy of the blog post.

I will press this point, and I'm happy for us to disagree on this, that I will still not define it as romantic versus non-romantic. I don't think romance for me is a helpful kind of addition on here, because what I like about what she's doing, and I guess what I was taking an alternative opinion to the use of the word fucking is that it's very clearly non-crued what she's doing. She's making a strong argument and allowing there to be like a variety. She's talking about a variety of different ways that people can relate. And obviously we're yet to come to like some of the really interesting conclusions. She comes to this. But that's why I think using the term like casual sex is like what is most useful versus kind of more attached and involved relationships. But you're absolutely not right.

She is not putting a value judgment. She's putting this in a social construct and context, which I think is important. Another thing that I find really interesting, as a 21st century reader of this text, is what I found refreshing, and this is almost relating to what I was just saying, is it's refreshing that there's a lack of complex terminology put upon relationship. So she's saying things like individual sex love and she used winged eros and wingless eros, and between quotation marks as well. Whereas I think, like, these days, you have so much, like, liberal, bollocks kind of terminology

associated with every form of, you know, relationships, as is perpetuated by the media. So there'd be, like, situation ships and all of this or crap. So I think it's quite nice to be reading something that's quite descriptive, but in a kind of simple terms, and she keeps, like, her more complex terminology for, like, the politics around it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think you're right. I think she's trying to find a language with which to talk about all these issues, which is not dependent upon the historically bourgeois language of romance, which is challenging, but it's also really important, I think. And that doesn't constrain relationships because that's what she's saying. She's not trying to constrain. She's basically, when she goes on to critique, you know, marriage, which we'll get on to,

she's saying here is a little box and she's saying part of, you know, the revolutionary project is it's not about that box. But at the same time, the complexity of human emotions and the way that humans relate in that complex ways has to be addressed now that we have more bandwidth effectively. Well, she sort of goes on and clarifies that, like, it's not just a, Oh, we've won the revolution now, we construct the new world. It says only when the proletariat has appropriated the laws not only of the creation of material wealth, but also of inner psychological life, is it able to advance fully armed to fight the decaying bourgeois world on the psychological and cultural front. So it's like, you know, this is also a moment of rearmine so that we can then conduct the fight more effectively.

I also asterisk that bit. I thought it was great because what's really central about that sentence, is she's saying only when you look at the inner life, psychological life, are we even able to advance fully armed? So there's this kind of juxtaposition there, which I think she's basically saying is not a conflict between like the psychology and being able to like have the ability to do this. But I like the way that at least it's translated as like advance fully armed to fight, the decaying bourgeois world.

It is decaying. there is no proletarian world emerging to replace it. In the next bit, she talks more specifically about the tender-winged eros has emerged from the shadows and began to demand his rightful place. Wingless eros has ceased to satisfy the psychological needs. And then further on in this paragraph, she introduces this phrase that I absolutely love, which is about for the inner life of the collective. So she's introducing this idea that there is such a concept that we need to be thinking about, a reality of the inner life of the collective. And I find that absolutely beautiful. That brings that effervescent energy

to me because it then situates this text in this kind of project of how do we nourish and nurture this inner life of the collective. And that's how she situates discussions of kind of love and relationship and sex going on from there. So I love that then. She basically then goes on to set up this next section where she's going to do a sort of like historical analysis of the changing functions of love, perhaps, I'll put it that way. She says it's time we separated ourselves from the hypocrisy of bourgeois thought. It's time to recognize that love is not only a powerful natural factor, a biological force, but also a social factor. essentially love is a profoundly social emotion and of course if it's more than just a natural force

then it can have history and we can look back in history and realise we can historicise the contemporary sort of dominant bourgeois mode of love dominant in our world deteriorating in Colin Tye's world of 1923. And then the bit after that she also, it seems like she's instrumentalising love for the collective in the next bit where she says

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. So she basically sets in stone, like following on from the bit that you read Keir, that this is something that needs to be taken seriously. And I'm all for it, this project, and it makes me want to read on. And it's quite clear that she has a very complex understanding of the relationship between the individual and the collective. which is clear in a lot of this Soviet stuff from the 20s that, you know, the historic, I remember this historic, maybe this late 20th century cliche about Marxism,

especially the Marxism of this period, is that it's, you know, it's thoroughly deterministic, has quite a simplistic, it has quite a simplistic model of historical change being determined by economic factors, et cetera. It's a really, it's a ridiculously crude caricatured. that it's quite clearly implicit in her approach that she understands human subjectivity as trans individual, as I would want to call it, for example, as very complex phenomenon, which is characterized by all kinds of social forces acting on it,

but also in which personal experience remains really important. Okay, so the next section is called Historical Notes, and Collentai offers this historical narrative, which really maps onto the classic Marxist, historical materialist, narrative of history, according to which you have ancient, like, tribal society, then you have feudal societies, then you have bourgeois capitalist society, and you're hopefully moving towards socialist or communist society. And she talks about how within each of those different societies, there are very different attitudes to interpersonal relationships.

And so the idea is basically in ancient societies, it's all about loyalty to your kin group and basically friendship and fealty to your family and your immediate kin are both of much, higher value than what we would think of today's romantic relationships. Can we just point out a couple of things that she says in this, in the kind of ancient world, which is interesting because she uses a very, in a very little space, she makes quite strong feminist statements, which I think are important, especially because it's international women's month as we're recording. And I think one of the things she points out is that when she's talking about friendship in the ancient world, she's talking about friendship

between men, because friendship between women is not even considered, and it's still a hugely under-theorized topic. There's very little that's written about women's friendships, and Elena Ferente changed this a little bit, but it's still not something that people talk about. And then she gives this example, which I think is really useful, is that friendship was so important between men that you might offer your wife to a guest. Yeah, yeah. And that's where women as property, and that's quite important to highlight, because it gives you an idea of what she's talking about in terms of kinship. That's also this line. It says, the person who accomplished great deeds and risked his life

for his friend was considered a hero and his action most virtuous, while a man risking himself for the sake of a woman he loved would have been reproached and even despised. She's sort of drawing on Greek myth to make these sorts of arguments, which has got its drawbacks, insofar as I know the sources she's drawing on it's pretty accurate I mean she talks about women in so far as they appear in the sources but isn't much she talks about Antigone Antigone is like a heroic figure in the story of the Trojan Wars because she risks her life to give the funeral rights her brother she has to go out onto the battlefield and risk being killed to get his body and varying I mean it all seems pretty accurate as a sort of

description insofar as we know and obviously if you're an ancient historian you can have all sorts of queries. But then she goes on to the description, goes on to the description of the feudal world. She talks about the way in which, I mean, again, really what she's talking about is what is what you see in the chivalrous epics of the Middle Ages and this idea that, well, really, there's this complete split between the marriage relationship and the romantic relationship. The idealised romantic relationship in courtly love is this idea that the, the knight has this infatuation with a woman and that's a different relationship to the person he just happens to be married to and have children with. And then she offers a really, really interesting analysis

of sort of why is that useful to feudalism? Because she sort of argues that, well, the idea is that really you're kind of you, the system overall can use this romantic attachment that men have to these women that they're in a sort of almost in a sort of parasocial relationship with a lot of the time in order to motivate them to really to engage into a military action without without there being any sort of other social costs and without them actually you know disrupting the the kinship relationships which are being cemented on the basis of marriage ties I mean of course if you want to rip this apart you can because apart from anything else it sort of assumes that what you see in the romantic chivalric writing of the Middle Ages bears any relation to the actual

lived social reality of members of the European warrior aristocracy, which it probably doesn't really. There's a discourse that she's bringing forth and saying like these were some of like this is some of the imagery and this is some of the, you know, what's appearing in text, which I think is totally legit. This idea of like love as quest and the challenge. And I think what she's bringing forth here is saying, like, actually, that's very male. As she's making this argument, she's also uncovering, like, the patriarchy within that because she qualifies that in no case, you know, does any of these women have any choice? And this is not about a man actually having a relationship with a woman. It's about an unattainable woman. The two main point

she's setting up, though, is one that she's already established is that, like, we need to think about love. So she says, feudal ideology saw love as a stimulus, as a quality assisting in social cohesion, spiritual love and the knight's adoration of his ladies serve the interests of the noble class. And you're sort of setting that up because you also want to then think about, you know, how winged eros and in fact, wingless eros fits into, you know, the building of a new society in Russia, you know, you're saying that love is always a social as well as a natural force, if you want. Later on in that same paragraph, actually, she says, love and marriage were kept separate by feudal ideology. They were only united by the bourgeoisie.

class that emerged in the 14th and 15th century. And that's the real ideology critique moment to point to courtly love to say, look, you know, not so long ago, the idea of love and marriage were completely separate, in fact, you know, marriages, perhaps they were arranged, particularly in this sort of arranged, you know, particularly in the sort of like nightly levels of society around, you know, building and maintaining estates and these sorts of things. And it's only in bourgeois society, these two aspects, love and marriage, brought together and seen as natural. So that's that denaturalization moment. Yeah, I think that's completely right. I think it's a really, it's a really clever analysis.

It's probably worth saying, what she's talking about here is elite ideology. So the question of how people who were not members of social elites in any of these historical periods lived and unthought about their interpersonal relationships, we don't know that. much about. She's not making any claims about that anyway either. In fact, I would say, I would say based on what I know about the historiography on that subject, she would probably assume that amongst the poorer class is something a bit more, a bit more like a kind of egalitarian attitude to interpersonal relationships and a bit more like a, a bit more instrumental in a sort of positive sense in terms of people understanding that they had to sort of get through

life as best they could. And marriage was often understood in terms of a sort of, you know, a relatively egalitarian relationship between partners who were just, you know, having to keep themselves and the kids alive. That would, you know, that's probably what you would expect to be the case. And as far as we know, that sort of was the case. But she's not, she's not making any claims about what life was like for poor people. She's making claims about what is going on within the ideology of the ruling class at these different periods. And I think those claims are pretty robust really. I think it's a really good analysis. I mean, honestly, in some ways, this is better than Fouca. I'm an enemy of Marxist anti-Fucoism. There's a lot to learn

from Foucau's really useful. Fouca's really good. On the other hand, look, you know, the massive claim in the history of sexuality, which is supposed to be this massive provocation, particularly to the Freudian establishment in France at the time when Foucaulte publishes it is, well, sexuality has a history. That itself is supposed to be like a massively shocking thing to say at the time when Fouca writes, well, that's what she's saying here. She's saying that and she's saying it from a feminist point of view and she's saying it from a point of view which has a more robust sense of historical causality than Fouca has. So, well done, Alexandra Colentai. And the next paragraph, she introduces kind of this idea that there are institutions that

pretend to wage war on one thing or another. And she really unpacks this in the next bourgeois section, but staying with the feudal for a minute. I mean, again, this is where she says, okay, the church pretended to wage war on depravity, but by encouraging, quote, unquote, spiritual love, it encouraged crude animal relations between the sexes. The knight, who would not be parted from the emblem of the lady of his heart, who composed poetry in her honour and risked his life to win her smile, would rape a girl of the urban classes without second thought or order. Yeah, good point. She is making some claims about lived reality, and they're not wrong claims. So there you go. No, and that same principle exists today under patriarchy.

Yeah. So then the analysis of the bourgeois family, well, I think you've already said, Kear, a key point is that the bourgeois ideal of marriage, it does. It brings together, it brings together the romantic relationship, the interpersonal relationship, the sexual relationship, the property relationship, brings all these things together, doesn't it, into one, one relationship? She explicitly links this to the idea of the family unit as being the little engine for the accumulation of capital. But again, the reason why I think it's important that it's not just romantic love when she comes to love of comrades later is that she's basically saying all kinds of love are piled into the one person which she will have this property relationship with in the household. So it's all love becomes piled into this relationship that benefits capital. And that's really important because she comes and unpacks that later, right?

And then she also says that women become like not just a good housewife, but she says here as the helper and the friend of the husband. So I read that as she's also saying there's the emotional labor that's put onto women there. It's like all kinds of love and comradeship and everything gets. piled into this one relationship and that puts a lot of pressure on that one relationship and that one institution as well. This is really important, isn't it? Because her whole frame of analysis is to say that there are all kinds of different relationships people can have with each other. And different kinds of love and different kinds of love. Different kinds of love and she's using love in a very expansive sense

such that I would say she's really talking about all kinds of affectionate relationship, including friendships, including family relationships, sibling relationships, sexual relationships of all different kinds. Political relationships. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And she's presenting this picture of the ideal bourgeois family as one in which, in a certain sense, the only relationship is the relationship between the spouses. Every other relationship outside of that one is entirely kind of instrumentalised

by commercial relations and by capitalism. And to some extent, almost all of the emotional needs of both partners are supposed to be met by this one relationship. And I think that is, you know, I think that's very powerful. That's, it's consistent on the one hand with Marx and Engels, these comments about the family and the reduction of all relationships in capitalism to the cash nexus. But again, it's also, it's also consistent with, you know, research into family life by radical sociologists in the 60s, 70s, 80s. It was a really important feature of radical critiques of the nuclear family from sort of socialist and feminist and socialist feminist perspectives by sociologists who are actually studying family relationships from the 60s onwards. Really important critique was, well, the nuclear family just tends to force, you know, a couple to try to meet all of each other's emotional needs under almost impossible circumstances. But I personally find really, really odd. I don't know how anybody could live like that, but a lot of

people do till today in the 21st century. That's an ideal that's upheld, right? And she gives us a really interesting analysis around that. And then she's also saying later, and she's talking about when she talks about this bit of the bourgeoisie made love and marriage inseparable, which is what we've just been talking about, is that where deception sits within that. So this has become the model that's acceptable. So even when a marriage is made for convenience, the partners, as you say, should practice hypocrisy and pretend affection. I suppose it's weird saying she does go on to make some comments about what life was like in feudal culture for peasants and for artisans in the towns and cities. She's largely dismissive of any idea that they had, that love relationships really played

any part in marriage relationships. I'm not sure that's true. I haven't read up on this subject for years and years and years, but years ago, when I was looking into, I was reading social history, specifically of sex and romance and relationships, going back to the Middle Ages. It seemed to be that the emerging picture from the latest historiography then was that as far as we could tell,

I mean, something quite like a kind of modern attitude to relationships, was fairly typical amongst peasants and the urban poor. In other words, marriage was considered a bit more casual, less totally insoluble than it was amongst the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, that it was generally understood. The person you were married to was going to be your primary sort of emotional partner and sexual partner. And this was a fairly, but this wasn't because there was some sort of advanced

ideology necessarily. That's a fairly rational response. response to making relationships under conditions of relative scarcity, basically. But none of this really undermines the broader thrust of her analysis. Yeah, I mean, towards the end of this section, she starts to talk, she talks about the narrowness of bourgeois love. Love is permissible only when it's within marriage. Love outside legal marriages is considered immoral,

the entire morality of the bourgeoisie. It's directed towards the concentration of capital. And he says, Love, of course, could not be contained within a limit set down by bourgeois ideology. Emotional conflict grew and multiplied and found expression in the new forms of literature, the novel which the bourgeois class develops.

Love constantly escaped from the narrow framework of legal marriage relations set for it into free relationships and adultery, which were condemned, but which were practiced. Yeah, it seems pretty accurate to me. yeah it's really good it's really good I think that that whole little section on historical forms of love

I mean it's a brilliant brilliant example of historical materialist cultural history in a really condensed way to great potential teaching aid actually I mean it really is it's often said he's an overly neglected figure Colin I think yeah I mean that passage should be in sort of

undergraduate readers of on like cultural theory and cultural history. All right, so are we on to love comradeship? Well, let's just set the scene with the last little bit of the last couple of sentences because, you know, obviously she's going through this historical analysis of different ways that love has been employed for particular social purposes and the different way people have thought about love. The working youth of Soviet Russia is confronting this question at this very moment.

This brief survey of the evolution of the ideal of love-marriage relationships will help you. My young friend to realize and understand that love is not the private matter, it might seem to be at first glance. Love is an important psychological and social factor which society has always instinctively organised in its interests. Working men and women armed with the science of Marxism and using the experience of the past, must seek to discover the place love ought to occupy in the new social order and determine the ideal of love that corresponds to their class interests. Yes. I mean, let's be real. If somebody said this from like a podium because this was their speech at an end of a demo, like I'd be going fucking nuts. Like it's so good.

You know what there is on Marxist, Marxist.org, on the page that introduces all the Conanty material, there's a clip, there's an MP3 clip of her speaking in Russian of her giving a speech, which we should, we should edit in, I think. All right, so we're getting on to love comradeship. The new 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 cooperation, it is essential that people should be capable of love and warm emotions. The proletarian ideology, therefore, attempt 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 and 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 organising character.

The bourgeoisie was well aware of this and in the attempt to create a stable family, bourgeois ideology erected married love as a moral virtue. To be a good family man was in the eyes of the bourgeoisie an important and valuable quality. 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. Absolutely amazing, isn't it? The concept that love has an organising character, it's like, wow.

It's obviously true, but to put it as bluntly as that, it's absolutely amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. Yeah, it's really, it's so advanced. Like, this line, solidarity is not only in awareness of common interests. It also depends on the intellectual and emotional ties linking the members of the collective. Well, that's fantastic. Of course, I'm starting work on a book on Solidarity at the moment, which no, no contents of which will come as at any surprise to listeners of this show. But this quote is like my starting point for the entire project.

Because on the one hand, of course, I'm totally preoccupied with the idea that solidarity is primarily an awareness of common interests. That's what it is. And that's important to say because there is a vast, there is some actual literature and there's a vast casual usage of the term solidarity in liberal and even in sort of left discourse, which completely ignores the idea of awareness of common interests, which instead thinks that solidarity is as a ethical disposition based on self-sacrifice of some kind. And there are literal professors of political philosophy and political theory at Oxbridge going around giving public lectures saying what solidarity means is altruism. And as we discussed in our episode on solidarity,

no, solidarity does not mean altruism. It means an awareness of common interests. And so that is the first thing you have to deal with. You have to get over this liberal assumption that solidarity is an ethical or purely psychological disposition. But of course, Conanty is addressing a far more advanced readership than those people. So she's saying, of course, it is an awareness, but it's not only an awareness of common interest. It also does depend on these emotional, these affective ties, as we would say today. And that is, in some sense, that captures the whole complex problem of how we think about solidarity and what it is. And then she goes on, as you say, to talk about love, to talk about positive affect, as we might say, as an organising force in this way,

which is really just brilliant. It does make me think actually about that. There's that Che Guevara quote about... A revolution is moved by feelings of great love. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And just to come back to that warm and cold idea, like, you know, all these warm emotions that we need to nurture basically can't have solidarity about them. because obviously, you know, Shea is writing from a context in which they've just been conducting a guerrilla war, of course, and, you know, you need feelings of hardness and coldness in order to conduct those sorts of things.

And, of course, the threat is always that those cold or hard emotions take over and you find it impossible to find the warm emotions, do you know what I mean? Anyway, just an idle thought. But love is not, it's like, it's not as though that is not a concept which has come up again and again across socialist history. I use my surname in vain. We have to read a line from the second paragraph. It's just absolutely amazing. Okay. We've already seen that each epoch has its ideal.

Each class strives to fill the conception of love with a moral content that suits its interest. Each stage of cultural development with its richer, intellectual and emotional experience redefines the image of Eros with the successive stages in the development of the economy and social love, ideas of love have changed. Shades of emotions have assumed greater significance or, on the other hand, have ceased to exist.

It's just an incredible critique of, like, a fantastic historical materialist critique of natural conceptions of morality, basically. I mean, it's a properly anti-essentialist perspective. It's an anti-essentialist perspective, which isn't allied to a mere individualistic kind of libertarianism. So yeah, it's really, it's really fantastic. Was it the next paragraph you wanted to talk about, no idea, was the one after that? Yeah, so I'm, I'm interested in how she's kind of like,

she, she tries here. I read this as her trying to, like, be more specific about what she's talking about when she talks about casual sex and what she's also against, which I, which I really like, because she has this concept of unhealthy carnality. So towards the end of that paragraph, she says, the sexual act has become an aim in itself, just another way of obtaining pleasure through lust sharpened with excesses and through distorted, harmful titillations of the flesh. A man does not have sex in response to healthy instincts, which have drawn him to a particular woman. A man approaches a woman, though he feels no sexual need for her in particular, with the aim of gaining his sexual satisfaction and pleasure through her.

prostitution is the organized expression of this distortion of the sex drive. I mean, I think I agree. This is not a fashionable opinion on the libertarian left at the moment, but I'm interested in the way that she defines prostitution there. But she does this thing where she's juxtaposing the difference between like, it's okay to have healthy instincts and you're drawn to like a particular woman, you know, as a man. But she's writing this from a woman's perspective and she's saying that kind of, I think, sex, what I read into it is like sex as power or sex as domination or sex as, you know, just

expending energy on another person as a object is what she has a problem with. Reading this, it really reminds me of reading people like Ellen Willis from the early 70s. And she's an American journalist and critic who wrote very interesting essays about, really about the experience of being a straight woman who was kind of, who was a music journalist, who was active in the rock and roll, scene, but she was also part of women's liberation. She was a leftist. She ended up being married to Stanley Aranowicz. She's a great American radical intellectual. And she writes very interesting little essays about all these experiences and about the problem, you know, the problem that, you know, as a straight woman who doesn't want to conform to bourgeois norms, like, you know,

you want a certain kind of freedom, but you also don't want to just be objectified. And you don't want to be experiencing new forms of subjugation. And Conantyde does seem to have a really, really developed perspective on what that means. She has a really developed perspective on what that means. And she's trying to produce a vocabulary, actually, which is really, really potentially really useful for answering what I think has been one of the perennial problems of, you know, late 20th, early 20th century feminism and sexual politics, which is the problem, okay, what do we want from heterosexual men, but what do we actually want from them? Like if we don't want them to

be patriarchs and we don't want them to just stop existing, then what do we want from them? And I'm not saying she is giving the answer to this question, but she's giving a language within which that question can be thought about in ways which is quite sophisticated and quite useful. So I think it's really valuable in that. Yeah, I would agree. I think this is kind of like this text forms a kind of preface almost to like some of those debates or some of those arguments or some of those things that those you know that area of thinking I would go one further and actually say that you know she doesn't make a comment here about homosexuality or like gay or lesbian relationships but I would say what she's interested in here is like women having sex with men not

even the definition of like straight or gay which I think is interesting in relation to like essentialism previously because this is about women who have sex. with men and men who have sex with women, regardless of what else they're doing. And I think that's important, actually quite liberatory in itself. She's not trying to define those relationships within certain borders because she is, she's critiquing that kind of definitional box in her when she discusses the bourgeois marriage. That's where she's saying the constraints are. And she's saying, I'm reading it as her saying, this is not about constraints, it's about the

kind of relationships we want to have and how we act those out and the importance, like Keir said earlier, of including the warm relationships, the ability to have those, sorry, sorry, warm emotions, the ability to be able to act out and live warm emotions is kind of like central to what we think is kind of a revolutionary relationships. In the next paragraph, she goes on to sort of build on that, I think. She says, love is intricately woven from friendship, passion, maternal tenderness, infatuation, mutual compatibility, sympathy, admiration, familiarity and many other shades of emotion. With such a range of emotions involved, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish direct connection between the natural drives of wingless Eros and winged Eros where

physical attraction and emotional warmth are fused. The existence of love friendships where the element of physical attraction is absent of love for one's work or for a cause or of love for the collective testify to the extent to which lovers become spiritualised and separated from its biological base. She's complexifying her own argument here. So I like this bit. I mean, I think it's worth pointing out just before that she gets into this differentiation between different types of attraction and different types of relationship. So for example, She says, a woman feels close to a man whose ideas hopes and aspirations match her own. She's attracted physically to another.

For one woman, a man might feel sympathy and a protective tenderness. And in another, he might find support and understanding for the strivings of his intellect. To which of the two must he give his love? And why must he tear himself apart and cripple his inner self? With only the possession of both types of inner bonds afford the fullness of living. Yeah, it's a good bit. So this is generally read as advocating, at least speculatively, for some kind of polyamory, which I think is a fair reading.

I think she sort of is. She's at least questioning whether that wouldn't be one of the implications of thinking about these things radically. Again, I'm seeing this through a woman's prism. And perhaps she's saying there is a possibility for men to love women and that not necessarily be a sexual relationship. I think she's saying there's various different ways. that you can love another person.

Yes, she is saying that. And that's also, I mean, that's usually, you know, that's one of the arguments that gets made for sort of ethical polyamory is the idea that there is different kinds of love. You have with different kinds of people. It's better to kind of maximise the possibility of all of them being expressed. And, you know, my own, my relationship to those ideas is always, I think I do agree in theory.

I'm not, I'm not sure it's livable under contemporary historical circumstances for most people. well, all the evidence is that it isn't really. But I think as a, I think, I think, at least theoretically and as a sort of idea of how people ought to be able to conduct their intimate relationships, I think it's, I think it's very profound. So one of the next bits that I really love is this paragraph where she says, under the bourgeois system, such a division of the inner emotional world, involves inevitable suffering. For thousands of years, human culture, which is based on the institution of property, has been teaching people that love is linked with the principles of property. Bourgeois ideology has insisted that love, mutual love, gives the right to absolute and indivisible possession of the beloved person. Such exclusiveness was the natural consequence

of the established form of pair marriage and of the ideal of, quote, unquote, all embracing love between husband and wife. But can such an ideal correspond to the interests of the working class? Surely it is important and desirable from the proletariat's point of view that people's emotions should develop a wider and richer range. I've written next to this, yes, yes, yes. So I absolutely love this bit because she's basically saying, like, come on, like we can be more expansive in our thinking and our application of our emotions than this very constraining conception of what we discussed earlier, like piling all of your needs onto one person in a household and it being linked to the principles of property. Like, it's fucked. I don't like

it. I don't do it. Also, I'd say this is entirely consistent with a certain, with a kind of spinosism, a sort of radical spinosist idea that, you know, the point of almost everything is to cultivate joyous affect. And cultivating joyous affect means cultivating the productive relationships that you have with others. And so I think that is, I think it is very profound. One of the other things to keep in mind when we're discussing this and then trying to relate it back to 21st century life is that she is talking in a post-revolutionary situation

where she's anticipating that material relations are going to change quite fundamentally. And so, you know, that one of the ways in which you might think that people are protective of the bourgeois family or, you know, the nuclear family, is that like, you know, the way the nuclear family functions for some in contemporary society as like, you know, it functions as like a haven from like the harsh, harsh market relations that go on outside. You know, it may be governed, for other people, it can also be a prison because, you know, you're trapped in these property relationships

perhaps via a mortgage or something like that. And so, you know, which structure and constrain your possibilities. But, you know, it's a little bit like when Marx talks about religion as the opium of the masses, you know, he then talks about it in the next sentence as the sigh of the oppressed. It actually, you know, it's a function. It's a mode of protecting yourself against the harshness of capitalist society. I mean, actually, when I was still had the privilege of teaching an undergraduate degree in cultural studies as the main part of my job, like I introduced quite early on in that story, a lecture I would do every year

just about romance, about romantic love in contemporary culture. And the reason I did, it wasn't because it was a big research interest of mine, and there wasn't a big literature on it, actually. And most of the literature that there was was fairly simplistic, like denunciations of heteronormative patriarchy from the

70s or 80s. And the whole substance of this lecture was the point that If you actually examined contemporary culture from an outsider's perspective, if you were an alien or anthropologist from some different culture, and you looked at what was the major preoccupation of the culture, especially for young people, especially people of the age of my students, you would immediately conclude that basically interpersonal relationships, sex, love, intimacy, romance was like the overriding preoccupation.

It is the thing that people are most interested in. It's what pop music is about, is about what's so, Popper is about. It's what, you know, the most popular, popular fixers are about. And it was quite clear that in a certain sense what was going on in the culture was we were being offered a certain kind of ideal of entirely self-directed, like intimate romantic relationships, which are quite different from what even our sort of grandparents would really have expected as being the major compensation for the loss of loads of other things in society, the loss of extended family, the loss of community, the loss of stable job prospects, in the transition

from Fordism to post-Fordism, et cetera. So, I mean, I would still stand by that. That is definitely what happened in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. I was first talking about this in the late 90s, and it was definitely true then. I think now, where we are now is probably kind of different. Where we are now, it's not even clear that that is available to younger people, even as an ideal because the material conditions which made it possible are disappearing so fast and the kind of the gamification of relationships through dating apps and things has produced really a different kind of situation but i think that is totally consistent with what she's saying it's totally consistent with what you're saying here and i think it was i think you know whether it

worked out for you or not i think really what it really was part of the i think it was very much the experience of sort of gen x actually i think it was a really sensitive experience of Gen X that we were given. That was the thing we were offered, really. That was the thing we were offered as the thing which would make your life have some kind of meaning. At the moment when post-modernity, the end of history were just stripping away the possibility of meaning from almost any other aspects of social existence. And yeah, I think Conanty is offering a really powerful set of analytical tools with which to think about that. So then she gets on to this whole idea of introducing joy and the relationship between joy and sex, which I think is really great.

She's just got this one sentence where she says, outside marriage, there was room only for the wingless heroes of momentary and joyless sexual relations. And basically what I take from that whole section is she's basically saying, you know, joyless sexual relations are a bad thing. is not something we want. And then further down in this section, I'll just read this bit because I find it really beautiful. She goes on to say, 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 bodies and positive emotions. And in the third place, it usually rests on an inequality of rights in relationships between the sexes, on the dependence of women on the man, and the male complacency and insensitivity, which undoubtedly hinder the development of comradely feelings. Winged eros is quite different. So this is her bit where she goes, one, two, three, these are the things that we need to have in, like, why winged eros is different, which I think is great the way she lays it out. If we're going to critique the bourgeois tendency to pile everything, including sensitivity, responsiveness and desire onto one person or to just to channel those inequalities on one person, he says, bourgeois ideology demands that a person should only

display, sensitivity, responsiveness and desire in the relationship with one partner. 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 members of the collective. The stipulation is that these emotions facilitate the development and strengthening of comradeship. So this is this idea of love comradeship. She's trying to introduce. No, you can have, obviously you'll have relationships with individual people, but, you know, and hey, perhaps you might have a monogamous one, and perhaps it might last all your life, do you know what I mean? But you've got to be aware that those feelings that are being developed, you know, they need to be applied to other people

outside of that. It's also permission that she's giving. She's like, it's okay to have these strong, warm feelings to other people and to other things. You know, it's not a failure. It's a positive, it's a positive thing. We just need to navigate it within, like, the ideology that we're trying to build together. And so then she starts to introduce this like various different concepts and terminology again around this ideal of love comradeship. There's this brilliant sentence which I think is so ACFM and gives that effervescent spirit which you're talking about here where she says collectivism of spirit can then defeat individualist self-sufficiency and the cold of inner loneliness from which people in bourgeois culture have attempted

to escape through love and marriage will disappear. It's fantastic. Yeah, that is great, yeah. And then she goes on from that to, I think, stipulate the vision. So she's basically saying, right, in the new and collective society, where interpersonal relations develop against the background of joyful unity and comradeship, Eros will occupy an honourable place as an emotional experience, multiplying human happiness. And we come to the kind of area of abundance. I mean, these are my words,

not hers, but I kind of, I thought that was really beautiful as well. In the paragraph after that, she sets out these three basic principles that must be conformed to. One, equality in relationships and enter masculine egoism and the slavish suppression of the female personality. Two, mutual recognition of the rights of the other, of the fact that one does not own the heart and soul of the other, the sense of property encouraged by bourgeois culture. Three, comradly sensitivity, the ability to listen and understand

the inner workings of the loved person. Bouchoir culture demands this only from the woman. But in proclaiming the rights of Wing Dioros, the ideal of the working class at the same time subordinates this love to the more powerful emotion of love duty to the collective. So

beautiful. And also such a good programme. So I take from that, as a going on from the vision which I read, I'm hearing this bit which you just read, Keir, as the program. Like here are very specific pieces of work which need to be done, which I think are a challenge to all of us, you know. I mean, these things about like needing to understand that other people have an inner working and like not to be stuck in the kind of the machine of capitalist understanding of like marriage or the family is like really important.

You're talking about a level of consciousness and awareness, which, you know, is like, it's just really great stuff. I have nothing to say except it's really great. Yeah, I agree. We should absolutely say if you're interested in learning more about Conanty or just hearing a reading of the entire text we've read today and loads of other readings from Conanty, then Kristen Godsey, who is an American historian, has an entire podcast, which is called AK-47, because AK-40. because AK are the initials of Alexandra Conanty and she reads supposedly she reads from a total of 47 texts from Conanty although she'll often spend several episodes on a text

so it's into like 100 plus episodes now but the episodes are very short they're usually 15 to 20 minutes so that is a great project so do check that out if you want lots more audio Conanty content I mean it's worth thinking I think about the ways in which this kind of rhetoric

It is really, really terrifying to people, to the liberals. The thought that you might have, the private sanctity of your personal intimate relationships might be intruded upon by the collective in any way at all. It is the nightmare that haunts the liberal imagination, the nightmare of totalitarianism. I think it's really important to understand that she is advocating for an attitude to love and relationships, which would, it would be experienced by some people as a reduction in their precious personal freedom, because it's, because it's asking that you do think, at least have a think about how your treatment of people and how your even most intimate relationships

fit into a wider pattern of collective behaviour. But she's saying that because ultimately, ultimately through doing that, everybody would achieve more freedom than they can have when they're ultimately constrained by a very narrow set of individualistic relations and a very narrow set of patriarchal roles. So I think it really is important to stress that. I think it is important to understand that partly for reasons I was going on about a few minutes ago, because bourgeois culture, and I think this is actually, this is a consistent feature of bourgeois culture that takes different forms under different historic conditions. It's a consistent feature of bourgeois culture that right up until the present, it presents the relationship, the relationship with your partner to whom you will get

married, with whom you will have children, as the compensation for all of the kind of degradation and alienation of the wider culture. So when you say to people, well, this thing, this thing, this is the only thing you've got left to give your life a feeling of human dignity. We're going to mess around with that as well. We're going to politicise it. We're going to say, you've got to think about it in terms of the needs of the collective. It seems like terrifying and awful to people in ways which are completely symptomatic of the functioning of bourgeois ideology, which I think are bad. But also based on, you know, building on what you just said, Jeremy, I think what she's also alluding to, she does not say this, what she's alluding to,

is that, you know, men over history get away with all sorts of fucking shit in the domestic realm as well. And so she's saying that's why she's pointing out, like, things like, you know, the importance of taking into consideration, you know, she says at the bottom of that part, you know, respect for the right of the other's personality. This woman in your relationship is a person with their own, like, aspirations and, like, feelings and issues. And so, yeah, I think that's what she's kind of pointing at. And in a way, she's, like, pointing, like, 50 years into the future with some of this.

Shall we round this off with her and have a great quote. The new class is capable of developing new facets of emotion, which possess unprecedented beauty, strength and radiance. As the cultural and economic base of humanity changes, so will love be transformed. The blind, all-embracing, demanding passions will weaken, the sense of property, the egotistical desire to bind the partner to one forever. The complacency of the man and the self-renunciation of the woman will disappear. At the same time, the valuable aspects and elements of love will develop.

respect for the rights of the others' personality will increase and a mutual sensitivity will be learned. Men and women will strive to express their love not only in kisses and embraces, but in joint creativity and activity. 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 social relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of Comradley's solidarity. Stick that in your pipe, Jordan Peterson. Yeah, very good point, yeah. I think before we go, we should just think a bit more about like

issues around the contemporary relevance of it. We've talked a lot about the analytical use of the approach he's given. And we've talked about kind of debates around polyamory and stuff. Because I think for me, I mean, for me, I think on the one hand, yeah, I think it is really useful, as Nadi was saying much earlier, it is a really useful framework of thinking about things that are going on right now. And I think there is a sense in which the kind of energetics, you know, it does point to an analysis of what's happening to a lot of people today, which is, I mean, a lot of people are just too sort of exhausted even to really have

relationships. And they're exhausted by the fact that the whole function of the regime of capitalist hegemony now works through the process of absorbing people's attention, demanding people's attention, demanding people's sort of emotional investment in these tiny little bursts that never really reaches a level of excitement or fulfillment, but is also just sort of exhausting and innovating. And it's also connected with the ubiquity of anxiety. This is the process of what Mark calls consciousness deflation. It's just that it's the process by which, you know, people are kept in a state where they just don't really feel like calm enough or relaxed enough or hopefully enough about the future or even, you know, just any, you know, not tired enough for enough of a week to even really have relationships a lot of the time. And I think that is, I think that is what's happening to a lot of people.

And I think she does give us a useful framework through which we can understand that. And it's also just that, the incredible isolation of young people in between. particular, you know, the level of people who were isolated for most of their, most of their day or even weak had just massively increased. And that's, that's, you know, of the last couple of years, you know, the last four or five years, or since COVID, anyway, that seems to be the conditions in which you get some sort of like parasociality through relationships to influences, etc. You just physically don't get the chance to develop, you know, warm relations with people, yeah, because

there's that that associational space has diminished. I mean, it's recent on the one hand, it's also very clearly a long-term trend of capitalism. I mean, I've said this before on the show. This is something like, it's something John Dunn is talking about in the 17th century. When he's saying no man

is an island, you know, it's a lot, it's observable and has been observed by artists and cultural commentators and philosophers. It's absolutely observable as a persistent trend of capitalism. And it's only ever counteracted at historical moments when there's been significant push back against the power of capitalism by initially by reactionary forces which express themselves culturally

through you know through through early forms of romanticism sometimes or forms of nationalism forms of nostalgia for feudalism but later by the late 19th century they that kind of resistance to capitalist individualisation the privatisation of all experience the university alienation. It can only be offered by various forms of working class organisation on various scales. And in this sense, she's absolutely right. And as we're often saying on the show, we'll probably never stop saying it. We're living through the consequences of both waves and cycles of collective resistance, which we've all been involved in which everybody listening to this has been

involved in to some extent at certain times. And also the consequences of their relative defeat at different times. And it's that complex set of, you know, waves of resistance and waves of repression that produces the outcomes at any given moment and produces the ways in which people would experience it, love and relationships. She's absolutely right, really, that it is fundamentally, you know, the question of, like, to what extent you can even have, like, meaningful and satisfactory, factory relationships with people is partly dependent upon the level of the class struggle, frankly. It just is. I'm saying, I know that sounds really reductive. I'm saying that as somebody who

was professionally trained to a world-class standard in all of the critiques of Marxist determinism, which have ever been generated by anybody, you know, since the 19th century, frankly. And all I can say is all those critiques of Marxist determinism you might want to make will serve as useful correctives to a simplistic understanding of what she's saying, but they do not in any way successfully refute the basic underlying hypothesis, whether the extent to which you are going to be able to have good relationships with people is at least partially dependent upon the sheer state of the class struggle at the moment in history you are happening to live.

I mean, the last thing I'd want to say on this is, you know, we started off by saying, well, this is sort of like, you know, the blog post from a hundred years ago idea. But it's something else as well. You could sort of read it as like, you know, the self-help book of a hundred years ago. The self-help book, which is basically collective, so wants to destroy the self. So perhaps, you know, just after Donald Trump's re-election, Trump 2.0, there was all of this. We need a Joe Rogan of the left. He says, no, we just need an Alexandra Collentai of the 21st century and the project she was involved in.

Well, I suppose, well, then the question is, well, what would she be telling us to do, like, right now? Because even me say, well, it depends on the state of the class struggle. Well, what if right now, like, you are someone who's having, you know, who's struggling to sort of make sense of their life and, like, have a good life under these circumstances? I mean, one answer is just it's really valuable and useful to get involved in things, to join things, to engage in some sort of collective struggle on any scale. Like, you can't substitute for that to some extent, whether it's joining a union or getting involved in community activism or joining a renter's union. Yeah, I have a simpler answer to that. And I would say, which also, like, speaks to what you guys were saying, which is prioritise relationships. Yeah. That's the project. Prioritized relationships.

Yeah, you want to also try to develop in yourself the aspects that you let that Colin Tai lays out in a more programmatic bit, you know, about comradly sensitivity, the ability to listen and these sorts of things. Of course. But I think there's a question there about just, just. to finish on that, there's a question about how that's done. And if you, you know, believe that people exist mostly in discourse, then that is through relationships, that you learn those things through practice with other people rather than like reading about this online. You know what I mean? It's in the practice of your relationships with people that your healing will occur. I'd also say that consistent with her approach here would be the qualification that that doesn't

you join your revolutionary organisation and expect that to fulfil all of your emotional needs because I also think historically and even in recent years quite a lot of bad politics and a lot of bad comradeship comes from people overinvesting in an organisation or a movement

as being the thing now which is going to meet all their needs and I think understanding the complexity and the necessary the inevitable complexity and unevenness and the changeability of our emotional lives. I think it's also really important to avoiding that and being able to cultivate comradeship

in a really substantial way, I think is important. I also feel like, you know, I always feel conflicted when I'm reading about these issues and thinking about it and thinking about the fact that in my own life, you know, Keir and I are not totally different in this regard. Like I've been in a heterosexual monogamous relationship for decades. We've got two children.

We've got a mortgage. we've got a house and it's been really good like it still is really good but i also feel like um we were always really conscious that i mean not on not so much on a intimate you know intimate level but certainly at the level of organization of the household for example that was never that wasn't our first choice like we always we wanted to we would have rather lived in a commune or in some kind of a co-op some kind of a shared housing situation because the the problems which he raises with the nuclear family i think i'll are real and I think there's lots of good

studies of child wearing practices in different cultures for example that show that the nuclear family which is the nuclear household which is one of the things he's critiquing isn't very functional but you know what has to accept a lot of the time that you don't get to choose

the historical circumstances under which you're operating that under the historical circumstances we're operating given the material constraints on us in the end we pursued the best the best course of to us. But I think even if that's what you're doing, even if you are having a mortgage, having a monogamous relationship, raising kids that way, I think if you understand that as a

historically contingent response to historically contingent circumstances, I think it can be really helpful. It can be really helpful to kind of making that a fulfilling experience to understand that to some extent, it's not that you're just fulfilling the platonic ideal of what it means to be a human being is that you're you're making the best you can out of a historically circumscribed set of circumstances and i think colentai again she gives a really she gives a really useful set of intellectual tools for thinking about that yeah i mean perhaps like that the other clue the other part of the program that colentai lays out is that bit which i read out at the end there which is strive to express love not only in kisses and embraces but in joint creativity and

activity. That's another way of saying you need to get involved in collective, collective action, collective projects in which you can express collectivity with other people. It's not just a good way to meet people of the opposite sex. It's a good way to develop the affects that you need for this more expansive sense of love comradeship, basically. It will basically improve your life. It will give you more joyful effects. It'll allow you to feel that collective, to do the Spinoza thing, that increase in your capacities to be affected by the world and affect the world. You know, that's what joy is. Thank you.