In honor of the 150th anniversary of the soviet militant and intellectual Alexandra Kollontai's birth on 31 March 1872, the International Union of Left Publishers releases Kollontai 150 on International Workers’ Day, 2022, an effort of 25 publishing houses in more than 20 different languages. 

Rebellious and resolute, Kollontai threw herself with full intensity into militant life in the name of the socialist cause. She worked as a volunteer educator in the outskirts of the Russian capital, wrote stories about and for the working class, organized the enlistment of young revolutionaries into the political movement, and carried out occasional missions such as transporting secret documents until she eventually joined the party of the international socialist movement definitively. There, she made the acquaintance of Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Vera Zasulich, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Vladimir Lenin, all critics of the revisionist wing.

One of Kollontai’s main concerns was feminism and the role of women in class struggle and in the revolutionary process. She also debated workers’ organization as a whole, as we can see in her texts on the workers' opposition, and greatly contributed to thinking and debating love beyond its bourgeois social form. 

Kollontai 150, the fifth joint book published by the International Union of Left Publishers, brings together four of Kollontai’s texts on topics such as the role of the women in social struggles, the history and importance of International Women’s Day (March 8), and reflections on love as a social relation. These texts are introduced by two essays on Kollontai’s life and work, one written by Ândrea Francine Batista and Atiliana da Silva Vicente Brunetto of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the other by the Spanish historian, feminist, and activist Julia Cámara.

We hope these essays prompt you to think about the relationship between capitalism and the oppression of women all over the world. As Andre and Silva end their essay: ‘Without feminism, there is no socialism!’

You can download and read the book for free here! If you’d rather read a physical book, we got you covered. We will have a print version of the book available for sale soon. Stay tuned!

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. It seeks to bridge gaps in knowledge about the political economy and social hierarchy to facilitate the work of political movements and engage in the ‘battle of ideas’ to fight against bourgeois ideology, which has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.