James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” indicts the Bolsheviks as premier examples of “authoritarian high-modernism”. As an anarchist, I thought he might have cited as counter-examples Bakunin, Kropotkin or (more relevant for the time period) Emma Goldman. Instead he chose the Marxists Rosa Luxembourg* and Alexandra Kollontai as the Jane Jacobses of communism. The former has her minor celebrity, but I had never heard of the latter before and didn’t give it a second thought until Ilya Somin indirectly led me to wikipedia’s page on left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks. It is ironic that the “Workers Opposition” is included there as they not only did not participate in any uprising, but encouraged the crushing of infantile left-deviationist rebels and took official positions in the Soviet government. A rather round about way of getting to the title of this post. Kollontai is apparently the source for the famous quote “the satisfaction of one’s sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water”, but what she actually said was “sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst”. The former is the sort of insane New Soviet Man ravings that righties are apt to swallow whole, the latter is sensible enough that even St. Augustine may have agreed. I’ll leave aside her other beliefs, but that is quite the misquote.
*Bryan Caplan thinks Rosa Luxembourg has an undeservedly high reputation among historians. I’m sure Keith Preston disagrees with his view of Gustav Landauer.
December 22, 2010
Entitled to an Opinion 
December 22, 2010 at 3:05 am
I’m reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder at the moment and it remains amazing that Stalin murdered ten times as many Russian Jews during the Great Terror of ’37-38 than Hitler ever murdered German Jews, and yet this monstrous crime is virtually covered up by Bolshie profs in the US and the EU who want a Euro-Communist solution to the ‘problems of capitalism.’ Every chapter of Snyder’s masterpiece is enlightening and I’m still suspicious of Russians with the START Treaty and whatever. These people are a decimated one-third of the population of the USSR and Stalin’s rapacity and stupidity made that population shrink VERY fast in the Great Famine of ’30-33 and the Great Terror of the late thirties. Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler did, and there are still Russkys who miss the ‘good old days’ of Soviet imperialism.
Trust and VERIFY—tell that to “What, me worry?” Lugar, the RINO wimp.
December 22, 2010 at 5:00 am
Stalin murdered ten times as many Russian Jews
That would be 60 millions?
Ahem…
“Trust and VERIFY” ?
Not to say that Stalin was a good boy but an overdose of wingnuttery detracts from the very arguments presented…
December 22, 2010 at 12:53 pm
That would be 60 millions?
No, because “of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, only 214,000 were left by the eve of World War II. About 90% of the remaining community was killed during the war” (Wikipedia). 10x sounds false though.
December 22, 2010 at 6:09 pm
According to your wikipedia link, she did say – “”The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers.”
Sounds like insane New Soviet Man ravings to me.
December 23, 2010 at 1:57 am
The “glass of water theory of sex” enjoyed quite a popularity among early commies. Kollontai was merely an active propagandist of commie “new love”. I read somewhere that the originator of the metaphor was George Sand. Sounds believable.
December 26, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Yes flenser, her views on the family seems to ignore basic biological drives.
Nanonymous, I tried googling for George Sand and the “glass of water”, but didn’t turn up much. Do you have anything more specific?
December 27, 2010 at 10:43 am
This is just something I read somewhere long ago. Now that I googled it, I found this from George Sand Teverino: A Romance: “You speak of loving as you would speak of
drinking a glass of water.” Maybe this was an inspiration? Sand was quite popular among late 19th century socialists. Dunno.
December 27, 2010 at 9:32 pm
That is somewhat along the right lines, though it doesn’t seem obvious what Sand is actually arguing for. I don’t intend to read the actual book!
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November 11, 2021 at 10:28 pm
[…] of the penal colony of Luna. In contrast to James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”, held up communists like Rosa Luxembourg and Alexandra Kollontai as examples of people who understood that revolutions unfold through their own unpredictable logic […]