Communism and the Family - Alexandra Kollontai

'Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on women's shoulders.' In
this piece by one of the towering figures of the working-women's
movement, Kollontai shows how the old family unit is no longer
useful and how communism provides the necessities to lessen the
burden of women and we discuss how 100 years later working women
are still staggered by the triple load of being a mother, housewife
and worker as well as how the capitalist world is still playing
catch up to the collossal social changes introduced in the Soviet
Union. This episode is part of our series on Marxist feminists. As
Thomas Sankara said, “Women hold up the other half of the sky.”
 Red Book Club recognizes that including the voices of nonmen
in our studies is not a niche activity, but is in fact an essential
step in gaining  the most comprehensive view of the
material conditions of the past  and present as we
possibly can; so we’ve planned this series to amplify the ideas
that nonmen have been bringing to the conversation for
 centuries. From Federici’s analysis of women as a means
of primitive accumulation to Luxemburg’s essay of the benefits
of revolution vs the impossibility of reform, each of these works
confronts history and the movement for social change through the
lens of the experiences of nonmen in society. Follow us on Twitter
at @RBCpod and feel free to message us if you need links to
companion resources or have any questions. You can also find us on
our new site at www.rbcpod.wordpress.com  where you can find
ebook copies of the works that we're covering and more.  If
you'd like to join the book club, you can support us through
patreon at https://www.patreon.com/redbookclub membership includes
 access to our Red Book Club server and more.  Thanks to
@NunezKeenan for the  intro theme; you can find more of
their work here:  http://tiny.cc/keenan  Thanks to
the Craig bot for helping us to record via Discord! 
Outro music: Working Class Woman - Barbara Dane