Communism and the Family - Alexandra Kollontai - a podcast by RBC

'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. 
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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

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